The genomes of 28 bacterial strains, including mycobacterial species Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Mycobacterium bovis, were analyzed for the presence of a special class of microsatellite, that of trinucleotide repeat sequences (TRS). Results of a search of all 10 possible TRS motifs (i.e., CCT, CGG, CTG, GAA, GAT, GTA, GTC, GTG, GTT, and TAT) with five or more repeating units showed that (CGG) 5 DNA fingerprinting of the inserted IS6110 element specific for the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex is a powerful epidemiological tool for visualizing DNA restriction fragment length polymorphisms (RFLP) of M. tuberculosis (26). The major limitation of IS6110-based RFLP typing is the difficulty of discriminating genetic polymorphisms of M. tuberculosis isolates with only a few copies of the element. In addition, there are two reports (1, 29) that described IS6110-based RFLP as unstable, although other studies have confirmed a high degree of stability (5, 15). Yeh and colleagues (29) indicated that genotypes with IS6110 were relatively unstable because they changed rapidly compared with those based on another marker. Alito et al. (1) reported that a multidrugresistant outbreak strain changed rapidly, according to IS6110 RFLP, over a period of a few years.
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