Rapid Triage of Smear-Positive Tuberculosis Suspects with a Commercial DNA Microarray: A Real-World Experience from 1100 Sputum Specimens.

Authors

Chunming Luo, Guimin Zou, Shuting Dai, Biyi Su, Jialou Zhu, Kun Li

Published in

Infection and drug resistance. Volume 19. Pages 623608. Epub Aug 11, 2026.

Abstract

To evaluate the real-world utility of a commercial DNA microarray assay for early triage of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC) in smear-positive sputum specimens.
This retrospective single-center study analyzed 1100 smear-positive sputum specimens submitted to Guangzhou Chest Hospital between January 2019 and December 2023. All specimens were processed in parallel using MGIT960 liquid culture and DNA microarray testing. For a subset of MGIT960 culture-positive specimens, MPT64 antigen testing was performed as per routine clinical practice for species identification. The study initially described the distribution of species identification results by microarray. Subsequently, in a subset of specimens with both microarray and MPT64 results (n=68), the agreement between the two assays in MTBC identification was evaluated using MPT64 as the reference standard.
The DNA microarray provided species-level identification of mycobacteria in the smear-positive specimens, with MTBC detected in 41.4% (455/1100) of cases. In the comparative analysis with MPT64 results, the microarray demonstrated 100% sensitivity (95% CI: 83.2-100.0), 97.9% specificity (95% CI: 88.7-99.9), and a Cohen's kappa coefficient of 0.97 for MTBC identification.
In a real-world setting, the DNA microarray assay demonstrates high reliability for MTBC identification while simultaneously providing species-level information for non-tuberculous mycobacteria (NTM). This capability allows the microarray assay to serve as an effective triage tool for smear-positive sputum specimens, offering species-level differentiation between tuberculosis and NTM infections, with the potential to reduce reliance on additional phenotypic confirmation pending further validation.

PMID:
42604358
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 16 Aug 2026.

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