Leprosy remains an epidemiological mystery, even 130 years after the leprosy bacillus was discovered.1 Despite the many helpful antibiotics now available to treat this mutilating disease, leprosy's transmission and mechanism of cell and tissue destruction remain poorly understood: Some 650,000 new cases are diagnosed worldwide each year, with about half in India and Brazil alone. But researchers are gaining a better understanding of the leprosy bacillus with the help of genomic data and insights provided by another infamous bacterial killer.
As part of a collaborative effort between L'Institut Pasteur in Paris and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK, investigators highlighted intriguing genomic features of Mycobacterium leprae, the topic of this Hot Paper.2 The researchers compared M. leprae, the rod-shaped bacillus that causes leprosy, to its close relative, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacillus that causes tuberculosis (TB). "Having two genome sequences is an extremely powerful way of understanding what happens ...
