@article{6717,
  keywords = {Africa, Americas, Asia, Biological Evolution, Emigration and Immigration, Europe, Genes, Bacterial, Genome, Bacterial, History, 18th Century, History, 19th Century, History, Ancient, History, Medieval, Humans, Interspersed Repetitive Sequences, leprosy, Minisatellite Repeats, Mycobacterium leprae, Oligonucleotide Array Sequence Analysis, Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide, Population Dynamics, Pseudogenes, Sequence Analysis, DNA},
  author = {Monot M and Honore N and Garnier T and Araoz R and Coppée J and Lacroix C and Sow S and Spencer JS and Truman RW and Williams DL and Gelber R and Virmond M and Flageul B and Cho S and Ji B and Paniz-Mondolfi A and Convit J and Young S and Fine PE and Rasolofo V and Brennan PJ and Cole S},
  title = {On the origin of leprosy.},
  abstract = {<p>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.</p>},
  year = {2005},
  journal = {Science (New York, N.Y.)},
  volume = {308},
  pages = {1040-2},
  month = {2005 May 13},
  issn = {1095-9203},
  url = {http://science.sciencemag.org/content/308/5724/1040.full},
  doi = {10.1126/science/1109759},
  language = {eng},
}