Özet:
Althought improvements in diagnosis, treatment and living condition, tuberculosis has still continued to be one of the most important infectious diseases. According to World Health Organisation (WHO), Turkey with an insidence of 26/100.000 is among the countries having moderate tuberculosis incidence. In order to determine genotypic characteristics of Turkish isolates, a total of 450 M. tuberculosis strains collected from Malatya, Marmara, Mediterranean and Aegean Regions in a period of 6 years (2000-2005) were typed by IS6110 RFLP and spoligotyping. IS6110 RFLP yielded 304 different profiles including 57 cluster having 203 strains (45.1%), 175 unique (38.9%), and 72 (16%) similar profiles. Clusters included 2-36 strains. The rate of low copy number strains was established as 28.6%. A total of 113 spoligotyping patterns were observed. Forty-seven spoligotyping-defined clusters totaling 384 patients (85.3%) and 66 (14.7%) unique patterns were found. After comparison with the SpolDB4 database, a total of 49 (10.9%) orphan strains were determined. The major shared-types (STs) encountered in the present study were ST 41 with 87 strains (19.3%), ST53 with 85 strains (18.8%), ST 47 with 20 strains (4.4%), ST 50 with 18 strains (4%), ST 284 with 18 strains (4%), and ST 196 with 10 strains (2.2%). ill-defined T superfamily, Latin-America & Mediterranean (LAM), and Haarlem are the frequently observed three major clades. Beijing genotype which is related to multidrug resistance was detected as 0.9%. By the using of both typing methods, 68 cluster having 219 strains (48.7%) and 231 unique profiles were obtained. Thirty-nine of the 72 strains with similar RFLP profiles and 73 of the 96 strains having low copy number of IS6110 were defined as cluster by spoligotyping. There was no a major genotype which was specific for regions. Also there was no difference among the clustering rates of the regions. The high clustering and drug resistant rates indicate that control and prevention measurements are ineffective in this region. Key Words: Spoligotyping, M. tuberculosis, IS6110 RFLP, Molecular epidemiology, MDR.