Bioinformatic Analysis of MIRU-VNTR Repeats of Mycobacterium Tuberculosis Strains from Lagos, Nigeria.

The analysis of Mycobacterial Interpersed Repetitive Unit-Variable Number of Tandem Repeat (MIRU-VNTR) discriminates against the species of M. tuberculosis involved in the transmission of the disease. The reference method is the manual method. Our study involved developing a bioinformatics method of interpreting MIRU-VNTR and comparing it to the manual method. For this we used two softwares, namely imagej and Microsoft Excel. Imagej was used to determine the migration distance of the bands and for the measure of size in a base pair. The number of repetitions of 18 markers used was analyzed with Excel macro. The results obtained were: 27% of the results exactly consistent, 16% of outliers generated by the macro and 57% of the results not matching.