National Reference Centre for Mycobacteriology

The National Reference Centre for Mycobacteriology (NRCM) program mandate is to provide diagnostic, reference and surveillance services to clients and health care providers for the genus Mycobacterium, including Mycobacterium tuberculosis. These services are used in the investigation, control, and prevention of human disease within the population. The NRCM operates a national proficiency program, which tests and ensures the quality of provincial laboratory technologies for mycobacterial diseases as well as maintains a national database of tuberculosis genotyping data. Through the use of a national database housed at the NRCM, strain typing acts to support standard tuberculosis epidemiology, such as contact tracing, for tuberculosis outbreak investigation, prevention, and control. The department also offers teaching programs for medical infectious disease physicians, graduate and undergraduate students, and visiting scientists. The scope of the NRCM includes detection and identification services, susceptibility testing services, genotyping services, training and applied research activities. The NRCM also provides diagnostic tests for the identification and antimicrobial susceptibility testing of aerobic actinomycetes (e.g. Nocardia spp., Gordonia spp., Streptomyces spp., Actinomadura spp., Nocardiopsis spp., Tsukamurella spp., Rhodococcus spp).