Antimycobacterial Activity of Selected Medicinal Sudanese Plants : Intracellular reporter gene assay Luciferase for screening novel drugs discovery against Mycobacterium tuberculosis

TB is a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide.It threatens one-third of the world's population and is the most common opportunistic infection in HIV/AIDS. TB is a major health problem in Sudan, which like other African countries is subject to the dual epidemics of TB and HIV/AIDS. The annual risk of TB infection in Sudan is a large country with a diverse population and history of civil conflict. Poverty levels are high with a gross national income per capita of less than two thousand dollars.Given the past contributions of natural products to drug discovery and given the fall in the number of new medicines introduced each year FDA drug approvals down from ~40 in 1996 to ~20 in 2006,it seems surprising that natural product based drug discovery has fallen so far out of fashion with the pharmaceutical industry.Some of the reasons behind that shift are caused by the difficulties in accessing natural products in ways that are compatible with high throughput screening.For the above reasons, selection of new strategies to evaluate and discovery of new anti-mycobacterial against Mtb harboring the pSMT1 plasmid carrying genes for Vibrio harveyi luciferase, novel drug-screening.