Mycobacterial heterogeneity of concurent isolates from sputum and blood of HIV-infected TB patients from Uganda. Herogeneity of concurent sputum and blood M. tuberculosis

In the context of advanced immunosuppression, M. tuberculosis is known to cause detectable mycobacteremia. However, little is known about the intra-patient mycobacterial diversity and direction of seeding between the sputum and blood compartments. From a diagnostic study of HIV-infected TB patients, 51 pairs of concurrent blood and sputum M. tuberculosis isolates were available. We applied both spoligotyping and MIRU-VNTR 24 loci for genotyping as well as identifying the proportion of infections with multiple strains, followed by whole genome sequencing and phylogenetic analysis for pairs with identical genotypes in different compartments