Tuberculosis Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Tuberculosis, including details on symptoms, causes, treatment, pulmonary, mycobacterium.

Tuberculous granulomas are hypoxic in guinea pigs, rabbits, and nonhuman primates.

Via LE, Lin PL, Ray SM, Carrillo J, Allen SS, Eum SY, Taylor K, Klein E, Manjunatha U, Gonzales J, Lee EG, Park SK, Raleigh JA, Cho SN, McMurray DN, Flynn JL, Barry CE

Tuberculosis Research Section, Laboratory of Clinical Infectious Disease, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20852, USA.

Understanding the physical characteristics of the local microenvironment in which Mycobacterium tuberculosis resides is an important goal that may allow the targeting of metabolic processes to shorten drug regimens. Pimonidazole hydrochloride (Hypoxyprobe) is an imaging agent that is bioreductively activated only under hypoxic conditions in mammalian tissue. We employed this probe to evaluate the oxygen tension in tuberculous granulomas in four animal models of disease: mouse, guinea pig, rabbit, and nonhuman primate. Following infusion of pimonidazole into animals with established infections, lung tissues from the guinea pig, rabbit, and nonhuman primate showed discrete areas of pimonidazole adduct formation surrounding necrotic and caseous regions of pulmonary granulomas by immunohistochemical staining. This labeling could be substantially reduced by housing the animal under an atmosphere of 95% O(2). Direct measurement of tissue oxygen partial pressure by surgical insertion of a fiber optic oxygen probe into granulomas in the lungs of living infected rabbits demonstrated that even small (3-mm) pulmonary lesions were severely hypoxic (1.6 +/- 0.7 mm Hg). Finally, metronidazole, which has potent bactericidal activity in vitro only under low-oxygen culture conditions, was highly effective at reducing total-lung bacterial burdens in infected rabbits. Thus, three independent lines of evidence support the hypothesis that hypoxic microenvironments are an important feature of some lesions in these animal models of tuberculosis.

Published 20 May 2008 in Infect Immun, 76(6): 2333-40.
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