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Mycobacterium tuberculosis is incredible in that it can survive for decades within its human host. It does this by varying its diet to successfully steal nutrients from the human host including immune cells; it is known to acquire and absorb multiple carbon sources from the body during infection.
In a paper published in the journal
Molecular Systems Biology, Surrey scientists detail how they measure the flow of metabolites or fluxes through metabolic pathways when
Mycobacterium tuberculosis is consuming some of its favourite nutrients. Measuring these fluxes could help scientists advance new tuberculosis drugs as well as understand why the bacterium survives so long in humans and why current antibiotics are often ineffective.
Mycobacterium tuberculosis is incredible in that it can survive for decades within its human host. It does this by varying its diet to successfully steal nutrients from the human host including immune cells; it is known to acquire and absorb multiple carbon sources from the body during infection.