A study designed to discover if there is evidence for transmission between patients from a cohort of paediatric Cystic Fibrosis patients

Demographic and patient location data were used to uncover epidemiological links between patients with genetically-related strains of M. abscessus that had been previously typed by Variable Number Tandem Repeat (VNTR) profiling. Whole genome sequencing was applied to 27 M. abscessus isolates from the 20 patients in this cohort to provide definitive data on the genetic relatedness of strains.