We evaluated the correlation of phenotypic ethambutol (EMB) susceptibility as determined by two drug susceptibility methods with embB mutations in multidrug-resistant (MDR) Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains. The concordance rate for EMB resistance between broth dilution method and sequencing results (83.6%) was significantly higher than between the proportion method and sequencing results (61.7%) (P ؍ 0.004). Of the embB mutants, 75.4% (46/61) possessed a mutation at embB306. Our results demonstrated that ethambutol resistance determined by broth dilution method reveals better correlation with embB mutations than the proportion method in MDR isolates.
The emergence of multidrug-resistant (MDR) tuberculosis (TB), defined as tuberculosis that is resistant to at least isoniazid (INH) and rifampin (RFP), is a serious threat to global tuberculosis control (1). China is considered one of the global hotspots of MDR-TB, with an estimated 110,000 MDR-TB cases each year (2). There is an urgent demand for accurate and rapid drug susceptibility testing (DST) to help develop efficient anti-TB drug regimens for appropriate treatment of individual cases (3).Ethambutol (EMB), one of the key first-line antimicrobial agents for the treatment of tuberculosis (4), plays an important role in the chemotherapy of drug-resistant TB, including MDR-TB (5). EMB inhibits arabinosyl transferases, encoded by the embCAB operon, thereby inhibiting biosynthesis of the cell well components arabinogalactan and lipoarabinomannan (6). Previous studies showed that mutations in the embB gene are mainly observed in clinical EMB-resistant isolates (7,8). Of the various mutations of embB, mutations at codon 306 are the most commonly detected point mutations conferring EMB resistance, which have been suggested as important molecular indicators for rapid detection of EMB-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates (9). In contrast, mutations in emb306 had also been observed among EMB-susceptible M. tuberculosis isolates (9). Previous studies have shown that a lack of consistency in conventional DST results for EMB is an inevitable problem in the tuberculosis laboratories (3, 10). It is therefore meaningful to investigate the concordance between phenotypic and genotypic EMB resistance testing. In this study, we screened for embB mutations among MDR strains isolated in China in order to assess and compare the correlation of phenotypic EMB susceptibilities determined by two DST methods with embB gene mutations among MDR strains.A total of 158 MDR isolates were collected from a national drug resistance survey of China. Drug susceptibility testing for EMB was performed by both the conventional proportion method recommended by World Health Organization and the broth dilution method according to previous reports (11,12). For the proportion method, the concentration of EMB in Lowenstein-Jensen (LJ) medium was 2 g/ml. For the broth dilution method, EMB concentrations were doubling dilutions from 0.125 to 32 g/ml, and the breakpoint MIC for EMB was taken as 5 ...