Genotyping of Mycobacterium Tuberculosis strains isolated from pulmonary tuberculosis patients by Spoligotyping and MIRU-VNTR (Mycobacterial İnterspersed Repetitive Unit-Variable Number of Tandem Repeat) methods in cukurova region

Objectives: : Tuberculosis is one of the major public health issues in the developing countries of the world. In control of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which has begun to increase together with the HIV epidemic in developed countries, specific diagnosis methods which is new, faster, cheap, sensetive and creation more effective anti-tuberculosis medicines, which can identify the public travel route and the transmission ways in genome level, epidemiological methods are required . Although there are many research methods based on the use of molecular methods like Spoligotyping and Mycobacterial interspersed Repetitive Units (MIRU) - Variable Number Tandem Repeats (VNTR) especially in high risk areas, there is not enough researches for determination of epidemiological characteristics of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in our country and our region. With this study, identification of epidemiyologic features of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in the Cukurova Region by using moleculer epidemiyologic methods is aimed.Materials and Methods: In this study, 467 Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex strains isolated from the clinical materials of patients that have pulmoner tuberculosis or contact suspicious which were sent our laboratory from the different hospitals and Tuberculosis Dispansery in the Cukurova Region between the dates of January 2007 to June 2010 were used. Strains were evaluated with Spoligotyping and 12 loci MIRU-VNTR methods for clonal level diagnosis.Results: Among the 467 isolates for spoligotyping analysis, 443 (94,9 %) genotype was in 21 cluster, 24 (5,1 %) of these isolates described as orphan strains according to SpolDB4 database. Result of this study, 239 strains (51,9 %) belong to T1 genotype and 54 strains (11,5 %) belong to LAM7 TUR genotype are the most common families in our regionConclusion: According to this study, different from the results of 5 study in our country, T1 family is more common LAM7 TUR family.Keywords: MIRU-VNTR, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Spoligotyping