Introduction: tuberculosis is a public health problem caused by the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex, so it is important to know the genetic characteristics of the bacteria. Objetive: to execute a literature review of the main components of the genome of Mycobacterium tuberculosis to understand the mechanisms in the pathogenesis and drug resistance. Methodology: a literature review in Spanish and English using Medline, PubMed, Scielo, Uniprot, Tuberlist. Results: the complete genome sequence of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, H37Rv comprises 4,411,529 base pairs. A very large portion of its coding capacity is devoted to the production of enzymes involved in lipogenesis and lipolysis. Conclusion: difficulties to manipulate genetically mycobacteria have made them a difficult model to characterize genetically. The developments of tools for genetic manipulation have been facilitating the understanding of genome organization, expression of their genes and phenotypic determination that influence in the pathogenicity and drug resistance. MED.UIS. 2015;28(1):39-51