RESEARCH Open Access Interleukin-6: a potent biomarker of

mycobacterial infection Prati Pal Singh * and Amit Goyal Background: Human tuberculosis (TB), a chronic inflammatory disease is caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, a facultative intramacrophage pathogen. The highly complex interactions between mycobacteria and macrophages (MΦs), characterized in part by the induction and elaboration of several cytokines including IL-1, IL-6, IL-10, IL-12 p40 and IL-12 p70 are not yet fully understood. The cytokines are known to have important bearing on the pathogenesis and host defense during TB. We thus studied different patterns of cytokines elaborated by mouse peritoneal macrophages (PMs) following their interaction with live and heat-killed, virulent and avirulent, and pathogenic and non-pathogenic mycobacteria, in vitro