Overview
- Carvalho and colleagues reported in PNAS the week of August 17, 2026, that the Mycobacterium tuberculosis locus rv2531c encodes an enzyme that converts the amino acid glutamate into GABA.
- The enzyme is largely inactive in normal conditions but becomes highly active under stress and can catalyze about 70 glutamate-to-GABA reactions per second.
- Researchers revealed the activity by using an extended, hour-long nuclear magnetic resonance assay that captured slow-starting kinetics missed by standard one-minute tests.
- Sequence searches found roughly 1,000 similar genes in other microbes, including the malaria parasite Plasmodium and the leprosy Mycobacterium, which raises the possibility of broader biological roles but does not yet prove clinical use.
- The discovery comes as tuberculosis remains a major global health problem with lengthy treatment and rising drug resistance, and the team says further work will test whether this stress-activated pathway can be targeted for new therapies.