Objectives: To assess the diversity of Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains in Cotonou, Benin, and the risk factors associated with clustering.
Methods: We analysed one sputum sample from 194 consecutive new pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) cases using two genotyping methods: spoligotyping and the 12 loci mycobacterial interspersed repetitive unit-variable number of tandem repeats (MIRU-VNTR). The data obtained were compared to the SpolDB4.0 database.
Results: We have found that spoligotype 61, highly predominant in West Africa, was also the most prevalent strain in Cotonou. We observed that the Beijing family represented 10.3% of strains and was associated with resistance to streptomycin. We also confirmed that combining spoligotyping and MIRU-VNTR provided a higher discriminatory power than the two techniques used individually.
Conclusion: Spoligotype 61 and Beijing genotype are the most prevalent genotypes of M. tuberculosis in Cotonou.