Tuberculosis patients may be infected with or have disease caused by more than one Mycobacterium tuberculosis strain, usually referred to as "mixed infections." These have mainly been observed in settings with a very high tuberculosis incidence and/or high HIV prevalence. We assessed the rate of mixed infections in a population-based study in rural Vietnam, where the prevalences of both HIV and...

BACKGROUND We determined the genetic diversity of mycobacteria isolated from tuberculosis patients in Mbarara Uganda, using region of difference (RD) analysis and spacer oligonucleotide typing (spoligotyping). METHODS Sputum samples were cultured on Lowenstein Jensen media. The isolates were characterized using RD analysis and spoligotyping. RESULTS The majority (92.8%) of the patients were...

Genotyping of Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains became indispensable for understanding tuberculosis transmission dynamics and designing measures to combat the disease. Unfortunately, typing involves sophisticated laboratory analysis, is expensive, and requires a high level of technical expertise, which limited its use in the resource-poor countries where the majority of tuberculosis cases occu...

Designing newer drugs, vaccines, and diagnostic techniques is dependent on better understanding of M. tuberculosis virulence mechanism. In this study the prevalence of pcaA gene was determined in M. tuberculosis strains typed by spoligotyping. The associated risk factors among patients with different nationalities residing in Iran were also determined. The isolated M. tuberculosis strains have ...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Molecular epidemiology tools are widely used in determining epidemiology of tuberculosis. Spoligotyping is a molecular epidemiology method that is used for characterization and typing of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex strains. The method is based on polymorphism of the chromosomal DR locus consisting of identical 36-bp DRs alternating with 35-41 unique spacers. The...

DNA fingerprinting techniques were used to type 273 isolates of Mycobacterium bovis from Australia, Canada, the Republic of Ireland, and Iran. The results of restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) analysis with DNA probes from IS6110, the direct repeat (DR), and the polymorphic GC-rich sequence (PGRS) were compared with those of a new PCR-based method called spacer oligonucleotide typi...

BACKGROUND Multidrug resistance is a critical factor in tuberculosis control. To gain better understanding of multidrug resistant tuberculosis in Brazil, a retrospective study was performed to compare genotypic diversity and drug resistance associated mutations in Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates from a national reference center. METHODS AND FINDINGS Ninety-nine multidrug resistant isolate...

Genomic deletion analysis revealed that strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis exhibiting spoligotyping patterns with almost all spacers present belong either to a strain lineage that includes the W-Beijing strain family or to the ancestral strain lineage of M. tuberculosis.

We used direct repeat (DR)-based spacer oligonucleotide typing (spoligotyping) (in association with double-repetitive element polymerase chain reaction, IS6110-restriction fragment length polymorphism [RFLP], and sometimes DR-RFLP and polymorphic GC-rich sequence-RFLP) to detect epidemiologic links and transmission patterns of Mycobacterium tuberculosis on Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Gui...