Evaluation of Vitek MS for rapid classification of clinical isolates belonging to Mycobacterium avium complex

Abstract

We evaluated the ability of the Vitek MS system to classify clinical pulmonary Mycobacterium avium complex isolates compared to multilocus sequence analysis. Vitek MS accurately identified 55% of the isolates as M. avium and 18% as M. intracellulare, but misidentified 24 (27%) Mycobacterium chimaera isolates as Mycobacterium intracellulare.

Keywords: Matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization-time of flight mass spectrometry; Multilocus sequencing; Mycobacterium avium complex; Mycobacterium chimaera; Real-time PCR.