Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB),causative agent of tuberculosis,is one of the most dreaded diseases of the century.It has long been studied by researchers throughout the world using various wet-lab and dry-lab techniques.In this study,we focus on mining useful patterns at genomic level that can be applied for in silico functional characterization of genes from the MTB complex.The model developed on the basis of the patterns found in this study can correctly identify 99.77％ of the input genes from the genome of MTB strain H37Rv.The model was tested against four other MTB strains and the homologue M.bovis to further evaluate its generalization capability.The mean prediction accuracy was 85.76％.It was also observed that the GC content remained fairly constant throughout the genome,implicating the absence of any pathogenicity island transferred from other organisms.This study reveals that dinucleotide composition is an efficient functional class discriminator for MTB complex.To facilitate the application of this model,a web server Tuber-Gene has been developed,which can be freely accessed at http://www.bifmanit.org/tb2/.

We developed and assessed the performance of a new multiplex real-time PCR assay for the detection of all Chlamydia species and simultaneous differentiation of Chlamydia psittaci and Chlamydia pneumoniae—two important human respiratory pathogens—in human clinical specimens. Next-generation sequencing was used to identify unique targets to design real-time PCR assays targeting all Chlamydia species, C. psittaci, and C. pneumoniae. To validate the assay, we used a panel of 49 culture isolates comprising seven C. psittaci genotypes, eight C. pneumoniae isolates, seven other Chlamydia species, and 22 near-neighbor bacterial and viral isolates, along with 22 specimens from external quality assessment (EQA) panels and 34 nasopharyngeal and oropharyngeal swabs and cerebrospinal fluid, stool, and sputum specimens previously identified as positive or negative for C. psittaci or C. pneumoniae. The assays were 100% specific, with limits of detection of 7.64– 9.02 fg/μL. The assay results matched with historical assay results for all specimens, except for one owing to the increased sensitivity of the new C. psittaci assay; the results of the EQA specimens were 100% accurate. This assay may improve the timely and accurate clinical diagnosis of Chlamydia infections and provide a greater understanding of the burden of disease caused by these agents.