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  • Title: Identification of novel open reading frames in the intergenic regions of Mycobacterium leprae genome and detection of transcript by qRT-PCR.
    Author: Sharma M, Das M, Diana D, Wedderburn A, Anindya R.
    Journal: Microb Pathog; 2018 Nov; 124():316-321. PubMed ID: 30172902.
    Abstract:
    Mycobacterium leprae is an unculturable obligate pathogen and causative agent for debilitating human disease leprosy. Due to reductive genome evolution M leprae genome harbours large number of pseudogenes and small number of genes (∼1600 genes and ∼1300 pseudogenes). How M leprae remained a successful human parasite with small set of genes remains poorly understood and provided us the impetus to investigate the intergenic regions of M leprae genome for the presence of possible open reading frames (ORFs). In this work, we have manually scanned all the intergenic regions of M leprae genome and identified 106 potential ORFs. Among these, 12 are large ORFs: encoding hypothetical proteins (HP) of more than 100 amino acids. We have also found 67 ORFs encoding 50-100 amino acids proteins and another 27 ORFs for 30-50 amino acids peptides. We have validated the presence of transcripts for large HPs by quantitative reverse transcriptase PCR (qRT-PCR). Our results suggest that some of the M leprae large HPs are indeed expressed at low level in leprosy patients. The present results will shed light on the intergenic ORFs of M leprae and further our understanding of the pathogenesis of leprosy.
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