Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 10, 2026
Demonstrating a Multi-drug Resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis Amplification Microarray
Published on: April 25, 2014
Using polymerase chain reaction with primers based on the plcB-plcC intergenic region to detect Mycobacterium
Hermides Pinto1, Claudia Giuliano Bica, Moisés Palaci
1Amplicon, Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil.
Objective:
To develop a system for the molecular diagnosis of tuberculosis by polymerase chain reaction (PCR), constructing primers based on the difference in gene organization of the intergenic region of phospholipase C (plcB-plcC region), which differentiates Mycobacterium tuberculosis from other mycobacteria.
Methods:
A PCR product of the expected size (432 bp) was obtained from M. tuberculosis and M. africanum only. A total of 33 mycobacterial isolates and 273 clinical samples from patients suspected of having tuberculosis were examined. These were used in the comparative study of the PCR technique versus culture.
Results:
For PCR versus culture, the data showed 93.8% accuracy (p < 0.0001), 93.1% sensitivity (CI: 88.7-96.0), and 96.4% specificity (CI: 96.1-99.4). The Kappa value (0.82) shows that there was a near-perfect concordance between the two tests.
Conclusion:
The use of the plcB-plcC region in PCR amplification was found to be an important and reliable tool for the specific diagnosis of tuberculosis in the samples analyzed.
