Zahra Jalali Sefid Dashti1, Ruben van der Merwe2, Samantha Sampson2, Rob Warren2 and Alan Christoffels1
1University of the Western Cape, South Africa 2Stellenbosch University, South Africa
Posters-Accepted Abstracts: J Mol Biomark Diagn
Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease caused by bacteria belonging to the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTC). The global burden of disease based on the World health organization (WHO) estimates suggests 9.4 million new TB cases worldwide, with the majority of the estimated cases occurring in Africa and Asia. In spite of the existing challenge with the multidrug resistant (MDR) TB, TB control faces another dilemma; extensively drug resistant (XDR) TB a situation where the pathogen is resistant to the four most effective anti-TB drugs rifapincin, isoniazid, an aminioglycoside and a fluoroquinolone. Deciphering the molecular basis of drug resistance has become a research priority, as this information will guide the development of new molecular based diagnostics as well as providing insight into new drug targets. In line with this, we carried out the assembly and functional annotation of a relatively large dataset with 400 M. tuberculosis genomes using reference based assembly approach. Variant calling methods including GATK (Haplotypecaller), Samtools and FreeBayes were used to identify SNPs that map to specific phenotypic categories such as XDR, MDR, and drug susceptible. This data provides a knowledge base for drug resistance marker discovery.
Zahra Jalali Sefid Dashti has completed her PhD at the South African National Bioinformatics institute (SANBI), University of the Western Cape. She is currently a Postdoctoral researcher at the same institute. Her research expertise is in the next generation sequencing data analysis of infectious diseases such as sleeping sickness and tuberculosis.
Email: zahra@sanbi.ac.za
Molecular Biomarkers & Diagnosis received 2054 citations as per Google Scholar report
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