Affiliations: Department of Biotechnology, School of Life Sciences, Manipal University, Manipal, India
Correspondence:
[*]
Corresponding author: Kapaettu Satyamoorthy, Department of Biotechnology, School of Life Sciences, Manipal University, Manipal, India. Tel.: +91 820 2571925; Fax: +91 820 2571919; E-mail:ksatyamoorthy@manipal.edu
Abstract: Tuberculosis is a major cause of human death around the world and is caused
by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The bacterium infects 1.8
billion people yearly which equals one-third of the world population.
Pathogenic bacterial genomes contain many perfect, imperfect and approximate
tandem repeats that can serve as marker for genotyping these pathogens.
Tandem repeats are generated by duplications during successive generations
which changes genome structures, thereby providing diversity and improving
the fitness of the pathogen during infection. In the present study, we have
retrieved reference genomes of 30 Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains and used Tandem Repeats Finder
tool for the prediction of genome-wide repeats. The genomes of publicly
available Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains varied in size from 4.38 MB to 4.42 MB. After trimming
out low quality tandem repeats, we found the strain M. tuberculosis CCDC5079 to have the
maximum tandem repeats density number (DN) while density length (DL) was
found to be maximum in M. tuberculosis KIT87190. We found the lowest repeat density number
and length in M. tuberculosis Erdman. This study would help in mapping and identification
of pathogenic bacterial species and to understand the importance of tandem
repeats in their evolution.
Keywords: Mycobacterium tuberculosis, tandem repeats, prediction, region of difference
