Mycobacteria within its intracellular niche: survival of the pathogen or its host?

Understanding how the host immune system signals in response to infection by pathogenic mycobacteria and how the bacteria activate immune evasion mechanisms is central to the global efforts to thwart mycobacterial infections, primarily tuberculosis. Rapid advances in the field of cellular microbiology and comparative genomics together with powerful techniques for studying the transcriptome and the proteome of the infected macrophage should aid in the understanding of the interplay between the host and the bacterium in its intracellular niche. This review summarizes the present state of knowledge in this field