Recombinant Pichinde viral vector expressing tuberculosis antigens elicits strong T cell responses and protection in mice.

Introduction: Tuberculosis (TB) caused by remains a major global health threat. The only available vaccine Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) does not prevent adult pulmonary TB. New effective TB vaccines should aim to stimulate robust T cell responses in the lung mucosa to achieve high protective efficacy.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis Requires Regulation of ESX-5 Secretion for Virulence in Irgm1-Deficient Mice.

The type VII secretion system ESX-5, which has been implicated in virulence, is activated at the transcriptional level by the phosphate starvation-responsive Pst/SenX3-RegX3 signal transduction system. Deletion of , which encodes a Pst phosphate transporter component, causes constitutive activation of the response regulator RegX3, hypersecretion of ESX-5 substrates and attenuation in the mouse infection model. We hypothesized that constitutive activation of ESX-5 secretion causes attenuation of the Δ mutant.

Pst/SenX3-RegX3 Regulates Membrane Vesicle Production Independently of ESX-5 Activity.

releases membrane vesicles (MV) that modulate host immune responses and aid in iron acquisition, although they may have additional unappreciated functions. MV production appears to be a regulated process, but remains the only characterized genetic regulator of vesiculogenesis. Here, we present data supporting a role for the Pst/SenX3-RegX3 signal transduction system in regulating MV production.

Systematic, multiparametric analysis of Mycobacterium tuberculosis intracellular infection offers insight into coordinated virulence.

A key to the pathogenic success of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), the causative agent of tuberculosis, is the capacity to survive within host macrophages. Although several factors required for this survival have been identified, a comprehensive knowledge of such factors and how they work together to manipulate the host environment to benefit bacterial survival are not well understood. To systematically identify Mtb factors required for intracellular growth, we screened an arrayed, non-redundant Mtb transposon mutant library by high-content imaging to characterize the mutant-macrophage interaction.