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Updated: Jun 20, 2026

A Microscopic Phenotypic Assay for the Quantification of Intracellular Mycobacteria Adapted for High-throughput/High-content Screening
Published on: January 17, 2014
[Establishment and evaluation of nitrate reductase combined with mycobacteriophage assay]
Ai-Ying Xing1, Zhong-Quan Liu, Hong-Yan Jia
1Laboratory of Molecular Biology for Tuberculosis, Beijing Tuberculosis and Thoracic Tumor Research Institute, Beijing 101149, China.
Objective:
To establish a rapid, inexpensive, and simple drug susceptibility test (DST) for Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tb) and evaluate its feasibility.
Method:
We used nitrate reductase combined with mycobacteriophage assay (PhaB-NRA) to test 49 clinical M. tb isolates of, and the results were compared with those of PhaB-NRA and traditional absolute concentration method.
Results:
The sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of PhaB-NRA for rifampicin were 89.1%, 91.67%, and 89.8%; on the contrary, those of isonicotinyl hydrazide were 86.21%, 90.0%, and 87.8%, respectively. The coincidence between PhaB-NRA and traditional assay were 0.746 for rifampicin and 0.750 for isonicotinyl hydrazide.
Conclusions:
PhaB-NRA is an inexpensive, rapid, and simple DST method. It is a promising rapid screening technique for DST of M. tb.

