Tuberculosis is the world's leading cause of death from a single infectious agent.
Vaccines that confer greater degrees of protection have been reported to induce the most adverse reactions. One alternative to the use of live-attenuated BCG as a vaccine is to develop a new vaccine based on subunits of M. tuberculosis . A subunit vaccine consisting of one or more mycobacterial antigens has the advantage of eliminating problems associated with live vaccines. A leading candidate for a subunit vaccine against M. tuberculosis is the antigen 85 complex of proteins, but it has the drawbacks of low yield and poor solubility. The present invention provides synthetic genes and a method of overexpressing the genes encoding the 85 antigens of M. tuberculosis in E. coli for the purpose of harvesting large amounts of recombinant 85 antigen to use as a vaccine and use in constructing an immunologic test for the diagnosis of tuberculosis.