BioProject

Human infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis results in a continuum of ill-defined, clinical manifestations with stable latent M. More...

Human infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis results in a continuum of ill-defined, clinical manifestations with stable latent M. tuberculosis infection (LTBI) and severe active disease at the ends. Identifying different states of infection is of importance to tuberculosis (TB) control since risk of developing active disease varies among different asymptomatic states while infectiousness varies among patients with different bacterial burden. We investigated changes in proteome-scale antibody responses during disease progression in a non-human primate model of tuberculosis. We probed M. tuberculosis proteome microarrays with serial sera collected from three infection-outcome groups (active, reactivation, and latent). We found that each infection outcome is associated with characteristic changes in the antibody levels and number of antigenic targets, which suggested an association between antibody responses and bacillary burden. Additional proteome-scale serological profiling of > 400 human TB suspects established that antibody responses are positively associated with bacterial load. Thus tuberculosis-specific antibody levels and number of antigenic targets increases with disease progression. Overall design: To investigate antibody responses during the course of infection, we probed M. tuberculosis proteome microarrays with serial sera collected from experimentally infected cynomolgus macaques. Based on infection outcome, the macaques were grouped into three classes; A) active disease (n = 4), B) latent infection (n=5) and C) reactivation disease (n = 5). Note that the macaques in the reactivation class developed signs of disease spontaneously without any experimental intervention. For each animal, we tested one pre-infection time point and approximately ten post-infection time points at one-month intervals. Less...