Molecular epidemiology of multi drug resistance tuberculosis isolates from pulmonary tuberculosis cases from Lucknow, India

Background: Drug resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB) is a man made problem and major public health concern issue in India as well in abroad. Molecular epidemiology has become an important tool for TB transmission surveillance and it also allows to discriminate between reinfections and relapses as well as to detect cross- contamination of specimens in the laboratory. Objective: We conducted a molecular epidemiologic analysis of 82 Multi drug resistance Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates from patients presenting pulmonary tuberculosis in Lucknow, India. Method: We have isolated and cultured mycobacterium on Lowenstein-Jensen medium from sputum samples, collected from patients attending OPD at CSM Medical University, UP. Those isolates which were characterized to be M. tuberculosis complex by morphological, biochemical and molecular techniques were tested for their resistance to the four first –line drugs Isoniazid, Rifampicin, Ethambutol and Streptomycin by 1% proportion method on LJ medium. We also performed DR, VNTR typing, and IS6110 on 82 MDR-TB isolates. Results: The polymorphic data showed significant level of dissimilarities among all isolates. Out of 82 patients, a number of VNTR9s were detected without showing any standard profile. On comparing the DR and VNTR data, we could only demonstrate that polymorphism do occur among clinical isolates of MDR-TB. Conclusion: Our results suggest that VNTR and DR typing is practically useful for application to molecular epidemiological of M. tuberculosis.