title: Out-of-Africa migration and Neolithic coexpansion of Mycobacterium tuberculosis with modern humans.
abstract: Tuberculosis caused 20% of all human deaths in the Western world between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and remains a cause of high mortality in developing countries. In analogy to other crowd diseases, the origin of human tuberculosis has been associated with the Neolithic Demographic Transition, but recent studies point to a much earlier origin. We analyzed the whole genomes of 259 M. tuberculosis complex (MTBC) strains and used this data set to characterize global diversity and to reconstruct the evolutionary history of this pathogen. Coalescent analyses indicate that MTBC emerged about 70,000 years ago, accompanied migrations of anatomically modern humans out of Africa and expanded as a consequence of increases in human population density during the Neolithic period. This long coevolutionary history is consistent with MTBC displaying characteristics indicative of adaptation to both low and high host densities.
authors.affiliation: 1] Genomics and Health Unit, Centre for Public Health Research (CSISP-FISABIO), Valencia, Spain. [2] CIBER (Centros de Investigación Biomédica en Red) in Epidemiology and Public Health, Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: Iñaki
authors.identifier: 0000000155049408
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Comas
authors.forename: Mireia
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Coscolla
authors.forename: Tao
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Luo
authors.forename: Sonia
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Borrell
authors.forename: Kathryn E
authors.initials: KE
authors.lastname: Holt
authors.forename: Midori
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kato-Maeda
authors.forename: Julian
authors.identifier: 0000000270695958
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Parkhill
authors.forename: Bijaya
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Malla
authors.forename: Stefan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Berg
authors.forename: Guy
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Thwaites
authors.forename: Dorothy
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Yeboah-Manu
authors.forename: Graham
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Bothamley
authors.forename: Jian
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Mei
authors.forename: Lanhai
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Wei
authors.forename: Stephen
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Bentley
authors.forename: Simon R
authors.initials: SR
authors.lastname: Harris
authors.forename: Stefan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Niemann
authors.forename: Roland
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Diel
authors.forename: Abraham
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Aseffa
authors.forename: Qian
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Gao
authors.forename: Douglas
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Young
authors.forename: Sebastien
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Gagneux
mesh_terms: D000349:Africa; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D006801:Humans; D009169:Mycobacterium tuberculosis / Q000235:genetics* / Q000254:growth & development / Q000502:physiology; D014376:Tuberculosis / Q000635:transmission*