Across 10,000 Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex strains, researchers reconstruct IS6110 dynamics, finding copy numbers from 1 to over 30 and 5% hotspot regions carrying half of independent insertions
The study developed a tool that detects and compares insertion sequence insertions from short reads without a reference genome, applied it to 10,000 strains of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC), and combined it with ancestral state reconstruction on presence-absence patterns to describe the distribution of IS6110 copy numbers (from 1 in some clades to more than 30 in strains of La3 (M.