A first insight on the population structure of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex as studied by spoligotyping and MIRU-VNTRs in Bogotá, Colombia.

With an incidence of 25.6/100,000 in 2008, tuberculosis (TB) remains an important public health problem in Colombia. In this study, a total of 152 Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex strains isolated in Bogotá, Colombia between years 1995 and 2007 were genotyped by spoligotyping and 12-loci MIRU-VNTRs. The various spoligotyping-based genotypic lineages in our sample were: Latin American & Mediterranean (LAM) n=75, 49.34%; Haarlem, n=38, 25.0%; ill-defined T group, n=21, 13.82%; S family, n=5, 3.29%; X clade, n=2, 1.32%; Beijing, n=1, 0.65%, while strains with unknown signatures (n=10) represented 6.58% of isolates. Using spoligotyping as a first molecular marker and MIRU-VNTRs as second marker, we obtained 102 single patterns and 14 clustered patterns (n=52 strains from 49 patients, 2-8 strains per cluster). The MIRU-VNTRs patterns corresponded to 50 MITs for 109 strains and 43 orphan patterns. The most frequent patterns were MIT190 (n=12), MIT45 (n=10), and MIT25 (n=9). The Hunter & Gaston discriminatory index (HGDI) of both methodologies used together showed a value of 0.992. In our setting, the HGDI of five loci subset (MIRU10, 16, 23, 26 and 40) contributed most to the discriminatory power of 12-loci format used (HGDI=0.977). The lineage distribution of M. tuberculosis showed that more than 3/4 of strains in Bogotá are commonly found in Latin America, Caribbean, and Europe. This observation might reflect the shared post-Columbus history of Colombia and its Latin-American neighbors as well as strains brought in by 20th century immigrants from Europe. We also demonstrate the usefulness of MIRU-VNTR to detect suspected links among patients and polyclonal infections.