New strategy in the fight against TB?

A new approach to combating the tubercle bacillus, the microorganism that kills some 1.5 million people in the world each year, has been developed by a French-British team including scientists from CNRS, Inserm, the Institut Curie and Université Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier. The researchers have discovered that an amino acid, aspartate, is essential for the development of the bacillus because it acts as its main source of nitrogen. They have also succeeded in establishing the mechanism by which the bacterium extracts aspartate from its host. These results, published online on 29 September 2013 in the journal Nature Chemical Biology, could make it possible to develop new antibiotics and new vaccines derived from attenuated strains of the bacillus, incapable of supplying themselves with aspartate.