13 Mar Article BMC Infectious Diseases
VNTR fingerprinting useful for typing M. tuberculosis bacterial strains in Vietnam.
Clustering of Beijing genotype Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates from the Mekong delta in Vietnam on the basis of variable number of tandem repeat versus restriction fragment length polymorphism typing.
Authors: Huyen MN, Kremer K, Lan NT, Buu TN, Cobelens FG, Tiemersma EW, de Haas P, van Soolingen D.
In: BMC Infect Dis. 2013 Feb 2;13:63. doi: 10.1186/1471-2334-13-63.
Molecular typing (also knwn as DNA fingerprinting) of mycobacteria is an important tool in epidemiological research and, increasingly, for control measures for tuberculosis. Various methods exist, but it is inknown whether these methods give comparable results for different genotype families (lineages) of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. This has been questioned in particular for the Beijing genotype that is abundant in East and Southeast Asia, including Vietnam.
In this paper Mai Nguyen Thu Huyen, a PhD researcher at Pham Ngoc Thach Hospital In Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and co-investigators from AMC/AIGHD, RIVM/Radboud University Nijmegen en KNCV Tuberculosis Foundation, studied the DNA fingerprints of 100 Beijing genotype strains isolated from tuberculosis patients in rural south Vietnam. Their analyses show that the more recently developed variable number of tandem repeat (VNTR) typing method has similar power to distinguish different strains as the more established but also more laborious method of restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) typing. Thefore, 24-loci VNTR typing can be used as a replacement for RFLP typing for studying transmssion and control of tuberculosis in countries where Beijing genotype strains of M. tubesulosis occur frequently.
Read the articleLink to abstract: BMC Infectious Diseases