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HAMAP: Mycobacterium leprae complete proteome
General information

Species:  Mycobacterium leprae
Species code: MYCLE
Taxonomy: Bacteria; Actinobacteria; Actinobacteridae; Actinomycetales; Corynebacterineae; Mycobacteriaceae; Mycobacterium (TaxID: 1769) [NEWT/ NCBI]
Description: An unculturable very slow-growing, acid-fast, obligate intracellular bacterium, which is non-motile and rod-shaped, Mycobacterium leprae is responsible for leprosy. Leprosy is primarily a granulomatous disease of the peripheral nerves and mucosa of the upper respiratory tract; skin lesions are the primary external symptom. Left untreated, leprosy can be progressive, causing permanent damage to the skin, nerves, limbs and eyes. Contrary to popular belief, leprosy does not actually cause body parts to simply fall off. People who have leprosy used to be forced to live in isolated colonies. It is now commonly believed that many of the people who were segregated into these communities were presumed to have leprosy, when they actually had syphilis. Leprosy is not highly infectious, as approximately 95% of people are immune; syphilis is more contagious. Before the 1940's leprosy was considered incurable until the development of the drug dapsone. M.leprae has however started to develop resistance to dapsone and so a new multiple-drug therapy (MDT) containing three drugs: dapsone, rifampicin and clofazimine is administered (adapted from Wikipedia).

Strain TN was isolated in Tamil Nadu, India. It belongs to SNP type 1 subtype A according to a new phylogenetic grouping. Comparison of 4 genomes indicates they are 99.995% identical, differing by only 215 polymorphisms and by 5 pseudogenes. SNP typing suggests that leprosy which rose in Africa was introduced into Asia by both a southern route and a northerly route which followed the Silk Road. Introduction to the Americas probably occurred via European immigrants rather than over the Bering Strait (adapted from PMID 19881526).
Properties: Presence of flagella: No
Human pathogen: Yes
Interaction: Animal pathogen in Mammalia (intracellular obligate)
Number of membranes: 1
Number of inteins: 3 in 3 different sequences
Statistics: Number of MYCLE entries in the UniProt Knowledgebase: 1603 (668 in UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot + 935 in UniProtKB/TrEMBL)


Genome(s) sequenced

Strain:    TN
Genome structure:
Chromosome EMBL accession number AL450380 (circular; 3,268,203 bp) (download entry)
Reference(s):
[1] MEDLINE=21128732; PubMed=11234002; [ NCBI , EBI , Israel , Japan ]
Cole S.T., Eiglmeier K., Parkhill J., James K.D., Thomson N.R., Wheeler P.R., Honore N., Garnier T., Churcher C.M., Harris D.E., Mungall K.L., Basham D., Brown D., Chillingworth T., Connor R., Davies R.M., Devlin K., Duthoy S., Feltwell T., Fraser A., Hamlin N., Holroyd S., Hornsby T., Jagels K., Lacroix C., Maclean J., Moule S., Murphy L.D., Oliver K., Quail M.A., Rajandream M.A., Rutherford K.M., Rutter S., Seeger K., Simon S., Simmonds M., Skelton J., Squares R., Squares S., Stevens K., Taylor K., Whitehead S., Woodward J.R., Barrell B.G. ;
"Massive gene decay in the leprosy bacillus.";
Nature 409:1007-1011(2001).
Web links:
Official genome site(s):
http://www.sanger.ac.uk/Projects/M_leprae/
Other web sites:
Entrez Genome Project: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=genomeprj&Cmd=DetailsSearch&Term=txid272631%5Borgn%5D
Genome Atlas: http://www.cbs.dtu.dk/services/gwBrowser/precalc/project.php?pid=90
GIB (DDBJ): http://gib.genes.nig.ac.jp/single/index.php?spid=Mlep_TN
GOLD: http://genomesonline.org/GOLD_CARDS/Gc00045.html
JVCI CMR: http://cmr.jcvi.org/tigr-scripts/CMR/GenomePage.cgi?database=ntml01
Karyn's Genomes: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/2can/genomes/bacteria/Mycobacterium_leprae.html
Leproma: http://mycobrowser.epfl.ch/leprosy.html
PEDANT: http://pedant.gsf.de/pedant3htmlview/pedant3view?Method=analysis&Db=p3_p90_Myc_lepra
 EBI Proteome Analysis page



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