The paper deals with the development of the optimal strategy for the genotyping of M. tuberculosis strains circulating in Odessa region, taking into consideration relatively high prevalence of Beijing family strains in the region. Spoligotyping has been demonstrated to have low discriminative power (HGDI=0.173) and therefore not suitable for differentiation of strains within Beijing family. Higher sensitivity and discriminative power (HGDI=0.723) has been obtained using multi-locus VNTR typing with 12 MIRU and 3 ETR loci for Beijing strains differentiation. Loci MIRU26, MIRU31, MIRU40, and ETR-A have been found to be highly polymorphic and most discriminative. Other genetic groups of M. tuberculosis isolated have been successfully differentiated using both spoligotyping and VNTR typing with sufficient sensitivity.
