Deciphering the polycistronic nature ofMycobacterium tuberculosislipoproteins of unknown functions

Abstract Mycobacterium tuberculosis , the causative agent of human tuberculosis, encodes 116 lipoproteins, from which 48 have no demonstrated or predicted function. In this study, we demonstrated that six genes of these lipoproteins of unknown function are encoded in transcriptional units together with genes with experimentally verified functions or that encode conserved functional domains. We assigned predicted functions to LpqT (Rv1016c), LppE (1881c), LppO (Rv2290), LprE (Rv1252c) and LpqF (Rv3593).