Monitoring autophagy during Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection

Tuberculosis is one of the world's most prevalent infectious diseases. The causative agent, M. tuberculosis, asymptomatically infects more than 30% of the world population and causes 8 million cases of active disease and 2 million deaths annually. Its pathogenic success stems from its ability to block phagolysosome biogenesis and subsequent destruction in the host macrophages. Recently, our laboratory has uncovered autophagy as a new means of overcoming this block and promoting the killing of mycobacteria. Here we describe the methods to study autophagy during M. tuberculosis infection of macrophages. The described assays can be used to investigate and identify factors important for autophagic elimination of mycobacteria that could potentially provide new therapeutic targets to defeat this disease.