Mycobacterium kansasii is one of the most common cause of pulmonary diseases due to nontuberculous mycobacteria. We investigated the changing in the number of isolation of M. kansasii and the clinical characteristics of M. kansasii pulmonary disease in Korea. Through searching the database of the Korean Institute of Tuberculosis, we identified the cases of isolated M. kansasii from 1992 to 2002. The number of M. kansasii isolation had increased from once in 1992 to 62 in 2002. Fifteen patients with M. kansasii pulmonary disease were identified during the period January 1997 to December 2002. Twelve patients (80%) were male and fourteen (93%) were from highly industrialized areas. The most common symptom was a cough. Seven patients (47%) had a cavitary lesion and right upper lobe was most commonly involved. Patients responded well to isoniazid and rifampicin based regimens both bacteriologically and radiographically. In conclusion, M. kansasii isolation has increased, especially in highly industrialized areas, as well as other nontuberculous mycobacteria in Korea.

Strain KIT 00200-70066-1 T was isolated from the sputum of a patient with pulmonary disease. Cells of the strain were Gram-variable, facultatively anaerobic, motile, spore-forming rods and formed colourless to white colonies on tryptic soy agar at 30 6C and pH 7. The pathogenicity of the strain is not known. The strain contained meso-diaminopimelic acid as the diagnostic diamino acid in the cell-wall peptidoglycan, MK-7 as the predominant menaquinone, anteiso-C 15 : 0 , iso-C 16 : 0 and C 16 : 0 as the major fatty acids and diphosphatidylglycerol, phosphatidylglycerol, phosphatidylethanolamine and several unknown lipids in the polar lipid profile. Phylogenetic analysis based on 16S rRNA gene sequences showed that the isolate belongs to the genus Paenibacillus, sharing the highest levels of sequence similarity with Paenibacillus nanensis MX2-3 T , Paenibacillus agaridevorans DSM 1355 T and Paenibacillus alkaliterrae KSL-134 T (95.4, 95.2 and 94.8 %, respectively), and that it occupied a distinct position within this genus. Combined phylogenetic and phenotypic data supported the conclusion that strain KIT 00200-70066-1 T represents a novel species of the genus Paenibacillus, for which the name Paenibacillus sputi sp. nov. is proposed; the type strain is KIT 00200-70066-1 T (5KCTC 13252 T 5DSM 22699 T ).The genus Paenibacillus (type species, Paenibacillus polymyxa) was erected by Ash et al. (1993) to accommodate the so-called rRNA group 3 bacilli, comprising 11 Bacillus species, on the basis of comparative 16S rRNA gene sequence analysis. Since then, eight more Bacillus species and one Clostridium species have been transferred to the genus, and a large number of novel species have been described; consequently, the genus contains 102 recognized species at the time of writing (Euzéby, 2009). Members of the genus Paenibacillus have been isolated from a wide variety of sources including soil, sediment, humus, the plant rhizosphere and phyllosphere, water, food, fodder, faeces, plant materials and diseased insect larvae (Daane et al., 2002). Some species have been reported from human biological samples, e.g. Paenibacillus turicensis and Paenibacillus provencensis from cerebrospinal fluid samples, Paenibacillus massiliensis, Paenibacillus sanguinis, Paenibacillus timonensis and Paenibacillus konsidensis from blood cultures and Paenibacillus urinalis from a urine sample, but they have been considered to be contaminants rather than pathogens (Bosshard et al., 2002;Roux & Raoult, 2004; Ko et al., 2008;Roux et al., 2008). Meanwhile, it has been reported that some pathogenic strains considered to belong to Paenibacills alvei and Paenibacillus macerans were isolated from patients with brain abscesses, catheter-associated infections, endophthalmitis, meningitis, prosthetic hip infections and wound infections (Antonello & Weinstein, 1989;Reboli et al., 1989;Bert et al., 1995;Barrero et al., 1996). However, they were classified based only on conventional phenotypic characterization, so their taxonomic affiliation remains uncert...

Background: Mycobacterial Interspersed Repetitive Units (MIRUs) that are located mainly in intergenic regions dispersed throughout the Mycobacterium tuberculosis genome. The selected MIRU loci, which were composed of a 12-locus set, demonstrated a high power for discrimination of Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates collected from Kangwon province of Korea. To evaluate its ability to discriminate the M. tuberculosis strains, 45 clinical isolates were genotyped using the methods IS6110 RFLP and MIRU. Methods: All the samples were collected during the period from January 2007 to December 2007 from TB patients, who were residents and registered to a public health center of Kangwon Province in Korea. A total of 45 DNAs were extracted from clinical isolated mycobacterial strains and genotyped using IS6110 RFLP, the MIRU method.

A total of 422 Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates from eight countries were subjected to IS 6110 and IS 1081 DNA fingerprinting by means of restriction fragment analysis to characterize M. tuberculosis strains from each country. Chinese, Mongolian, Hong Kong, Filipino, and Korean isolates had comparatively more copies of IS 6110 (proportion with eight or more copies; 95% ± 5%), while Thai, Malaysian, and Vietnamese isolates had fewer copies (proportion with eight or more copies, 60% ± 4%). We found a number of novel IS 1081 types in this study. One IS 1081 type was present in 56% of Filipino isolates, had a specific 6.6-kb Pvu II fragment in its IS 6110 DNA fingerprint, and was termed the “Filipino family.” The IS 1081 types of Thai isolates had interposing characteristics between the characteristics of northeastern Asian and southeastern Asian IS 1081 types. A 1.3-kb single-copy IS 6110 fragment was found only in Vietnamese M. tuberculosis isolates. Although M. tuberculosis isolates from each country had comparatively similar characteristics depending on the classification factor, each country's isolates showed characteristic DNA fingerprints and differed slightly from the isolates from the other countries in either the mode number of IS 6110 copies or the distribution of IS 1081 types.

Aims: To evaluate sensitivity and specificity of the newly developed PaxView TB/NTM MPCR-ULFA Kit.  Study Design: Compared with the licensed AdvanSure TB/NTM real-time PCR. Place and Duration of Study: SCL and PaxGenBio in Gyeonggi-do, Korea, between August 2018 and May 2019. Methodology: In this study, 350 specimens including sputum, bronchial washing, body fluid, tissue, urine, and cerebrospinal fluid were examined to evaluate the performance of the PaxView TB/NTM MPCR-ULFA Kit compared to results of the currently licensed AdvanSure TB/NTM real-time PCR (LG Chem, Korea). Results: Compared to the AdvanSure TB/NTM real-time PCR, the PaxView TB/NTM MPCR-ULFA Kit test was found to possess a 100% sensitivity. In other words, all 140 MTB and 61 non-tuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) specimens that tested positive with the AdvanSure TB/NTM real-time PCR also tested positive with the PaxView TB/NTM MPCR-ULFA Kit. However, the specificity of the later kit found to be 97.9% (146/149; 95% CI 95.6–100.0), meaning that out of 149 MTB/NTM specimens that tested negative with the AdvanSure TB/NTM real-time PCR, 146 were identified as MTB/NTM-negative according to the PaxView TB/NTM MPCR-ULFA Kit. Nonetheless, the overall agreement between the two diagnostic tools was 99.1% (347/350; 95% CI 98.1– 100.0) and the kappa value was 0.982 (350; 95% CI 0.968 – 0.995), meaning that the two diagnostic tools rendered almost identical results. Conclusion: The PaxView TB/NTM MPCR-ULFA Kit could be useful to identify MTB and NTM in resource-limited countries, as this procedure is far more cost-effective than real-time PCR and convenient than conventional gel electrophoresis approaches.