Whole Genome Sequence Analysis of Mycobacterium tuberculosis Strains from Patients in Campania Region
Tuberculosis (TB) is one of the deadliest infectious disorders in the world. To effectively TB manage, an essential step is to gain insight into the lineage of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) strains and the distribution of drug resistance. Although the Campania region is declared a cluster area for the infection, to contribute to the effort to understand TB evolution and transmission, still poorly known, we have generated a dataset of 159 genomes of MTB strains, from Campania region collected during 2018-2021, obtained from the analysis of whole genome sequence data. The results show that the most frequent MTB lineage is the 4 according for 129 strains (81.11%). Regarding drug resistance, 139 strains (87.4%) were classified as multi susceptible, while the remaining 20 (12.58%) showed drug resistance. Among the drug-resistance strains, 8 were isoniazid-resistant MTB (HR-MTB), 7 were resistant only to one antibiotic (3 were resistant only to ethambutol and 3 isolate to streptomycin while one isolate showed resistance to fluoroquinolones), 4 multidrug-resistant MTB, while only one was classified as pre-extensively drug-resistant MTB (pre-XDR). This dataset expands the existing available knowledge on drug resistance and evolution of MTB, contributing to further TB-related genomics studies to improve the management of TB infection.