Medicine » Infectious Diseases

Understanding Tuberculosis - Deciphering the Secret Life of the Bacilli

Edited by Pere-Joan Cardona, ISBN 978-953-307-946-2, Hard cover, 334 pages, Publisher: InTech, Chapters published February 17, 2012 under CC BY 3.0 license
DOI: 10.5772/2479

Mycobacterium tuberculosis, as recent investigations demonstrate, has a complex signaling expression, which allows its close interaction with the environment and one of its most renowned properties: the ability to persist for long periods of time under a non-replicative status. Although this skill is well characterized in other bacteria, the intrinsically very slow growth rate of Mycobium tuberculosis, together with a very thick and complex cell wall, makes this pathogen specially adapted to the stress that could be generated by the host against them. In this book, different aspects of these properties are displayed by specialists in the field.