Genome-Wide Comparison of Medieval and Modern Mycobacterium leprae

作者：Verena J. Schuenemann, Pushpendra Singh, Thomas A. Mendum, Ben Krause‐Kyora, Günter Jäger, Kirsten I. Bos, Alexander Herbig, Christos Economou, Andrej Benjak, Philippe Busso, Almut Nebel, Jesper L. Boldsen, Anna Norman Kjellström, Huihai Wu, Graham R. Stewart, G. Michael Taylor, Peter Bauer, Oona Y.-C. Lee, Houdini H.T. Wu, David E. Minnikin, Gurdyal Singh Besra, Katie Tucker, Simon Roffey, Samba Ousmane Sow, Stewart Thomas Cole, Kay Nieselt, Johannes Krause · 发表于：Science · 年份：2013 · DOI：10.1126/science.1238286 · 被引用次数：363 · 研究领域：Leprosy Research and Treatment、Mycobacterium research and diagnosis、Yersinia bacterium, plague, ectoparasites research

Leprosy: Ancient and Modern In medieval Europe, leprosy was greatly feared: Sufferers had to wear bells and were shunned and kept isolated from society. Although leprosy largely disappeared from Europe in the 16th century, elsewhere in the world almost a quarter of a million cases are still reported annually, despite the availability of effective drugs. Schuenemann et al. (p. 179 , published online 13 June; see the 14 June News story by Gibbons , p. 1278 ) probed the origins of leprosy bacilli by using a genomic capture-based approach on DNA obtained from skeletal remains from the 10th to 14th centuries. Because the unique mycolic acids of this mycobacterium protect its DNA, for one Danish sample over 100-fold, coverage of the genome was possible. Sequencing suggests a link between the middle-eastern and medieval European strains, which falls in line with social historical expectations that the returning expeditionary forces of antiquity originally spread the pathogen. Subsequently, Europeans took the bacterium westward to the Americas. Overall, ancient and modern strains remain remarkably similar, with no apparent loss of virulence genes, indicating it was most probably improvements in social conditions that led to leprosy's demise in Europe.