JCM Accepts, published online ahead of print on 24 June 2009

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J. Clin. Microbiol. doi:10.1128/JCM.00360-09
Copyright (c) 2009, American Society for Microbiology and/or the Listed Authors/Institutions. All Rights Reserved.

Unexpectedly High Proportion of Ancestral Manu Genotype Mycobacterium tuberculosis Strains Cultured from Egyptian Tuberculosis Patients

Zeinab H. Helal, Mohamed Seif El-Din Ashour, Somaia A. Eissa, Ghanem Abd-Elatef, Thierry Zozio, Sankhiros Bapaboor, Nalin Rastogi^*, and Mazhar I. Khan^*

Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Faculty of Pharmacy, Al-Azhar University, Cairo, Egypt; Molecular Biology Laboratory, Department of Pathobiology and Veterinary Science, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269-3089, USA; Center of Tuberculosis, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Faculty of Medicine, Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt; Department of Chest Diseases, Faculty of Medicine Al-Azhar University, Cairo, Egypt; Unité de la Tuberculose & des Mycobactéries, Institut Pasteur de la Guadeloupe, Abymes, Guadeloupe (France)

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: nrastogi{at}pasteur-guadeloupe.fr.

Tuberculosis is one of the important public health problems in Egypt. However, there is limited information available on the Mycobacterium tuberculosis genotypes circulating in Egypt. Total of 151 M. tuberculosis strains were characterized by spoligotyping. Results revealed that 74.8% of M. tuberculosis isolates grouped into 13 different clusters, while 25.2% had a unique spoligotype pattern. Comparison with an international spoligotyping database SITVIT2 showed types SIT53 (T1) and SIT54 (Manu2) as the most common types between cluster groups. In addition new shared types SIT2977, SIT2978 SIT2979 were observed. Results identified for the first time an unusually high proportion of ancestral Manu strains of M. tuberculosis from Egyptian patients. The percentage of Manu clade in this study (27.15%) is significantly higher than over all representation of 0.4% in the SITVIT2 database. We show that TB in Egypt is caused by a predominant M. tuberculosis genotype belonging to the ancestral Manu lineage, which could be a missing link of the split between ancestral and modern tubercle bacilli during M. tuberculosis evolution.