The use of high performance liquid chromatography to speciate and characterize the epidemiology of mycobacteria

Objective: We evaluated high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) for species identification of mycobacteria from various clinical specimens in an urban hospital in South Korea between January 2005 and December 2009. Methods: In the study period 24,774 cultures were completed, yielding the 3215 clinical isolates cultivated for mycobacteria and positive cultures that had mycolic acid investigated by HPLC. For species identification, we compared HPLC patterns of clinical isolates with 33 standard Mycobacterium species. Results: There were 3 different HPLC groups with single, double, and triple-cluster patterns representing 9, 20, and 4 mycobacterial species, respectively. Species identification rates of HPLC for Mycobacterium tuberculosis and nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) were found to be 100% and 95.6%, respectively. Among mycobacterial isolates, 12.1% were NTM-positive. There were 20 different NTM species with frequencies of 0.3%~15.5%. Conclusion: The HPLC method was highly sensitive identifying NTM isolated from clinical specimens.