Effect of hypoxia on Mycobacterium tuberculosis-host phagocyte interactions

Mtb appears to have developed specialized biomolecular infrastructure to survive and persist within granulomas, where it is subjected to a diverse set of stress conditions. One of these stress conditions is hypoxia. We hypothesized that host cell response is radically altered with hypoxia stressed Mtb and designed in-vitro experiments to study this phenomenon. Hypoxia-stressed as well as aerobically grown Mtb were used to infect rhesus macaque bone marrow derived macrophages (Rh-BMDMs) and the host global transcriptional response compared. Using 4 x44 k Agilent arrays specific for rhesus macaque genome, we tested in biological duplicate the effect of aerogically grown Mtb on rhesus macaque BMDMs and compared this to the corresponding effect of the hypoxia-conditioned Mtb on rhesus macaque BMDMs