Discovery of Tuberculosis proteins expressed and exported only when in the host

A collaboration with Miriam Braunstein’s group (UNC Microbiology and Immunology) has recently led to the publication of a nice paper in mBio that describes a novel technique to identify proteins specifically secreted in the context of the host immune system. Specifically, this work focused on identifying proteins that were exported out of Mycobacterium tuberculosis into the mouse host (a standard animal model for studying tuberculosis). This work was based on some very nice experimental work by by Ellen Perkowski in Miriam’s group. Dan Oreper (working in my group as part of a longer-running rotation project) developed the computational analysis approaches to sort out bacterial proteins from those of the host. Check out the (open access) publication below.

Perkowski EF, Zulauf KE, Weerakoon D, Hayden JD, Ioerger TR, Oreper D, Gomez SM, Sacchettini JC, Braunstein M. 2017. The EXIT strategy: an approach for identifying bacterial proteins exported during host infection. mBio 8:e00333-17. https://doi.org/10.1128/mBio.00333-17