A precision overview of genomic resistance screening in Ecuadorian isolates of Mycobacterium tuberculosis using web-based bioinformatics tools.

Introduction: Tuberculosis (TB) is among the deadliest diseases worldwide, and its impact is mainly due to the continuous emergence of resistant isolates during treatment due to the laborious process of resistance diagnosis, nonadherence to treatment and circulation of previously resistant isolates of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. In this study, we evaluated the performance and functionalities of web-based tools, including Mykrobe, TB-profiler, PhyResSE, KvarQ, and SAM-TB, for detecting resistance in 88 Ecuadorian isolates of Mycobacterium tuberculosis drug susceptibility tested previously. Statistical analysis was used to determine the correlation between genomic and phenotypic analysis.

Population structure and genetic diversity of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in Ecuador.

Tuberculosis (TB) is a significant public health problem in Ecuador with an incidence of 43 per 100,000 inhabitants and an estimated multidrug-resistant-TB prevalence in all TB cases of 9%. Genotyping of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTBC) is important to understand regional transmission dynamics. This study aims to describe the main MTBC lineages and sublineages circulating in the country.

Country-wide rapid screening for the Beijing sublineage in Ecuador using a single-nucleotide polymorphism-polymerase chain reaction method.

Background: Strains of the Beijing sublineage of Mycobacterium tuberculosis have caused large outbreaks of tuberculosis, often involving multidrug resistance strains and this genetically highly conserved family of strains predominates in some geographic areas. For most of the countries of Latin America, no country-wide studies about the prevalence of the Beijing lineage are available.

Methods: In this study, we determine the prevalence of the Beijing sublineage in Ecuador, using a large nation-wide sample of 991 isolates from the years 2014-2016 and with the strains, in case-related-proportional representation, emerging from most of the provinces of the country.

Prevalence, Drug Resistance, and Genotypic Diversity of the Beijing Family in Ecuador.

The Beijing family, the most successful lineage, is considered hypervirulent, associated with clustering and has a strong association with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. The Beijing strains have spread worldwide and also to Latin America. Genotyping of a countrywide collection of 380 strains from Ecuador, with 24-loci mycobacterial interspersed repetitive units-variable number tandem repeats (MIRU-VNTR), revealed only six Beijing strains, but four of these were MDR-TB.