Chewing the fat: lipid metabolism and homeostasis during M. tuberculosis infection.

Chewing the fat: lipid metabolism and homeostasis during M. tuberculosis infection. Curr Opin Microbiol. 2015 Nov 3;29:30-36 Authors: Lovewell RR, Sassetti CM, VanderVen BC Abstract The interplay between Mycobacterium tuberculosis lipid metabolism, the immune response and lipid homeostasis in the host creates a complex and dynamic pathogen-host interaction. Advances in imaging and metabolic analysis techniques indicate that M. tuberculosis preferentially associates with foamy cells and employs multiple physiological systems to utilize exogenously derived fatty-acids and cholesterol. Moreover, novel insights into specific host pathways that control lipid accumulation during infection, such as the PPARĪ³ and LXR transcriptional regulators, have begun to reveal mechanisms by which host immunity alters the bacterial micro-environment. As bacterial lipid metabolism and host lipid regulatory pathways are both important, yet inherently complex, components of active tuberculosis, delineating the heterogeneity in lipid trafficking within disease states remains a major challenge for therapeutic design. PMID: 26544033 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Current Opinion in Microbiology - Category: Microbiology Authors: Tags: Curr Opin Microbiol Source Type: research