Comprehensive Resistance Prediction for Tuberculosis: an International Consortium (CRyPTIC)
About the project
CRyPTIC’s aim was to help improve control of tuberculosis and facilitate WHO’s End TB Strategy by better, faster and more targeted treatment of drug-resistant tuberculosis via genetic resistance prediction, paving the way towards universal drug susceptibility testing (DST).
Our ultimate goal was to achieve sufficiently accurate genetic prediction of resistance to most anti-tuberculosis drugs, so that whole genome sequencing can replace culture-based DST for TB. This will enable rapid-turnaround near-to-patient assays to revolutionise MDR-TB identification and management. This project was funded by MRC Newton Fund, Wellcome Trust, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It ran from 2016-2021 and was led by Professor Derrick Crook, University of Oxford.
-
Press release – Largest ever global study of tuberculosis identifies genetic causes of drug resistance
Using cutting-edge genomic sequencing techniques, researchers at the University of Oxford have identified almost all the genomic variation that gives people resistance to 13 of the most common tuberculosis (TB) drug treatments. The Comprehensive Resistance Prediction for Tuberculosis International Consortium (CRyPTIC) research project has collected the largest ever global dataset of clinical M. tuberculosis samples…
-
New logo celebrating the release of the CRyPTIC papers
To celebrate the release of the CRyPTIC dataset and the nine manuscripts deposited in preprint servers, we’ve made a new CRyPTIC logo that includes all the names of the people in the CRyPTIC project.
-
New publication: Structure of MmpL3 protein
Oliver Adams, as part of his DPhil studies in Simon Newstead’s group at the University of Oxford, has resolved the structure of MmpL3 which is the only essential member of the mmpL family of genes. It is a mycolic acid transporter that is targeted by a number of antituberculars under active development, for example SQ109 which is in Phase 3 clinical trials. This…
-
WHO tuberculosis mutation catalogue released
Last Friday 25 June 2021, the World Health Organization released their first report containing a catalogue of mutations in Mycobacterium tuberculosis and their association with drug resistance. The CRyPTIC project shared its large and comprehensive dataset, as well as providing its genetic processing pipeline, to the group compiling that data and producing the report. We are very pleased that…
-
Internal project seminars in June 2021
The analysis group will be presenting five consecutive seminars starting on Wed 9 June at 1500 BST (1400 GMT). Each seminar will focus on one of the primary publications to come from the CRyPTIC project. In the first seminar we will begin by describing the Release One dataset The CRyPTIC Release One dataset: how it…
-
New preprint: Deciphering bedaquiline and clofazimine resistance in tuberculosis
Stefan Niemann, a CRyPTIC partner, led this combined experimental and modelling study looking at how resistance is conferred to bedaquline and clofazimine in Mycobacterial tuberculosis. The CRyPTIC project provided 14,151 clinical isolates, each with minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs) to bedaquiline and clofazimine. This dataset was used to pinpoint genetic variation in Rv0678, a transcription regulator of a…
-
New preprint: Establishing epidemiological cutoffs for the CRyPTIC UKMYC microdilution plates.
The CRyPTIC project has measured the minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs) of 20,637 isolates to 13 different anti-TB drugs using a bespoke 96-well broth microdilution plate. These samples were collected by 14 partner laboratories based in 11 countries and span five continents. In this preprint, we use this large dataset to determine epidemiological cutoffs (ECOFF or ECV)…
-
BashTheBug passes 4 million classifications
A few days ago our BashTheBug volunteers passed the 4 million classifications mark! The work they are doing is key to improving the accuracy with which our 96-well microtitre plates are read in the CRyPTIC project. For more information see the BashTheBug blog.
-
New paper: Estimating genetic adaption in 10,000 M. tuberculosis genomes
Daniel Wilson, one of the CRyPTIC partners, has recently published a paper where he introduces a new approach, genomegaMap, which estimates the ratio of non-synonymous to synonymous mutations (usually referred to as dN/dS) at sites across the genome. This ratio can provide important clues to which parts of the genome are under selection pressure, which can lead…
-
CRyPTIC inoculates its 15,000th microtitre plate
Sometime in November 2019, the 15,000th 96-well microtitre plate was inoculated with M. tuberculosis. Since each plate contains 13 different antibiotics used to treat tuberculosis this is a large and comprehensive antibiotic susceptibility dataset. The vast majority of samples also have their whole genome sequenced to enable us to associate genetic variants with resistance (or susceptibility).