Tuberculosis (TB) is prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa and in the context of South Africa, the incidence of TB in the Western Cape is among the highest in the country. Together with HIV, these two diseases represents are deadly combination. The severity of TB prevalence in South Africa is complicated by the presence of drug-resistant TB. Intervention strategies for TB range from clinical trials for new TB drug treatment to improved surveillence of multi-drug resistance informed my advances in TB diagnostic tests.

Currently there are 11 internationally sequenced TB strains accessible to the scientific community. More recently, researchers at Tygerberg Medical School and UWC have been sequencing clinical isolates of TB in South Africa. In collaboration with these investigators, we are:

• developing and implementing assembly methodology for short read data from bacterial genomes
• developing bioinformatics resources for managing these genetic data sets to accelerate deeper insights into the underlying mechanisms of host evasion and virulence factors.
• developing methods to correlate the genetic variation in TB isolates with an expanded interaction network of virulence TB genes..
• identifying novel drug targets using insilico docking studies

Collaborators: Professors Nico Gey Van Pittius and Robert Warren – Tygerberg Medical School, University of Stellenbosch; Dr Ekow Oppon – Medical Research Council

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