Genotyping of Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates from northwest Iran for determination on the mechanism of transmission.

ABSTRACT

Planning to control tuberculosis requires identification of dominant strains in the region, transmission patterns and risk factors that are possible by using molecular genotyping techniques. The aim of this study is to determine the transmission of tuberculosis in the northwest of Iran in order to better understand the spread of disease in northwest of Iran. In this study, 194 positive mycobacterium cultivars in northwest of Iran were investigated using exact tandem repeat-variable number tandem repeats (ETR-VNTR) method. The ETR-VNTR method was identified 55 different patterns in 194 isolates, which contained 25 clusters and 30 unique patterns, and the largest cluster had 33 isolates, and discriminatory power of ETRVNTR method was determined 0.9322 in the examined samples. There are strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis located in the northwest of Iran that infect people, and ETRVNTR method can be used as a first-line method to examine the dynamics of tuberculosis transmission.