Abstract
Mycobacterium Tuberculosis (Mtb), the causative agent of tuberculosis disease, has the most structurally complex and diverse lipids of any species. However, the flood of information from genomic research and proteomic research has not been matched by the corresponding advancements in lipidomics. The lack of lipidomic assays has been a glaring deficiency in the collection of analytical techniques currently available. We have transferred into our lab a method to characterize the global lipidome of several Mtb strains. This methodology relies on Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (LC-MS) coupled with accurate mass determinations from a catalogued database that has 22,606 entries specific to Mtb. We show lipids from all the major lipid classes and we also show changes in the lipid content with variations in the Mtb strain. This methodology can be adapted to any biological sample and represents a huge advancement for characterizing the lipids (molecules that are implicated in promoting virulence and protecting the bacilli) found in Mtb.