Evaluation of spoligotyping in a study of the transmission of Mycobacterium tuberculosis

Spoligotyping (fur spacer oligotyping) is an easy economical, and rapid way of typing Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex strains with the DR spacer markers (J. Kamerbeek et al., J. Clin. Microbiol. 35:907-914, 1997; D, van Soolingen et al., 33:3234-3248, 1995), The stability of the markers was demonstrated hy showing that ail the Mycobacterium bovis BCG strains tested gave the same spoligotyping pattern, None of the 4Z atypical mycobacterial strains tested gave a spoligotyping signal, indicating the specificity of the technique for M, tuberculosis complex. The utility of the spoligotyping method was demonstrated be analyzing BOG isolates uf M. tuberculosis obtained over 1 year in three Paris hospitals. The results obtained by this; technique were compared to those obtained by Torrea ct al, (G. Torrea et al., J, Clin, Microbiol. 34:1043-1049), 1996) by IS6110-based restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) analysis, Strains from patients with epidemiological relationships that were in the same IS6110-RFLP cluster were also in the same spoligotyping group, Spoligotyping was more discriminative than RFLP analysis for strains Kith one or two copies of IS6110, RFLP analysis did not discriminate between the nine strains with one or two IS6110 bands with no known epidemiological relation, whereas spoligotyping distinguished between eight different types, IS6110-RFLP analysis split some of the spoligotyping clusters, particularly when the IS6110 copy number was high, Therefore, we propose a strategy for typing M. tuberculosis strains in which both markers are user).