Implementation of a Consensus Set of Hypervariable Mycobacterial Interspersed Repetitive-Unit-Variable-Number Tandem-Repeat Loci in Mycobacterium tuberculosis Molecular Epidemiology.

This study shows that the addition of a consensus 4-locus set of hypervariable mycobacterial interspersed repetitive-unit-variable-number tandem repeat (MIRU-VNTR) loci to the spoligotyping-24-locus MIRU-VNTR typing strategy is a well-standardized approach that can contribute to an improvement of the true cluster definition while retaining high typeability in non-Beijing strains.