Monot Marc, Honoré Nadine, Garnier Thierry, Araoz Romulo, Coppée Jean-Yves, Lacroix Céline, Sow Samba, Spencer John S, Truman Richard W, Williams Diana L, Gelber Robert, Virmond Marcos, Flageul Béatrice, Cho Sang-Nae, Ji Baohong, Paniz-Mondolfi Alberto, Convit Jacinto, Young Saroj, Fine Paul E, Rasolofo Voahangy, Brennan Patrick J, Cole Stewart T
Unité de Génétique Moléculaire Bactérienne, Institut Pasteur, Paris, France.
Science. 2005 May 13;308(5724):1040-2. doi: 10.1126/science/1109759.
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.
麻风病是一种慢性人类疾病，可能导致使人衰弱的神经后果，由麻风分枝杆菌感染引起。这种无法培养的病原体经历了广泛的简化进化，其基因组的一半现在被假基因占据。通过比较基因组学，我们证明，所有现存的麻风病病例都可归因于一个单一的克隆，通过对非常罕见的单核苷酸多态性进行分析，可以追溯到其在全球的传播情况。这种疾病似乎起源于东非或近东，并随着人类的 successive 迁徙而传播。在过去500年里，欧洲人或北非人将麻风病引入了西非和美洲。
