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

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.

Detection and characterization of nocardia from patients diagnosed as tuberculosis in egypt.

Pulmonary tuberculosis and pulmonary nocardiosis are similar in most clinical symptoms and radiological manifestation. In the developing countries like Egypt where tuberculosis is very common, anti-tuberculosis drugs are started on basis of radiology and clinical symptoms. This study included 600 sputum specimens collected from 200 patients diagnosed as pulmonary tuberculosis from three chest hospitals in Egypt. IS6110 specific primer were selected for PCR to identify the Mycobacterium tuberculosis and hsp65 gene specific primers were used for PCR and sequencing for the identification of Mycobacterium and Nocardial species. The region of the gene coding for 16S rRNA in Nocardia species were selected as genus specific primer sequences for a PCR and Real Time PCR assays. Our result confirmed that four whole DNA samples, extracted from sputum specimen from the pulmonary tuberculosis patients on anti-tuberculosis treatment, were Nocardia species. Three of them matched (99% homology) with Nocardia farcinica (formerly Nocardia asteroid type V) and one match (83% homology) with Nocardia pneumonia. Molecular methods such as PCR and real-time PCR for identification of Nocardia are rapid and accurate methods. No cross-reactions were observed using Real Time PCR specific for Nocordia with other closely related genera.