TB Dictionary
Along with Alberto Garcia-Basteiro and many others, Marcel contributed to the creation and editing of the Global TB Dictionary, a consensus TB dictionary to unify the language we speak. Link to THE LANCET Global Health publication describing this dictionary.
Alberto L Garcia-Basteiro, Joanna Ehrlich, Maryline Bonnet, Marianne Calnan, Stephen M Graham, Sabine Hermans, Adriana Jarrett, Rhoda Lewa, Anna Mandalakas, Leonardo Martinez, Giovanni Battista Migliori, Catherine WM Ong, Larissa Otero, Molebogeng Xheedha Rangaka, Mario CB Raviglione, Barbara Seaworth, Willy Ssengooba, Grant Theron, Anete Trajman, Marcel A Behr. A Global Tuberculosis Dictionary: unified terms and definitions for the field of tuberculosis. Lancet Global Health, The, 2024-05-01, Volume 12, Issue 5, Pages e737-e739, Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an Open Access article under the CC BY 4.0 license
BCG strains that are mono-resistant to drugs used for TB
Sarah Danchuk has engineered a panel of recombinant BCG strains that are mono-resistant to drugs used for TB. Link to publication describing recombinant BCG strains. Strains available by request or also deposited at the BCCM/ITM Mycobacteria collection. 
Danchuk S, McIntosh F, Jamieson FB, May K, Behr MA. Bacillus Calmette-Guérin strains with defined resistance mutations: a new tool for TB lab quality control. Clinical Microbiology and Infection, 2020 Mar; 26(3): 384.e5-384.e8
The rBCG strains have been used in Sarah N Danchuk, Ori E Solomon, Thomas Andreas Kohl, Viola Dreyer, Ivan Barilar, Christian Utpatel, Stefan Niemann, Dick van Soolingen, Richard Anthony, Jakko van Ingen, Joy S Michael, Marcel A Behr. Challenging the gold standard: the limitations of molecular assays for detection of Mycobacterium tuberculosis heteroresistance. Thorax. 2024 Jun 14;79(7):670-675. doi: 10.1136/thorax-2023-220202.
Ancestral sequence for the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex
Luke Harrison has imputed the ancestral sequence for the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex, called MTBC 0.
Link to publication describing MTBC 0.
Harrison LB, Kapur V, Behr MA. An imputed ancestral reference genome for the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex better captures structural genomic diversity for reference-based alignment workflows. Microb Genom. 2024 Jan;10(1):001165. doi: 10.1099/mgen.0.001165.PMID: 38175684
The sequence can also be accessed via https://mycobrowser.epfl.ch/
Previous work : Graphical user interface for Genomic Sequence Comparison
MycoHit is a JAVA application
This program serves to perform BLAST searches > then parses the TBLASTN result files with PERL scripts > in order to select the highest score for each protein. Obtained data, including the score, are then stored on a local MYSQL database.
It was first published in this article: Veyrier F, Pletzer D, Turenne C, Behr MA. Phylogenetic detection of horizontal gene transfer during the step-wise genesis of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. BMC Evol Biol. 2009 Aug 10;9:196. doi: 10.1186/1471-2148-9-196.
