Genotyping of clinical Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates based on eight loci of MIRU-VNTR.

: Genotyping that differentiates between strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis based on variations in the genome of the organism is a useful tool for molecular epidemiological studies of tuberculosis. In the present study, we identified a combination of five mycobacterial interspersed repetitive unit (MIRU) loci and three variable numbers of tandem repeats (VNTR) loci of M. tuberculosis that showed a discriminatory power comparable to that of the 15 to 24 loci-based typing proposed for international standardisation in analysing 210 paediatric isolates obtained from Chongqing, China.