First Indonesian report of WGS-based MTBC L3 discovery

Abstract

Abstract Objective Recent spoligotyping results in the island nation of Indonesia had revealed the existence of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex lineage 3 (MTBC L3) or Central Asian (CAS) strains. In this work, whole-genome sequencing (WGS) – based methods were used to search for the presence of MTBC L3. Results Two unrelated Indonesian L3 strains discovered by WGS-based SNP phylogenomics are presented here for the first time. Assemblies of their genomes yielded 96.95% (MTBC strain Mtb_S6970) and 98.35% (Mtb_S19106) of the known reference strain H37Rv. Their respective constructed genome coverages are 45.38 ± 12.95x and 63.13 ± 21.10x. The two L3 genomes have 4062 and 4121 genes, respectively, which are well within the number of genes predicted in MTBC strains. Instead of having three rRNA genes usually, Mtb_S6970 possesses four. These L3 isolates exhibit cross-class antibiotic susceptibility. FadD26, fadE24, fbpA, lprO, and panC, which are thought to be important in the pathophysiology of MTBC, were discovered to have 3–7 times more loci in L3 than L2 or L4. The penetration of L3 in the nation, despite its antibiotic sensitivity, is a concerning indicator of borderless global spread that may eventually be overcome by the phenotypes of acquired drug resistance.