The mycobacteria: A postgenomic view

Abstract

This chapter focuses on insights gained from genome exploration and functional analyses. It provides an overview of the evolution and of the infection strategies used by pathogenic mycobacteria and how this information may be useful for developing new insights into disease control. The importance of molecular characterization of Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains was also shown in a recent microarray analysis of a large number of epidemiologically well‐defined M. tuberculosis isolates from San Francisco. One of the key findings of the sequence analysis was that M. tuberculosis differs radically from other bacteria in that approximately 10% of its coding capacity is dedicated to genes encodin..