Mycobacterial biomaterials and resources for researchers

Abstract

There are many resources available to mycobacterial researchers, including culture collections around the world that distribute biomaterials to the general scientific community, genomic and clinical databases, and powerful bioinformatics tools. However, many of these resources may be unknown to the research community. This review article aims to summarize and publicize many of these resources, thus strengthening the quality and reproducibility of mycobacterial research by providing the scientific community access to authenticated and quality-controlled biomaterials and a wealth of information, analytical tools and research opportunities.

Figure 1.

An example phylogenomic tree used to identify unknown Mycobacterium samples to the species- and/or subspecies-level. Tree was constructed as previously described (Riojas et al.2018). Each leaf on the tree corresponds to the test sample (in red) or to the reference genomes of the species and/or subspecies type strains, or in the case of the M. tuberculosis complex, the variants (Riojas et al.2018). The outer ring is comprised of the accession numbers for the WGS of each strain.

Figure 2.

Phylogenetic tree based on whole genome multilocus sequence type (WgMLST) data of 3536 publicly available MTB isolates processed through the UVP pipeline in the ReSeqTB knowledgebase. The Unweighted Pair Group Method with Arithmetic Mean (UPGMA) phylogenetic tree was created based on similarity matrix for a cross-section of isolates in the data set drawn from the WGS of the isolates.