BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Infectious Diseases: Epidemiology and Prevention
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1657825
This article is part of the Research TopicWorld TB Day 2025: Yes! We Can End TB: Commit, Invest, DeliverView all 5 articles
Population structure and antibiotic resistance profiles of Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates from Ibadan, Nigeria (2019-2020): a pilot study to improve affordable molecular diagnostic tools
Provisionally accepted
Elsy Carvajal1Samantha Escandon1Pelumi Adewole2Bernardo Castro Rodriguez1Angel Sebastian Rodriguez Pazmiño1Solon Alberto Orlando3Alexandra Narvaez4Samuel Alabi2
Miguel Angel Garcia Bereguiain5*- 1Universidad de Las Americas, Quito, Ecuador
- 2University College Hospital Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria
- 3Instituto Nacional de Investigacion en Salud Publica - Quito, Quito, Ecuador
- 4Universidad de Especialidades Espiritu Santo, Samborondon, Ecuador
- 5University of the Americas, Quito, Ecuador
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Nigeria ranks as the sixth country globally and the first in Africa with the highest burden of tuberculosis (TB) infection. The emergence and spread of multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) strains have posed significant challenges to effective disease management in the country. In this study, 55 Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) isolates from patients attending a hospital in Ibadan city (Nigeria) were selected. MTB isolates were analyzed using PCR amplification of gene fragments associated with antibiotic resistance, followed by Sanger sequencing and bioinformatics analysis. Additionally, MIRU-VNTR genotyping was performed to address population structure and transmission dynamics. Results show an association between mutations in the rpoB, inhA and gyrA genes and phenotypic resistance to rifampicin, isoniazide and fluoroquinolones in a significant percentage of the MTB isolates. However, an extended panel of genes would enable a better characterization of antibiotic resistance. The population structure of MTB in Ibadan, as determined by using MIRU-VNTR, revealed that 96.1% of the strains belong to lineage 4, distributed in the following sublineages: Uganda I (47.1%), LAM (21.6%), Cameroon (17.6%), and Ghana (9.8%). Meanwhile, 3.9% of the strains correspond to lineage 5 (L5), West African-1 sub-lineage. The population structure was very heterogeneous and no active transmission clusters were detected. Overall, this pilot study demonstrated the utility of cost-effective molecular tools in enhancing TB surveillance and control programs in settings where whole-genome sequencing (WGS) is still an economical challenge.
Keywords: Nigeria, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, antibiotic resistance, MIRU-VNTR, sublineages
Received: 01 Jul 2025; Accepted: 10 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Carvajal, Escandon, Adewole, Castro Rodriguez, Rodriguez Pazmiño, Orlando, Narvaez, Alabi and Garcia Bereguiain. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Miguel Angel Garcia Bereguiain, magbereguiain@gmail.com
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