| Bum-Joon Kim | 1 Article |
Objectives
<i>Mycobacterium intracellulare</i> is the major causative agent of nontuberculous mycobacteria-related pulmonary infections. The strain typing of <i>M. intracellulare</i> 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, <i>hsp65</i> and <i>rpoB</i> sequencing, pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE), multilocus sequence typing (MLST), mycobacteria interspersed repetitive-unit-variable-number tandem-repeat analysis (MIRU-VNTR), and VNTR assay targeting 44 <i>M. intracellulare</i> isolates obtained from patients with pulmonary infections were performed. Results All the antibiotic susceptibility patterns had no association with the molecular and sequence types tested in this study; however, the molecular and sequence types were related with each other. PFGE gave best results for discriminatory capacity, followed by VNTR, MLST, and MIRU-VNTR. Conclusion The high discriminatory power of PFGE, VNTR, and MLST is enough for differentiating between reinfection and relapse, as well as for other molecular epidemiological usages. The MLST could be regarded as a representative classification method, because it showed the clearest relation with the sequence types. Citations
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