The emergence of drug resistance threatens to destroy tuberculosis control programs worldwide, with resistance to all first-line drugs and most second-line drugs detected. Drug tolerance (or phenotypic drug resistance) is also likely to be clinically relevant over the 6-month long standard treatment for drug-sensitive tuberculosis. Transcriptional profiling the response of Mycobacterium tuberculosis to antimicrobial drugs offers a novel interpretation of drug efficacy and mycobacterial drug-susceptibility that likely varies in dynamic microenvironments, such as the lung. This chapter describes the noninvasive sampling of tuberculous sputa and techniques for mRNA profiling M. tb bacilli during patient therapy to characterize real-world drug actions.
Keywords: Microarray analysis; Mycobacteria; Mycobacterium tuberculosis; RNA amplification; RNA extraction; Sputum; Transcriptional profiling; Transcriptome.