Identification of the BeAn 58058 virus in a Pulmonary TB Patient
Disciplines
Bioinformatics | Genetics and Genomics | Immunology and Infectious Disease | Microbiology
Abstract (300 words maximum)
Tuberculosis (TB) is a severe bacterial infection caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, killing 1.5 million per year due to drug-resistant strains and a vaccine that has poor success rates. Tuberculosis is becoming resistant to drugs ranging from multidrug-resistant (MDR) to total drug-resistant (TDR). Infection rates are also increased in low-income countries with high prevalence in countries such as China, which had 833,000 individuals diagnosed in 2019. To combat these challenges, phage therapy is being researched to be used conjunctively with antibiotics as a more significant form of treatment. Anonymized patient data was retrieved from Xu et al., 2022 at Tianjin Medical University General Hospital in China, suspected or diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis from 2018 through 2021. The first data set that was analyzed came from the sequence read archive, SRR19611430. The fluid was collected from the alveolar of the patient’s lung and sequenced by the Illumina NextSeq 550 platform. Sequence reads were first trimmed and went through quality control with the fastp software. Kraken2 was then used to identify viral members within this data set. Despite not finding a TB phage, another virus was present in high amounts, BeAn 58058. A research article by Ferravante et al. 2022 explored the relationship between coronavirus and the prevalence of other respiratory viruses, such as BeAn 58058. BeAn 58058 has often been identified in postmortem Covid-19 patients. Our finding potentially implies that some patients with TB may also be infected with BeAn 58058, similar to Covid-19 patients from Ferravante et al. 2022.
Academic department under which the project should be listed
CSM - Molecular and Cellular Biology
Primary Investigator (PI) Name
Tsai-Tien Tseng
Identification of the BeAn 58058 virus in a Pulmonary TB Patient
Tuberculosis (TB) is a severe bacterial infection caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, killing 1.5 million per year due to drug-resistant strains and a vaccine that has poor success rates. Tuberculosis is becoming resistant to drugs ranging from multidrug-resistant (MDR) to total drug-resistant (TDR). Infection rates are also increased in low-income countries with high prevalence in countries such as China, which had 833,000 individuals diagnosed in 2019. To combat these challenges, phage therapy is being researched to be used conjunctively with antibiotics as a more significant form of treatment. Anonymized patient data was retrieved from Xu et al., 2022 at Tianjin Medical University General Hospital in China, suspected or diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis from 2018 through 2021. The first data set that was analyzed came from the sequence read archive, SRR19611430. The fluid was collected from the alveolar of the patient’s lung and sequenced by the Illumina NextSeq 550 platform. Sequence reads were first trimmed and went through quality control with the fastp software. Kraken2 was then used to identify viral members within this data set. Despite not finding a TB phage, another virus was present in high amounts, BeAn 58058. A research article by Ferravante et al. 2022 explored the relationship between coronavirus and the prevalence of other respiratory viruses, such as BeAn 58058. BeAn 58058 has often been identified in postmortem Covid-19 patients. Our finding potentially implies that some patients with TB may also be infected with BeAn 58058, similar to Covid-19 patients from Ferravante et al. 2022.