ISSN: 0973-7510
E-ISSN: 2581-690X
Pneumoconiosis and pulmonary tuberculosis seriously affect the health of coal miners. Tuberculosis complicating silicosis is often called silicotuberculosis. The purpose of this research is to explore whether silicotuberculosis isolates have independent clustering characteristics or not. We isolated 42 strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis from tuberculosis patients in a certain mining area, among which 16 were silicotuberculosis strains and 26 were pulmonary tuberculosis strains. The polymorphism typing results of 12 mycobacterial interspersed repetitive-unit-variable-number tandem-repeat (MIRU-VNTR) loci showed that the gene polymorphism of the silicotuberculosis and pulmonary tuberculosis isolates at 26 and 40 MIRU loci was higher. The cluster analysis showed that the isolates had different cluster characteristics, indicating that Mycobacterium tuberculosis which is prevalent in pneumoconiosis patients may have independent clustering characteristics.
Pneumoconiosis, Tuberculosis, Silicotuberculosis, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Coal miner
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