Genotypes of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC) vary with the geographic origin of the patients and can affect tuberculosis (TB) transmission. This study was aimed to further differentiate spoligotype-defined clusters of drug-resistant MTBC clinical isolates split in Beijing (n = 190) versus non-Beijing isolates (n = 84) from Sichuan region, the second high-burden province in China, by I...

We have evaluated fluorescent amplified fragment length polymorphism (FAFLP) fingerprinting as a complementary technique for genotyping Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which may aid in the elucidation of the transmission dynamics of tuberculosis. Earlier FAFLP studies (1, 2, 3, 5) broadly employed EcoRI and MseI restriction enzymes, which are known to have a low cleavage frequency for GC genomes of...

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...

In a previous study, we proposed to associate spoligotyping and typing with the variable number of tandem DNA repeats (VNTR) as an alternative strategy to IS6110-restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) for molecular epidemiological studies on tuberculosis. The aim of the present study was to further evaluate this PCR-based typing strategy and to describe the population structure of Myco...

DNA genotyping of Mycobacterium tuberculosis has been widely applied in the understanding of disease transmission in many countries. The purpose of this study was to genotype the strains of M. tuberculosis isolated in patients with new tuberculosis (TB) cases in Minas Gerais, as well as to compare the similarity, discriminatory power, and agreement of the clusters between the IS6110 Restriction...

A total of 129 clinical isolates of Mycobacterium tuberculosis representing 91 patients were typed by a combination of direct-repeat (DR)-based spoligotyping and an inter-IS6110-PGRS (polymorphic GC-rich region)-PCR, also designated double-repetitive-element PCR (DRE-PCR). During the first phase of this investigation, 72 clinical strains representing 52 patients were initially typed by IS6110-r...

Fifty-two multidrug-resistant isolates of Mycobacterium tuberculosis representative of the currently predominant lineages in France were analyzed using repetitive-sequence-based PCR (rep-PCR) DiversiLab (DL), spoligotyping, 24-locus mycobacterial interspersed repetitive-unit-variable-number tandem-repeat typing (MIRU-VNTR), and restriction fragment length polymorphism of IS6110 (IS6110-RFLP). D...

IS6110 DNA fingerprinting was used to characterize an outbreak of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis in 21 individuals (17 males and 4 females) living in or roaming among four distantly separated areas in the Czech Republic. The restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) analysis separated the collected Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains into group A, including 14 patients with six IS6110 co...

Spoligotyping (for spacer oligotyping) is an easy, economical, and rapid way of typing Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex strains with the DR spacer markers (J. Kamerbeek et al., J. Clin. Microbiol. 35:907-914, 1997; D. van Soolingen et al., 33:3234-3248, 1995). The stability of the markers was demonstrated by showing that all the Mycobacterium bovis BCG strains tested gave the same spoligotypi...

Fast and inexpensive identification of epidemiological links between limited number of Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains is required to initially evaluate hospital outbreaks, laboratory crosscontaminations, and family or small community transmissions. The ligation-mediated PCR methods (LM-PCR) appear sufficiently discriminative and reproducible to be considered as a good candidate for such ini...