• M Cristina Gutierrez, Niyaz Ahmed, Eve Willery, Sujatha Narayanan, Seyed E Hasnain, Devendra S Chauhan, Vishwa M Katoch, Véronique Vincent, Camille Locht, and Philip Supply.
• Institut Pasteur, Paris, France.
• Emerging Infect. Dis. 2006 Sep 1; 12 (9): 1367-74.

AbstractAlthough India has the highest prevalence of tuberculosis (TB) worldwide, the genetic diversity of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in India is largely unknown. A collection of 91 isolates originating from 12 different regions spread across the country were analyzed by genotyping using 21 loci with variable-number tandem repeats (VNTRs), by spoligotyping, by principal genetic grouping (PGG), and by deletion analysis of M. tuberculosis-specific deletion region 1. The isolates showed highly diverse VNTR genotypes. Nevertheless, highly congruent groupings identified by using the 4 independent sets of markers permitted a clear definition of 3 prevalent PGG1 lineages, which corresponded to the "ancestral" East African-Indian, the Delhi, and the Beijing/W genogroups. A few isolates from PGG2 lineages and a single representative of the presumably most recent PGG3 were identified. These observations suggest a predominance of ancestral M. tuberculosis genotypes in the Indian subcontinent, which supports the hypothesis that India is an ancient endemic focus of TB.

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