Ancient Origin and Gene Mosaicism of the Progenitor of Mycobacterium tuberculosis Export

@article{citeulike:1089148, abstract = {The highly successful human pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis has an extremely low level of genetic variation, which suggests that the entire population resulted from clonal expansion following an evolutionary bottleneck around 35,000 y ago. Here, we show that this population constitutes just the visible tip of a much broader progenitor species, whose extant representatives are human isolates of tubercle bacilli from East Africa. In these isolates, we detected incongruence among gene phylogenies as well as mosaic gene sequences, whose individual elements are retrieved in classical M. tuberculosis. Therefore, despite its apparent homogeneity, the M. tuberculosis genome appears to be a composite assembly resulting from horizontal gene transfer events predating clonal expansion. The amount of synonymous nucleotide variation in housekeeping genes suggests that tubercle bacilli were contemporaneous with early hominids in East Africa, and have thus been coevolving with their human host much longer than previously thought. These results open novel perspectives for unraveling the molecular bases of M. tuberculosis evolutionary success.}, author = {Gutierrez, Cristina M. and Brisse, Sylvain and Brosch, Roland and Fabre, Michel and Oma\&\#239;s, Bahia and Marmiesse, Magali and Supply, Philip and Vincent, Veronique}, citeulike-article-id = {1089148}, citeulike-linkout-0 = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.0010005}, day = {1}, doi = {10.1371/journal.ppat.0010005}, journal = {PLoS Pathogens}, keywords = {archaeology, genetics, mtuberculosis}, month = {September}, number = {1}, pages = {e5+}, posted-at = {2007-02-05 19:32:16}, priority = {0}, title = {Ancient Origin and Gene Mosaicism of the Progenitor of Mycobacterium tuberculosis}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.0010005}, volume = {1}, year = {2005} }

TY - JOUR ID - citeulike:1089148 L3 - citeulike-article-id:1089148 N2 - The highly successful human pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis has an extremely low level of genetic variation, which suggests that the entire population resulted from clonal expansion following an evolutionary bottleneck around 35,000 y ago. Here, we show that this population constitutes just the visible tip of a much broader progenitor species, whose extant representatives are human isolates of tubercle bacilli from East Africa. In these isolates, we detected incongruence among gene phylogenies as well as mosaic gene sequences, whose individual elements are retrieved in classical M. tuberculosis. Therefore, despite its apparent homogeneity, the M. tuberculosis genome appears to be a composite assembly resulting from horizontal gene transfer events predating clonal expansion. The amount of synonymous nucleotide variation in housekeeping genes suggests that tubercle bacilli were contemporaneous with early hominids in East Africa, and have thus been coevolving with their human host much longer than previously thought. These results open novel perspectives for unraveling the molecular bases of M. tuberculosis evolutionary success. IS - 1 JF - PLoS Pathogens TI - Ancient Origin and Gene Mosaicism of the Progenitor of Mycobacterium tuberculosis VL - 1 SP - e5 KW - archaeology KW - genetics KW - mtuberculosis AU - Gutierrez, Cristina AU - Brisse, Sylvain AU - Brosch, Roland AU - Fabre, Michel AU - Omaïs, Bahia AU - Marmiesse, Magali AU - Supply, Philip AU - Vincent, Veronique PY - 2005/09/01/ UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.0010005 ER -