Techniques to understand mycobacterial lipids and use of lipid-based nanoformulations for tuberculosis management

Abstract

Tuberculosis (TB) is an airborne infectious disease caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) that claims 2 million lives every year around the globe. In the era of increasing burden of multidrug resistance (MDR), emergence of drug resistance has become a worrying cause of concern toward present therapeutics. Under such circumstances, in order to pave way for developing better therapeutic strategies, a deeper understanding to dissect the MDR mechanisms needs immediate attention given the persistent global burden of TB. Nowadays, understanding lipid biology of MTB has gained prominence due to the newly assigned roles of MTB lipids in pathogenesis particularly due to the functional interactions between lipids and MDR determinants. MTB possesses unique cell wall rich in lipids which are coded by almost 30% of the genome. The exclusive mycobacterial cell wall lipids such as trehalose monomycolate and dimycolate (TMM, TDM), phthiocerol dimycocerosate (PDIM), sulpholipid-1 (SL-1), diacyl trehalose (DAT), and pentacyl trehalose (PAT) among others are known to play a significant role in pathogens. Commensurate with this only limited resources are available which deals with the methods to study MTB lipids. The scarcity of relevant tools has led to investments in programs to develop new approaches for lipid research. This chapter describes the extraction methods to study lipids in Mycobacterium which are known to play crucial roles in MDR along with various lipid-based nanoformulations designed for TB management.