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Cited by 593

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 66 of the 66 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

High Functional Diversity in Mycobacterium tuberculosis Driven by Genetic Drift and Human Demography

Open access
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·2008·PLoS Biology

Abstract

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.

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Crossref · 10.1371/journal.pbio.0060311

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Metadata

Authors
Hershberg, R., Lipatov, M., Small, P. M., Sheffer, H., Niemann, S., Homolka, S., Roach, J. C., Kremer, K., Petrov, D. A., Feldman, M. W., & Gagneux, S.
Venue
PLoS Biology
Published
2008-12-16
Volume
6
Issue
12
Pages
e311
ISSN
  • 1544-9173 (ISSN-L)
  • 1545-7885
OpenAlex
W2106813347
Cited by
593
References
66
FWCI
25.47
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
gold

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: High Functional Diversity in Mycobacterium tuberculosis Driven by Genetic Drift and Human Demography. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1371/journal.pbio.0060311
The paper
Hershberg, R., Lipatov, M., Small, P. M., Sheffer, H., Niemann, S., Homolka, S., Roach, J. C., Kremer, K., Petrov, D. A., Feldman, M. W., & Gagneux, S. (2008). High Functional Diversity in Mycobacterium tuberculosis Driven by Genetic Drift and Human Demography. PLoS Biology. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0060311

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.