Poulet S, Cole S T
Unité de Génétique Moléculaire Bactérienne, Institut Pasteur, France.
Arch Microbiol. 1995 Feb;163(2):79-86. doi: 10.1007/BF00381780.
In tuberculosis, it is often important to establish the source of infection and to determine whether disease is due to a new strain of Mycobacterium tuberculosis or to relapse. To cope with the resurgence of tuberculosis and atypical mycobacterioses in AIDS patients, on the one hand, and to overcome the limitations of classical bacteriological procedures on the other, the development of rapid, sensitive, and reliable diagnostic and epidemiologic tools is highly desirable. Molecular typing methods are often based on repeated genes such as those for rRNA. Ribotyping is of limited use with pathogenic mycobacteria, as the slow-growers possess a single rRNA operon, while the fast-growers have two. This problem has been overcome by the discovery and study of repeated DNA elements in mycobacterial genomes, as these provide an alternative pathway for diagnostic and epidemiological investigations.
在结核病中，确定感染源以及判断疾病是由新型结核分枝杆菌菌株引起还是复发往往很重要。一方面，为应对艾滋病患者中结核病和非典型分枝杆菌病的再度流行，另一方面，为克服传统细菌学检测方法的局限性，迫切需要开发快速、灵敏且可靠的诊断和流行病学工具。分子分型方法通常基于重复基因，如rRNA基因。核糖体分型对于致病性分枝杆菌的应用有限，因为生长缓慢的分枝杆菌只有一个rRNA操纵子，而生长快速的分枝杆菌有两个。通过发现和研究分枝杆菌基因组中的重复DNA元件，这一问题已得到解决，因为这些元件为诊断和流行病学调查提供了另一条途径。
