Metabolite Profiling of Serum from Patients with Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis (TB) is caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) and is a major health problem globally [1].MTB has infected 10 million people and caused 1.8 million deaths per year worldwide [2].However, a rapid and accurate TB diagnosis remains a major challenge for global control efforts [3].Recently, the incidence of pulmonary tuberculosis is high in immunocompromised individuals, and the emergence of multidrug-resistant bacteria has made diagnosis and treatment more complicated [4,5].A standard diagnosis method for TB is a smear and culture for acid-fast bacilli in clinical specimens.Although these techniques are important steps for TB diagnosis, they have several drawbacks [6][7][8].Smear microscopy is only effective for TB diagnosis when the bacterial load is >10,000 organisms/ml of sample [9].