Mycobacterium tuberculosis CDC-1551

In 1996 TIGR was the recipient of a grant from the NIH to sequence the 4.4 Mb genome of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. While a similar project was underway to sequence the laboratory strain (H37Rv) at the Sanger Center, TIGR chose to sequence a recent clinical isolate from the Kentucky/Tennessee region. This strain (often referred to as the "Oshkosh" strain, but more properly CDC-1551) was isolated from a male children's clothing factory worker and was shown to be highly contagious, infecting approximately 80% of his co-workers and social contacts. The CDC-1551 strain was also demonstrated to be highly virulent in mice, producing several orders of magnitude more organisms than the H37Rv strain when inoculated into the lungs of mice. Fortunately, the strain has not caused wide-spread disease in man and is pan-drug sensitive. The Mycobacterium tuberculosis CDC1551 genome was sequenced by TIGR and has a total of 4189 genes. The genome is a circular chromosome of 4,403,765 base pairs with an average G + C content of 65.6%.