ABSTRACT
In the early 1990s, researchers in microbiology, epidemiology, and public health began to apply recent advances in molecular biology to the study of tuberculosis (TB) transmission. A key step was the development and distribution of a standardized and specific genotyping technique for Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which exploits bacterial polymorphisms in the number and chromosomal location of the insertion sequence IS6110: IS6110-based restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) analysis (1). Since then, researchers and public health authorities have used RFLP analysis (and related techniques) to address a number of epidemiologic questions relevant to TB control, a discipline now known as molecular epidemiology.
