Tuberculosis infection is a major challenge in today’s world, as has been recognised by the WHO. The current Gold Standard test requires taking a sputum sample, which is grown for several weeks, to identify the presence of the infectious vector Mycobacterium tuberculosis. There are a number of efforts underway (for instance, in our department in a collaboration with University of Pretoria, and from the OU as a spinout of the Beagle II space exploration mission) to improve detection methods and speed up the process with improved accuracy. Hopefully these will come to market soon, to prevent things like the latest scam that is running in South Africa, where TB-infected people are selling their sputum to non-infected people so that they can claim disability grants.
We are also helping in this effort – I have a new PhD student in the group, the recipient of a prestigious university 125th anniversary scholarship, who will be studying how key aspects of the Mycobacteria contribute to biological function. We have also received sponsorship from Amazon on their Cloud system to help us with the work, and I hope to detail our foray into Cloud computing at a later stage.
