Summary

Tuberculosis (TB) is a global public health emergency responsible for millions of deaths. One-third of the world population is infected with latent TB, a silent TB carrier capable of progressing into active TB in the future. Currently available diagnostic tools are lengthy, time-consuming, and inefficient in detecting TBinfected young children and less immune individuals. With the current situation, TB diagnosis, treatment, and prevention services will be interrupted, resulting in additional TB cases and extra deaths. This urges the need for an accurate, rapid, and cost-effective diagnostic tool for TB diagnosis. Therefore, advanced molecular methods could be used for TB diagnosis purposes. More specifically bacterial biomarkers for disease diagnosis as the biomarkers derived from hosts show individual variations and much more research in the application. Therefore, much attention is driven towards pathogen gene expression using exosomes (small particles carrying biological molecules in the cell) for biomarker identification. Limited studies are conducted both globally and locally, warranting more future studies to end TB soon and prevent unnecessary deaths.

Objectives

1. A preliminary study to detect Mtb RNA in serum exosomes using Pt8/Pt9 primers and five Mtb and host genes (based on previous the literature) namely,
• Mtb genes: GlnA1, DnaK, GarA, FAS and Ag85a
• Host genes: CXCL10, GBP1, XPO4, CCL24, ABCA1 in ATB, LTBI and HCs using Real Time-
PCR.
2. To investigate the mycobacterial gene expression using serum exosomes of LTB patients and ATB
patients using RNA sequencing .3. To validate the top 15 differentially expressed genes obtained from RNA sequencing using RT-PCR for latent tuberculosis candidate biomarker identification

Major Equipment Facilitated by Grant