Abstract
Introduction: Molecular epidemiology of TB is a combination of genotyping methods and classical epidemiological investigations, that helps us understand the way the disease is spread and transmitted.
Aim: Assessment of the diversity of the population structure of M. tuberculosis complex strains isolated in the course of a national drug resistance survey in Albania in 2010.
Method: Prospective study with a homogenous cohort. A set of 220 MTBC DNA-s (belonging to as many patients), were analyzed by a combined 24 MLVA-spoligotyping (Multi Locus VNTR Analysis or MLVA) strategy. VNTR analysis was performed using an automated DNA analyzer. The genotyping data were compared via the freely accessible MIRU-VNTRplus service with the reference strains of the Spol DB4 database for the assignment of MTBC species, lineages, and genotypes (http://www.miru-vntrplus.org).
Results: The predominant genetic lineages were T1 (34.09%%), LAM (16.36%) and Haarlem 1 (7.73%) .The Clustering rate MIRU-VNTR resulted 0.39 and Clustering rate Spoligo 0.75. 23.18% of the strains did not match with an existing pattern in the SpolDB4 database.
Conclusions: The population structure of M. tuberculosis in Albania is highly heterogenous. It includes ubiquitary spoligotypes like ST53, ST42, ST47, ST50, ST62 ST52 as well as other less common shared types like ST613 and ST4. Other brand new signatures that were referred to as unknown in Spol DB4, resulted involved in chains of recent transmission. In our opinion these genotypes are phylogeographically specific for Albania and need to be further studied.
- © 2013 ERS