Using Omics to Study Leprosy, Tuberculosis, and Other Mycobacterial Diseases

Mycobacteria are members of the Actinomycetales order, and they are classified into one family, Mycobacteriaceae. More than 20 mycobacterial species cause disease in humans. The Mycobacterium group, called the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC), has nine closely related species that cause tuberculosis in animals and humans. TB can be detected worldwide and one-fourth of the world’s population is contaminated with tuberculosis. According to the WHO, about two million dies from it, and more than nine million people are newly infected with TB each year. Mycobacterium tuberculosis ( M. tuberculosis ) is the most potential causative agent of tuberculosis and prompts enormous mortality and morbidity worldwide due to the incompletely understood pathogenesis of human tuberculosis. Moreover, modern diagnostic approaches for human tuberculosis are inefficient and have many lacks, while MTBC species can modulate host immune response and escape host immune attacks to sustain in the human body. “Multi-omics” strategies such as genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and deep sequencing technologies could be a comprehensive strategy to investigate the pathogenesis of mycobacterial species in humans and offer significant discovery to find out biomarkers at the early stage of disease in the host. Thus, in this review, we attempt to understand an overview of the mission of “omics” approaches in mycobacterial pathogenesis, including tuberculosis, leprosy, and other mycobacterial diseases.