Deciphering the polycistronic nature of Mycobacterium tuberculosis lipoproteins of unknown functions

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).