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Journal of Clinical Microbiology, August 1999, p. 2602-2606, Vol. 37, No. 8
Department of Mycobacteriology, Statens Serum
Institut, Copenhagen, Denmark,1 and
Laboratory for Infectious Diseases and Perinatal
Screening, National Institute of Public Health and Environmental
Protection, Bilthoven, The Netherlands2
Received 18 November 1998/Returned for modification 13 February
1999/Accepted 25 April 1999
Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex strains cultured in
Denmark have been analyzed by IS6110 restriction fragment
length polymorphism (RFLP) on a routine basis from 1992 and onwards.
Due to the influx of immigrants with tuberculosis, the number of
strains harboring only one to five copies of IS6110 has
increased steadily. Since the discriminatory power of
IS6110 fingerprinting for such strains is poor, we have
performed additional genotyping of all low-copy-number strains by the
recently described PCR-based method known as spoligotyping. A total of
311 clinical strains were typed: 14 Mycobacterium bovis BCG, 48 M. bovis, and 249 M. tuberculosis
strains. Spoligotyping correctly differentiated M. bovis
and M. bovis BCG from M. tuberculosis strains,
but it did not differentiate M. bovis from M. bovis BCG. All M. bovis BCG strains exhibited
identical spoligotype patterns. The discriminatory power of
spoligotyping of low-copy-number M. tuberculosis strains
was higher than that of IS6110 fingerprinting. Based on
RFLP typing solely, 83% of the low-copy-number M. tuberculosis strains were found to form part of a cluster, and
75% were found to form a cluster on the basis of spoligotyping. When
the two techniques were combined, the amount of clustering decreased to 55%. The combination of these two techniques might be valuable in
studying the epidemiology of M. tuberculosis strains
harboring few copies of the IS6110 element.
0095-1137/99/$04.00+0
Copyright © 1999, American Society for Microbiology. All rights reserved.
Usefulness of Spoligotyping To Discriminate IS6110
Low-Copy-Number Mycobacterium tuberculosis Complex
Strains Cultured in Denmark
*
Corresponding author. Mailing address: Department of
Mycobacteriology, Statens Serum Institut, Artillerivej 5, 2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark. Phone: 45 3268 3705. Fax: 45 3268 3871. E-mail:
jba{at}ssi.dk.
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