On the origin of leprosy.

Marc Monot (1) , Nadine Honoré (1) , Thierry Garnier (1) , Romulo Araoz (1) , Jean-Yves Coppée (2) , Céline Lacroix (2) , Samba Sow (3) , John S. Spencer (4) , Richard W. Truman (5) , Diana L. Williams (5) , Robert Gelber (6) , Marcos Virmond (7) , Béatrice Flageul (8) , Sang-Nae Cho (9) , Baohong Ji (10) , Alberto Paniz-Mondolfi (11) , Jacinto Convit (11) , Saroj Young (12) , Paul E. Fine (12) , Voahangy Rasolofo (13) , Patrick J. Brennan (4) , Stewart T Cole (1)

1 Génétique Moléculaire Bactérienne
2 PF2 - Puces à ADN (Plate-Forme 2)
3 Centre National d'Appui à la lutte Contre la Maladie
4 Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology
5 National Hansen's Disease Program
6 Leonard Wood Memorial Center for Leprosy Research
7 Instituto Lauro de Souza Lima
8 Hôpital Saint-Louis
9 Yonsei University College of Medicine
10 Service de Bactériologie et d'Hygiène Hospitalière [CHU Pitié-Salpêtrière]
11 Instituto de Biomedicina [Caracas]
12 LSHTM - London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
13 Institut Pasteur de Madagascar

Leprosy, a chronic human disease with potentially debilitating neurological consequences, results from infection with Mycobacterium leprae. This unculturable pathogen has undergone extensive reductive evolution, with half of its genome now occupied by pseudogenes. Using comparative genomics, we demonstrated that all extant cases of leprosy are attributable to a single clone whose dissemination worldwide can be retraced from analysis of very rare single-nucleotide polymorphisms. The disease seems to have originated in Eastern Africa or the Near East and spread with successive human migrations. Europeans or North Africans introduced leprosy into West Africa and the Americas within the past 500 years.

Domains: Life Sciences [q-bio]; Biochemistry, Molecular Biology; Molecular biology

Marc Monot, Nadine Honoré, Thierry Garnier, Romulo Araoz, Jean-Yves Coppée, et al.. On the origin of leprosy.. Science, 2005, 308 (5724), pp.1040-2. ⟨10.1126/science/1109759⟩. ⟨pasteur-00204117⟩