On March 12, the “Engineering More Stable, Selectable Marker-free Autoluminescent Mycobacteria by One Step”, the latest research fruit of the research team led by Zhang Tianyu from Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health Chinese Academy of Sciences was published online by the international academic journal PLoS ONE.

The research team led by Zhang Tianyu has first constructed a resistance expression box used for the efficient construction of recombinant Mycobacteria without resistance markers (patent number: 201310386264.0. F Yang et al, J Microbiol Methods, 2014 103:29-36) and also adopted different research strategies to ultimately realize the one-step construction of Autoluminescent Mycobacteria, including mycobacterium tuberculosis (laboratory standard strain and multiple clinically resistant strains), BCG, Mycobacterium marinum and non-pathogenic mycobacterium smegmatis, etc. According to the results, they are not only free of screening marker, but also have very steady luminous elements. The application for an patent has been approved (ZL 201210183007.2).