High Functional Diversity in Mycobacterium tuberculosis Driven by Genetic Drift and Human Demography
By Ruth Hershberg, Mikhail Lipatov, Peter M. Small, Hadar H. Sheffer, Stefan Niemann, S. Homolka, J. Roach, K. Kremer, D. Petrov, Michal Feldman and 1 more. PLoS Biology, 2008
620 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Mycobacterium tuberculosis infects one third of the human world population and kills someone every 15 seconds. For more than a century, scientists and clinicians have been distinguishing between the human- and animal-adapted members of the M. tuberculosis complex (MTBC). However, all human-adapted strains of MTBC have traditionally been considered to be essentially identical. We surveyed sequence diversity within a global collection of strains belonging to MTBC using seven megabase pairs of DNA sequence data. We show that the members of MTBC affecting humans are more genetically diverse than generally assumed, and that this diversity can be linked to human demographic and migratory events. We further demonstrate that these organisms are under extremely reduced purifying selection and that, as a result of increased genetic drift, much of this genetic diversity is likely to have functional consequences. Our findings suggest that the current increases in human population, urbanization, and global travel, combined with the population genetic characteristics of M. tuberculosis described here, could contribute to the emergence and spread of drug-resistant tuberculosis.
Subfields: Ecology, Epidemiology, Infectious Diseases
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cbe888d50adfaf81cab5d41514f7a14de099d50e
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Citations in the corpus
- Explaining microbial population genomics through phage predation (2009, background): “; it was later reinforced by epidemiological studies of pathogenic isolates, in which a rise and fall of clonal lineages was found to occu”
- MIRU-VNTRplus: a web tool for polyphasic genotyping of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex bacteria (2010, methodology): “As the MTBC gene sequence variation is low classical sequence-based typing methods such as multi-locus sequence typing, even extended to tens of genes, are only informative for the identification at genetic (sub-)lineage but not at strain level (4,5).”