Global Distribution of Mycobacterium tuberculosis Spoligotypes

摘要

We present a short summary of recent observations on the glo-bal distribution of the major clades of the Mycobacterium tuber-culosis complex, the causative agent of tuberculosis. Thisglobal distribution was defined by data-mining of an interna-tional spoligotyping database, SpolDB3. This database con-tains 11,708 patterns from as many clinical isolates originatingfrom more than 90 countries. The 11,708 spoligotypes wereclustered into 813 shared types. A total of 1,300 orphan pat-terns (clinical isolates showing a unique spoligotype) were alsodetected