ORIGINAL RESEARCH
MIRU-VNTR genotyping of clinical isolates of Mycobacterium tuberculosis from Moscow region
Laboratory of Bacterial Genetics, Department of Genetics and Biotechnology,
Vavilov Institute of General Genetics of RAS, Moscow, Russia
Correspondence should be addressed: Valery N. Danilenko
ul. Gubkina, d. 3, Moscow, Russia, 119333; ur.ggiv@direlav
Funding: this work was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (Grant No. 13-04-91444 Toxin-antitoxins and RpsA in TB drug resistance and persistence).
Acknowledgements: authors thank the research team of the Department of Microbiology of the Central TB Research Institute (Moscow) for their assistance in preparing a collection of M. tuberculosis isolates, with special thanks going to Larisa Chernousova, D. Sci. (Biol).
Contribution of the authors to this work: Shur DA — experiment planning, data collection, analysis and interpretation, drafting a manuscript; Maslov DA — experiment planning, data analysis and interpretation, drafting a manuscript; Bekker OB, Danilenko VN — experiment planning, data interpretation, drafting of a manuscript.
Antibiotic selection pressure, genetic polymorphism as well as diversity of the immune status of the host and other selection factors continuously prompt Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the tuberculosis causative agent, to evolve. Significant or insignificant mutations shape new (sub)lineages of the pathogen whose evolution can be understood only through analyzing and monitoring its genotypic diversity and properties of its lineages. In our study we used a set of 46 M. tuberculosis clinical isolates from Moscow region. The samples were typed using the standard 24-loci MIRU-VNTR technique. Beijing family isolates were shown to prevail in the collection (60.9 %), as well as Beijing-B0/W148 subtype (60.7 % of total Beijing type samples); most of them (88,2 %) were multidrug-resistant resistant. The applied technique allowed us to detect one case of a mixed-strain infection.
Keywords: genotyping, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, phylogenetics, epidemiology, Beijing, MIRU-VNTR