대구-경북지역에서 분리된 결핵균주의 IS6110-Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism 분석

Tuberculosis is one of the world's major health problems that affects ten million people and is responsible for about three million deaths each year. It is important to differentiate Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains for the molecular epidemiological study of tuberculosis. Until now, IS6110 (also known as IS986) is the most useful DNA for this purpose since it usually has more copies than other repetitive elements in genomes of M. tuberculosis isolates. Several authors reported IS6110-RFLP patterns of Korean M. tuberculosis strains. However, those papers contained IS6110-RFLP patterns of only limited number of M. tuberculosis isolates for a certain area in Korea. As a first step to obtain nationwide IS6110-restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) information of Korean M. tuberculosis isolates, we performed IS6110-RFLP analysis using 97 M. tuberculosis isolates from Taegu-Kyungpook (TK) region and 28 foreign strains. The polymorphism of TK isolates was higher and more complicated than not only 28 foreign strains tested but also other Korean strains previously reported. We also found many unique bands in TK isolates. We suggest that extensive regional study with many M. tuberculosis isolates should be performed at regional centers for more informative IS6110-RFLP database in Korea.