ArticlePLoS pathogens2005
Ancient origin and gene mosaicism of the progenitor of Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
Article in PLoS pathogens, 2005. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 214 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
214 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 642 citations in OpenAlex.
- Prevalence and risk factors of malnutrition in patients with pulmonary tuberculosis: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Frontiers in medicine · 2023Pooled it
- Effects of zinc and vitamin A supplementation on prognostic markers and treatment outcomes of adults with pulmonary tuberculosis: a systematic review and meta-analysis.BMJ global health · 2022Pooled it
- Epidemiology of tuberculous lymphadenitis in Africa: A systematic review and meta-analysis.PloS one · 2019Pooled it
- A randomized trial of multivitamin supplementation in children with tuberculosis in Tanzania.Nutrition journal · 2011Trial
- Variation in multiple classes of simple sequence repeats can alter drug susceptibility inbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
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- Exploring the Potential of Coumarin as a Potent Antitubercular Agent.Mini reviews in medicinal chemistry · 2026Review
- Exploring the Natural Products Atlas (NPAtlas) Database for Hunting Prospective Irreversible Covalent DprE1 Inhibitors With Antitubercular Activity: An IntegratedJournal of tropical medicine · 2026Article
- Tuberculosis: An Ongoing Global Threat.Advances in experimental medicine and biology · 2026Review
- Molecular Epidemiology ofMicroorganisms · 2025Review
- Insights into Autophagy in Microbiome Therapeutic Approaches for Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis.Cells · 2025Review
- Integrative genomics sheds light on the immunogenetics of tuberculosis in cattle.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Nanoenabling MbtI Inhibitors for Next-Generation Tuberculosis Therapy.Journal of medicinal chemistry · 2025Article
- Tuberculosis in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus.Frontiers in immunology · 2025Review
- Decoding the tuberculosis puzzle: mechanical factors driving disease progression.Frontiers in tuberculosis · 2025Article
- The impact of COVID-19 on tuberculosis in most populated state of India: A geospatial meta-analysis.Journal of family medicine and primary care · 2024Review
- Genetic diversity ofNew microbes and new infections · 2024Article
- Evolution and emergence of Mycobacterium tuberculosis.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2024Review
- Relationship between smoking and pulmonary tuberculosis based on positive sputum smears.GMS hygiene and infection control · 2024Article
154 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.