Determination of genetic diversity of multidrug-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains in Turkey using 15 locus MIRU-VNTR and spoligotyping methods

ABSTRACT

Tuberculosis (TB) remains the leading cause of deaths from infectious disease worldwide. Nowadays, the tendency of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC) to spread between continents due to uncontrolled migration movements shows that TB is a global health problem. The number of studies for the detection of MTBC strains’ epidemiological features in areas with TB spread risk using molecular-based methods such as spoligotyping and Mycobacterial Interspersed Repetitive Unit (MIRU) Variable Number Tandem Repeats (VNTR) at the clonal level is insufficient. In this study, it was aimed to determine the phylogenetic relationships of MTBC strains at the species level by spoligotyping and 15 locus MIRU-VNTR (MIRU-VNTR₁₅) molecular methods of 96 multidrug-resistant (MDR) MTBC strains isolated from sputum samples of patients with a preliminary diagnosis of pulmonary TB or suspected contact history those sent to National Tuberculosis Reference Laboratory from the centers that are members of the Tuberculosis Laboratory Surveillance Network. The phylogenetic relationship between 96 MDR-TB strains was investigated with the combination of bead-based spoligotyping and MIRU-VNTR₁₅ methods on the MAGPIX® Milliplex Map device. In this study, it was determined that the T1 family is more common in our country and LAM7-TUR family is less common than the Beijing family unlike other studies. It was determined that the strains in the same cluster had different locus profiles, and there was no transmission from the same clone in the clonal typing we performed with spoligotyping and MIRU-VNTR₁₅.

KEYWORDS:

• Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex
• spoligotyping
• MIRU-VNTR
• MDR-TB
• tuberculosis surveillance

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank all clinicians and laboratory technicians who contributed to this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethical conduct of research

This study was approved by the Ethical Committee of Clinical Researches of Mersin University (Approval date: 19/12/2018 and Number: 2018/491).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Mersin Üniversitesi [2019-1-TP3-3148].