Tuberculosis patients may be infected with or have disease caused by more than one Mycobacterium tuberculosis strain, usually referred to as "mixed infections." These have mainly been observed in settings with a very high tuberculosis incidence and/or high HIV prevalence. We assessed the rate of mixed infections in a population-based study in rural Vietnam, where the prevalences of both HIV and...

OBJECTIVES Mycobacterium intracellulare is the major causative agent of nontuberculous mycobacteria-related pulmonary infections. The strain typing of M. intracellulare is important for the treatment and control of its infections. We compared the discrimination capacity and effective value of four different molecular typing methods. METHODS Antibiotic susceptibility testing, hsp65 and rpoB se...

Mycobacterial interspersed repetitive unit-variable number tandem repeat (MIRU-VNTR) typing of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex isolates is portable, 100% reproducible, and highly discriminatory. Nondenaturing high-performance liquid chromatography (non-dHPLC) with use of a WAVE microbial analysis system is a promising method of PCR amplicon analysis as it is low cost and requires no preanaly...

Several methods are available for the molecular typing of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex isolates. The results of the recent research demonstrated that Mycobacterial Interspersed Repetitive Unit (MIRU)-Variable Number Tandem Repeats (VNTR) method has high discriminatory power and reproducibility, is easy to perform, and available for multi-center studies and automation. However, there is in...

In this study we report on the development of a multilocus variable-number tandem-repeat (VNTR) analysis (MLVA) method for the molecular typing of Mycoplasma pneumoniae. The genomic content of M. pneumoniae M129 was analyzed for VNTRs, and 5 of the 17 VNTRs identified were selected for use in an MLVA assay. The method was based on a GeneScan analysis of VNTR loci labeled with fluorescent dyes b...

Multiple-locus variable-number tandem-repeat (VNTR) analysis (MLVA) has been proposed as a means of strain typing for tracking the transmission of leprosy. However, empirical data for a defined population are lacking. To this end, a study was initiated to assess the diversity and distribution of prevalent Mycobacterium leprae strains in Qiubei County, Yunnan Province, People's Republic of China...

*Corresponding author: Mailing address: Division of Bacteriology, Chiba Prefectural Institute of Public Health, 666-2 Nitona, Chuo, Chiba, Chiba 260-8715, Japan. Tel: +81-43-266-6723, Fax: +81-43-265-5544, E-mail: [email protected] Tuberculosis is one of the major bacterial diseases in Japan (1). Advances in the molecular epidemiological analysis of this disease have greatly improved t...

Genotypic analysis was performed on 48 Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex strains collected from a hospital in Dhaka city. Deletion analysis showed that the isolates were all M. tuberculosis; 13 of them were found to be of the "ancestral" type, while 35 were of the "modern" type, indicating that both endemic (ancestral type) and epidemic (modern type) strains cause tuberculosis in Bangladesh. G...

BACKGROUND Single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) analysis is a powerful strategy for large-scale molecular population studies examining phylogenetic relationships among bacterial strains. Mycobacterial interspersed repetitive units-variable number of tandem repeats (MIRU-VNTR) can be easily digitized to share data among laboratories. This study applied SNP and MIRU-VNTR analyses for molecular st...