Analysis of variants in mitochondrial genome and their putative pathogenicity in tuberculosis patients from Mizoram, North east India.

Tuberculosis caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis is one of the main global health concerns. In this study, the entire mitochondrial genome from blood samples of tuberculosis patients was analyzed to understand the possible mtDNA variants. The potential impact of non-synonymous substitutions on protein functions were determined using prediction tools. 28 non- synonymous variants were found of which 2 variants (MT-ND2 g. A > G4824 p.T119A and MT-ND6 g. T > C14180 p.Y165C) were found to be deleterious among the cases only. Majority of the variants lie in the D-loop of the non-protein coding region of the mitochondrial DNA. We propose that mutations in the mitochondrial genome need to be validated further to understand their association with tuberculosis.