Mycobacterium tuberculosis is, according to the World Health Organization, the most dangerous infectious disease, causing more deaths than any other single infection. Approximately one third of the world's population is already infected. More than 4,000,000 new cases, and more than 2,000,000 deaths have to be accounted for each year (1). During the last two decades, multi-resistant strains have appeared due to the discontinued treatment of tuberculosis in many countries, threatening all countries that experience immigration (1). Recently, extreme-resistant strains have appeared in Africa. A successful treatment of a multi-resistant case of tuberculosis requires up to 6 different antibiotics and 18-24 months of continuing care. In the United States, the typical costs per patient are approximately $200,000. In order to gain the upper hand against TB, entirely new strategies are required to obtain the basic knowledge, which will then enable the successful development of new anti-TB-therapies.

Mycobacteria possess an especially thick outer membrane (called “cell envelope”), which acts as a hydrophobic shield against antibiotics (2). The development of metabolic assays will permit us to observe the level of metabolic activity in a living mycobacterium in dependence of the environmental conditions and/or the presence of an anti-TB drug. We present our synthetic work toward an UV/Vis-absorption-based assay for the activity of Alkaline Phosphatase. Transport-Assays permit the elucidation of the transport activity through various channel-forming proteins embedded in the Outer Mycobacterial Membrane.

(1) www.who.int (2) Niederweis, M.; Bossmann, S. H. Nanostructuring at surfaces using proteins. Encyclopedia of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology 2004, 7, 851-867.