Using omics to Study Leprosy, Tuberculosis, and Other Mycobacterial Diseases

Diseases caused by mycobacteria, like tuberculosis (Mycobacterium tuberculosis) and leprosy (Mycobacterium leprae), cause important health problems often linked to poverty. Despite being ancient diseases, many aspects of their pathogenesis, and also, of bacterial biology, remain unknown. In addition, available diagnostics and therapies for mycobacterial diseases are outdated, and affected by drug resistance thus representing a public health threat. In the last few decades, omics methods have been widely used to detect and identify molecular signatures in various sample types, providing an extensive picture of molecular processes of biological systems. They are powerful tools that can be used to uncover many aspects of disease biology, like host-pathogen interactions and potential biomarkers, among others. Their application to the study of mycobacterial pathogens, as well as mycobacteria-host interactions, may provide insights that translate into new diagnostic and therapeutic tools.

This Research Topic aims to gather research applying omics methods (for example, genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, lipidomics) to uncover biological processes of pathogenic Mycobacterium species (M. tuberculosis, M. leprae, M. abscessus, etc), as well as aspects of host-pathogen interactions during infections, such as inflammatory signatures during stages of disease pathogenesis.

This Research Topic has the purpose to collect any omics studies involving mycobacteria, especially human pathogens like M. leprae and M. tuberculosis such as applications of these tools to study mycobacterial drug resistance processes, changes in both mycobacteria and host linked to infection, and also, effects of pharmacological interventions.