Tuberculose e o estudo molecular da sua epidemiologia

• Autor(a) principal: Pandolfi, J. R. [UNESP]
• Data de Publicação: 2007
• Outros Autores: Malaspina, A. C. [UNESP], Santos, A. C B [UNESP], Suffys, P. N., Oellemann, M. A C, Valentini, Sandro Roberto [UNESP], Leite, Clarice Queico Fujimura [UNESP]
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UNESP
• Texto Completo: http://serv-bib.fcfar.unesp.br/seer/index.php/Cien_Farm/article/view/236; http://hdl.handle.net/11449/70129
• topic: Genotyping; Mycobacterium tuberculosis; Tuberculosis, molecular epidemiology; bacterial DNA; bacterial genome; bacterial strain; bacterium isolate; disease transmission; DNA sequence; epidemic; gene locus; genetic recombination; genotype; human; hybridization; molecular epidemiology; molecular typing; nonhuman; restriction fragment length polymorphism; review; tuberculosis; variable number of tandem repeat

Systems that can distinguish epidemiologically-related Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains from unrelated ones are extremely valuable. Molecular biology techniques have allowed a great deal of information to be acquired about the infectious disease tuberculosis (TB) that was very hard or impossible to obtain by conventional epidemiology. A typing method based on bacterial DNA genome differences, known as RFLP (restriction fragment length polymorphism), is widely used to discriminate strains in the epidemiologic study of TB. However, RFLP is laborious and there is a tendency to replace it by other methods. Thus, other DNA sequences have been employed as epidemiological markers, as in Spoligotyping, a fast technique based on PCR followed by differential hybridization of amplified products. The polymorphism observed among different isolates is probably the product of strain-dependent recombination. MIRU (mycobacterial interspersed repetitive unit) typing is a reproducible and fast assay, involving the generation of genotypes based on the study of 12 loci containing VNTRs (variable-number tandem repeats) in strains of the M. tuberculosis complex. It compares strains from different geographic areas and allows the movement of individual lineages to be tracked, as in RFLP. This approach enables a greater number of isolates to be analyzed, leading to the identification of a larger number of foci of transmission within the population and thus to improved ways of slowing the progress of the disease.