Figure 2

Intracellular replication of six clinical isolates of Mycobacterium avium in human CD14+ cells. Sampling was performed after six hours of inoculation with added bacteria, then one, four and seven days after removal of extracellular bacteria. Numbers represent the mean values from six donors, showing the ratio of numbers of mycobacterial to human genomes (A) and absolute numbers of mycobacteria per well (B), measured by real-time PCR of single copy genes in cell lysates. There was a significant increase in the ratio of mycobacteria at day four for isolate Maa 1794 (p = 0.04) and at day 7 for Maa 1794 (p = 0.01) and Maa 1553 (p = 0.02) and in absolute numbers of bacteria for isolate Maa 1794 (p = 0.01) at day 7 using the paired t-test.