As a part of the international effort to improve our knowledge of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) in the hope of finding new therapeutics targets, our project focus on RecA involvement in the phenotypic heterogeneity and virulence of Mtb. RecA is a bacterial homologous double-strand DNA recombination enzyme that plays a key role in the Mtb SOS DNA repair system. As such, it is involved in the regulation of numerous genes and implicated in multiple stress responses. This central role of RecA means it is also hugely implicated in the virulence mechanisms of Mtb (e.g. immune evasion or antibiotic resistance). Analysis of RecA expression overtime shows different levels of expression in the same bacteria, visible as pulses of fluorescence with our RecA-reporter strain. Those phenotypic variations of the RecA expression could have an impact on all the mechanisms and genes regulated by RecA. Thus, the aim of this study is to better characterize this phenotypic variations of RecA in Mtb at the genetic, epigenetic, and transcriptional level.
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