Current Methods in the Molecular Typing of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Other Mycobacteria

Table 2

Discriminatory power of selected typing methods for Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex and nontuberculous mycobacteria and level of genetic polymorphism they reveal.

Typing method	MTBC	NTM
RFLP	High	Insufficient data
RAPD	Medium	High
PFGE	Medium	High
AFLP	High	Insufficient data
Spoligotyping	Low/diverse	None
MIRU-VNTR typing	High/diverse	Insufficient data

MTBC: Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex; NTM: nontuberculous mycobacteria; RFLP: restriction fragment length polymorphism; RAPD: random amplified polymorphic DNA; PFGE: pulsed-field gel electrophoresis; AFLP: amplified fragment length polymorphism; MIRU-VNTR: mycobacterial interspersed repetitive unit-variable number of tandem repeats.