Use of single-cell technology to improve our understanding of the role of TLR2 in macrophage–Mycobacterium tuberculosis interaction

The interaction between Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the agent of tuberculosis (TB), and its host cell, the macrophage, is multifaceted, dynamic, and involves multiple molecular partners. A better understanding of this interaction could help researchers manipulate the immune system in order to design host-targeted immunotherapies and/or develop a novel vaccine protecting better adults against TB. Jani and coworkers studied the role of the macrophage receptor TLR2 in the response to M. tuberculosis using single-cell technologies (C. Jani, S. L. Solomon, J. M. Peters, and S. C. Pringle, et al., mSystems, https://doi.org/10.1128/msystems.00052-23, 2023). This work addresses the multiple challenges associated with such studies and shows how informative single-cell analysis can be for the study of heterogeneous and complex host-pathogen interactions.