TB-ARC Project (Tuberculosis Antibiotic Resistance Catalog Project)
The TB-ARC project is a massive international collaboration, bringing together researchers and data from several continents from across the globe. In an effort to identify the full complement of naturally occurring mutations responsible for drug resistance in clinical Mycobacterium tuberculosis, we sequenced over 1,800 geographically and phenotypically diverse isolates that have been quantitatively characterized for their resistance to a broad spectrum of first and second line antibiotics. We identified, and experimentally validated, novel mutations (and mutation combinations) that explain previously unexplained, low frequency resistance to first and second line drugs, including cycloserine. We have also shown that, in some countries where drug resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB) is epidemic, resistance emerged at the very beginning of the antibiotic era and that these early mutations have persisted for decades within M. tuberculosis populations and now account for a large fraction of today's DR-TB.
Download TB-ARC data from Broad website
Collaborators
| The Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T. | Ashlee Earl, Abigail L Manson, Thomas Abeel, Christopher Desjardins, Sinead Chapman, Bruce Birren |
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| Brigham and Women's Hospital | Keira Cohen |
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| The Public Health Agency of Sweden, Sweden | Pontus Jureen, Sven Hoffner |
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| Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA | Helen Jenkins |
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| Yale School of Public Health | Theodore Cohen |
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| Republican Research and Practical Centre for Pulmonology and Tuberculosis, Belarus | Alena Skrahina, Aksana Zalutskaya | |
| Office of Cyber Infrastructure and Computational Biology (OCICB), National Institute of Health, USA | Andrei Gabrielian, Alex Rosenthal | |
| Microbiology & Morphology Laboratory Phthisiopneumology Institute; Chisinau, Moldova | Valeriu Crudu | |
| Rutgers-New Jersey Medical School, New Jersey, USA | David Alland |
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| Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA | Derek Armstrong, Susan E. Dorman, William R. Bishai, Kathryn Winglee | |
| Boston Medical Center, Boston, MA, USA | Jerrold Ellner |
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| Makerere University College, Uganda | Willy Ssengooba |
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| KwaZulu-Natal Research Institute for Tuberculosis and HIV (K-RITH), South Africa | Alexander Pym |
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| International Tuberculosis Research Center (ITRC), South Korea | Jong Seok Lee |
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| Boston University, Boston, MA, USA | James Galagan |
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| National Taiwan University Hospital, Taiwan | Po-Ren Hsueh |
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| National Institute for Research in Tuberculosis (NIRT), India | Soumya Swaminathan, Sujatha Narayanan | |
| National Institute of Allergy and Infectious disease (NIAID), National Institute of Health, USA | Maiga Mamoudou |
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| Medical Research Council, South Africa | Marti Van der Walt, Jeannette Brand, Lesibana Malinga |
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| TB Resist | Gail Cassell |
