High functional diversity in Mycobacterium tuberculosis driven by genetic drift and human demography

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 s...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PLoS biology 2008-12, Vol.6 (12), p.e311-e311
Main Authors: Hershberg, Ruth, Lipatov, Mikhail, Small, Peter M, Sheffer, Hadar, Niemann, Stefan, Homolka, Susanne, Roach, Jared C, Kremer, Kristin, Petrov, Dmitri A, Feldman, Marcus W, Gagneux, Sebastien
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bacterial genetics
Base Sequence
Databases, Genetic
Demography
Drug resistance
Drug Resistance, Multiple, Bacterial - genetics
Emigration and Immigration
Evolutionary Biology
Genetic aspects
Genetic diversity
Genetic Drift
Genetics and Genomics
Genome, Bacterial
Humans
Infectious Diseases
Mycobacterium
Mycobacterium tuberculosis
Mycobacterium tuberculosis - genetics
Phylogenetics
Phylogeny
Physiological aspects
Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide
Population
Public Health and Epidemiology
Studies
Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis, Multidrug-Resistant - genetics
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1545-7885
1544-9173
1545-7885
DOI:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060311