Molecular characteristics and genotype distribution of Pneumocystis Jirovecii in HIV/AIDS patients in national Hospital for Tropical diseases from 2014-2017

To investigate the molecular characteristics and genotype distribution of Pneumocystis jirovecii in HIV/AIDS patients who were admitted to the National Hospital for Tropical Diseases. Subjects and methods: Prospective and cross-sectional description. 31 HIV/AIDS patients infected with P. jirovecii and confirmed by bronchoscopy and realtime PCR from 01 - 2014 to 12 - 2017 were included for this study. Results and conclusions: Nucleotide analysis revealed that no nucleotide alteration occured in the loci β-TUB, CYB, DHFR, DHPS, whereas minor variable positions were observed in the SOD locus. The most frequent nucleotide variation was found in three loci: mt26S, 26S and ITS1. Based on the nucleotide variation, the SOD locus was classified into two genotypes (SOD and SOD6), the mt26S locus was classified into 14 genotypes (2, 7, 8, 11, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, and 23), the ITS1 locus was classified into 14 genotypes (A1, A2, A3, A4, A5, A6, B1, B2, B3, B7, B8, B9 and B10), and the 26S locus was classified into 4 genotypes (1, 11, 12, and 13). Several new genotypes were only distributed in the P. jirovecii strains circulating in Vietnam.