Advances in diagnosis of Tuberculosis: an update into molecular diagnosis of Mycobacterium tuberculosis

Tuberculosis (TB) is a major cause of deaths by a single infectious agent and has now been a global public health problem due to increasing numbers of drug-resistant cases. Early and effective treatment is crucial to prevent the emergence of drug-resistance strains. This demands the availability of fast and reliable point-of-care (POC) diagnostic methods for effective case management. Commonly used methods to screen and diagnose TB are clinical, immunological, microscopy, radiography, and bacterial culture. In addition, recent advances in molecular diagnostic methods including MTBDRplus, loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP), line probe assay (LPA), GeneXpert, and whole genome sequencing (WGS) have been employed to diagnose and characterize TB. These methods can simultaneously identify Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) and mutation(s) associated with routinely used anti-TB drugs. Here, we review the use of currently available diagnostic methods and strategies including conventional to recently implemented next-generation sequencing (NGS) methods used to detect MTB in clinical perspective.