NEXT GENERATION SEQUENCING: A PARADIGM SHIFT IN THE ELIMINATION OF TUBERCULOSIS

Despite all the advances made in Tuberculosis (TB) diagnostics and therapeutics, the fight against this disease is far from over. The disease is now spreading faster due to rapid urbanisation and close clustering. Added to this is the new problem of drug resistance, its early diagnosis and targeted therapy. The current diagnostic capabilities have their own limitations, be it genotypic or phenotypic tests. They have a high turnaround time, do not detect drug resistance other than Rifampicin and there are discrepancies in the interpretation of Drug Sensitivity tests for TB. Newer molecular techniques like Sequencing can overcome these shortcomings of existing diagnostics. However, they need huge infrastructure and bioinformatics, extensive research for interpreting mutations and should be accessible to those who need it the most. In this chapter we hereby discuss Sequencing for TB, particularly targeted Next generation Sequencing, its current application and its future prospects.