Tuberculosis (TB) is a major health problem which causes many deaths every year in the world. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) report, 1.5 million people lose their lives due to tuberculosis in every year. Although some of the infected people are showing the symptoms, in some the disease never develops, even about 90% of the affected ones are improved by the immune system's response. As in many infectious diseases, the difference between the number of infected people and the number of sick people is caused by differences in balance between the host defense and the virulence of the organism. In this case, the genetic basis of the response to infectious agents needs to be investigated in order to understand the relationship between infectious diseases and host. For this purpose; we investigated the effects of TLR4 polymorphisms (rs4986790 & rs4986791) that are involved in immune system mechanisms against susceptibility to Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB). In order to understand the association we did genotyping in 65 TB patients from Malatya. The results of the genotyping showed no significant association to the single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) mentioned, for rs4986790 the p value was 0.80 and for rs4986791 p value was 0,517 for the genotypes. The population size was the limiting factor for the statistical analysis and it should be also taken into account that a number of genes are taking part in the signal transduction pathway that TLR4 is involved.
Key words: MTB, TLR, polymorphism, genotyping, SNP
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