RESUMO
BACKGROUND: Infections caused by mycobacteria have been significantly increasing. Due to the difficulty of making a decision about the pathogenicity of mycobacteria, species-level identification is very important for patients' diagnosis and treatment. The purpose of this study was to identify mycobacteria species using a high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) method and to provide an initial database for the distribution of mycobacteria in Korea. METHODS: Acid fast bacteria isolated from 3,107 clinical specimens were identified by mycolic acid analysis using HPLC. The HPLC patterns were compared with those of standard mycobacteria species. RESULTS: The HPLC patterns were divided into single, double, and triple cluster groups, each group comprising 9, 20, and 4 species, respectively. Mycobacteria and non-tuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) were identifies by HPLC at the rates of 99.5% and 95.6%, respectively. NTM was isolated in 12.4% of the mycobacteria positive specimens. This study also found that there were 20 different NTM species with the distribution of each species ranging from 0.3% to 15.9% of the total NTM. While the rate of NTM has been increasing in Korea, M. avium-intracellulare, M. fortuitum, and M. chelonae are relatively decreasing, and M. kansasii and M. gordonae are relatively increasing. CONCLUSIONS: HPLC method was highly discriminative for the identification of NTM in clinical specimens.