Mycobacterium Leprae: Genes, Pseudogenes And Genetic Diversity

Abstract

Leprosy, which has afflicted human populations for millenia, results from infection with Mycobacterium leprae, an unculturable pathogen with an exceptionally long generation time. Considerable insight into the biology and drug resistance of the leprosy bacillus has been obtained from genomics. M. leprae has undergone reductive evolution and pseudogenes now occupy half of its genome. Comparative genomics of four different strains revealed remarkable conservation of the genome (99.995% identity) yet uncovered 215 polymorphic sites, mainly single nucleotide polymorphisms, and a handful of new pseudogenes. Mapping these polymorphisms in a large panel of strains defined 16 single nucleotide polymorphism-subtypes that showed strong geographical associations and helped retrace the evolution of M. leprae.

Keywords:

• drug-resistance
• leprosy
• molecular epidemiology
• Mycobacterium leprae
• phylogeography
• pseudogene

Acknowledgments

We thank Philippe Busso, Jeffrey Chen, Alberto Paniz and Swapna Uplekar for helpful discussions.

Financial & competing interest disclosure

This work received the financial support of the Foundation Raoul Follereau, and the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (grant RO1-AI47197-01A1). The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

This work received the financial support of the Foundation Raoul Follereau, and the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (grant RO1-AI47197-01A1). The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.