Genome-wide mutational biases fuel transcriptional diversity in the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex
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Álvaro Chiner-Oms Michael Berney Christine Boinett Fernando González-Candelas Douglas B Young Sebastien Gagneux William R Jacobs Julian Parkhill Teresa Cortes Iñaki ComasAbstract
The Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC) members display different host-specificities and virulence phenotypes. Here, we have performed a comprehensive RNAseq and methylome analysis of the main clades of the MTBC and discovered unique transcriptional profiles. The majority of genes differentially expressed between the clades encode proteins involved in host interaction and metabolic functions. A significant fraction of changes in gene expression can be explained by positive selection on single mutations that either create or disrupt transcriptional start sites (TSS). Furthermore, we show that clinical strains have different methyltransferases inactivated and thus different methylation patterns. Under the tested conditions, differential methylation has a minor direct role on transcriptomic differences between strains. However, disruption of a methyltransferase in one clinical strain revealed important expression differences suggesting indirect mechanisms of expression regulation. Our study demonstrates that variation in transcriptional profiles are mainly due to TSS mutations and have likely evolved due to differences in host characteristics.
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Journal Nature Communications
Volume 10
Issue number 1
Pages 3994
Available online
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Publisher website (DOI) 10.1038/s41467-019-11948-6
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Europe PubMed Central 31488832
Pubmed 31488832
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