Abstract
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.
Publication types
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Historical Article
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Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
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Research Support, U.S. Gov't, P.H.S.
MeSH terms
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Africa / epidemiology
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Americas / epidemiology
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Asia / epidemiology
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Biological Evolution
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Emigration and Immigration*
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Europe / epidemiology
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Genes, Bacterial
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Genome, Bacterial
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History, 18th Century
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History, 19th Century
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History, Ancient
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History, Medieval
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Humans
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Interspersed Repetitive Sequences
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Leprosy / epidemiology
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Leprosy / history*
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Leprosy / microbiology
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Leprosy / transmission
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Minisatellite Repeats
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Mycobacterium leprae / classification
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Mycobacterium leprae / genetics*
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Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis
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Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide
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Population Dynamics
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Pseudogenes
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Sequence Analysis, DNA