A hospital-based genomic analysis reveals predominance of ST215 Mycobacterium tuberculosis with low drug resistance.

Authors

Mingxuan Yang, Xingxu Zhao, Qing Wang, Guonian Dai, Yan Wang, Yanhong Li, Hanwei Ma

Published in

Frontiers in microbiology. Volume 17. Pages 1871161. Epub Jul 01, 2026.

Abstract

Tuberculosis (TB) remains a major public health challenge in Northwest China. Genomic approaches provide valuable tools for characterizing the population structure, transmission patterns, and drug-resistance profiles of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB), yet hospital-based genomic data from this region remain limited.
This single-center, hospital-based study analyzed 26 clinical MTB isolates collected from a tertiary hospital in Northwest China. Whole-genome sequencing (WGS), drug susceptibility testing (DST), phylogenetic analysis, and a murine infection model were used to investigate lineage distribution, genetic relatedness, drug-resistance characteristics, and pathogenicity.
The Beijing lineage, represented by spoligotype SIT1, accounted for 73.08% of the isolates, and 80.77% belonged to sequence type ST215. Phylogenetic analysis identified a closely related cluster of ST215 isolates with low pairwise SNP distances, suggesting potential recent transmission within the studied cohort. No multidrug-resistant (MDR) or extensively drug-resistant (XDR) isolates were detected, and resistance was limited to sporadic monoresistance. All isolates carried the aac(2')-Ic and erm(37) genes, although these genes were not consistently associated with phenotypic resistance. In an intravenous mouse infection model, histopathological changes induced by a representative ST215 isolate were broadly comparable to those caused by the reference strain H37Rv.
This hospital-based genomic investigation identified a predominant ST215 MTB population with generally low levels of drug resistance in the studied cohort. These findings provide preliminary genomic and phenotypic evidence for MTB isolates in this specific clinical setting and highlight the need for larger, multicenter studies to further evaluate transmission patterns and drug-resistance dynamics in Northwest China.

PMID:
42459881
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 16 Jul 2026.

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