Unexpectedly high proportion of ancestral Manu genotype Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains cultured from tuberculosis patients in Egypt.

Zeinab H Helal (1, 2) , Mohamed Seif El-Din Ashour (1) , Somaia A Eissa (3) , Ghanem Abd-Elatef (4) , Thierry Zozio (5) , Sankhiros Babapoor (2) , Nalin Rastogi (5) , Mazhar I Khan (2)

1 Department of Microbiology and Immunology
2 Molecular Biology Laboratory, Department of Pathobiology and Veterinary Science
3 Center of Tuberculosis, Department of Microbiology and Immunology
4 Department of Chest Diseases, Faculty of Medicine
5 Institut Pasteur de la Guadeloupe

Tuberculosis is one of the important public health problems in Egypt. However, limited information on the Mycobacterium tuberculosis genotypes circulating in Egypt is available. A total of 151 M. tuberculosis strains were characterized by spoligotyping. The results revealed that 74.8% of M. tuberculosis isolates grouped into 13 different clusters, while 25.2% had unique spoligotype patterns. Comparison with an international spoligotyping database (the SITVIT2 database) showed that types SIT53 (T1 variant) and SIT54 (Manu2 variant) were the most common types between cluster groups. In addition, new shared types SIT2977, SIT2978, and SIT2979 were observed. The results identified for the first time an unusually high proportion of ancestral Manu strains of M. tuberculosis from patients in Egypt. The percentage of the Manu clade in this study (27.15%) was significantly higher than its overall representation of 0.4% in the SITVIT2 database. We show that in Egypt tuberculosis is caused by a predominant M. tuberculosis genotype belonging to the ancestral Manu lineage which could be a missing link in the split between ancestral and modern tubercle bacilli during the evolution of M. tuberculosis.

Keywords: "Mycobacterium"; "Tuberculosis"; Egypt; "Spoligotyping"; "Manu"; "DNA Fingerprinting"; "Molecular Epidemiology"; "SITVIT2"; Mycobacterium; Tuberculosis; Spoligotyping; Manu; DNA Fingerprinting; Molecular Epidemiology; SITVIT2

Domains: Life Sciences [q-bio]; Microbiology and Parasitology; Bacteriology

Zeinab H Helal, Mohamed Seif El-Din Ashour, Somaia A Eissa, Ghanem Abd-Elatef, Thierry Zozio, et al.. Unexpectedly high proportion of ancestral Manu genotype Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains cultured from tuberculosis patients in Egypt.. Journal of Clinical Microbiology, 2009, 47 (9), pp.2794-2801. ⟨10.1128/JCM.00360-09⟩. ⟨pasteur-00511972⟩