TY - JOUR T1 - African nonhuman primates are infected with the yaws bacterium <em>Treponema pallidum</em> subsp. <em>pertenue</em> JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/135491 SP - 135491 AU - Sascha Knauf AU - Jan F. Gogarten AU - Verena J. Schuenemann AU - Hélène M. De Nys AU - Ariane Düx AU - Michal Strouhal AU - Lenka Mikalová AU - Kirsten I. Bos AU - Roy Armstrong AU - Emmanuel K. Batamuzi AU - Idrissa S. Chuma AU - Bernard Davoust AU - Georges Diatta AU - Robert D. Fyumagwa AU - Reuben R. Kazwala AU - Julius D. Keyyu AU - Inyasi A. V. Lejora AU - Anthony Levasseur AU - Hsi Liu AU - Michael A. Mayhew AU - Oleg Mediannikov AU - Didier Raoult AU - Roman M. Wittig AU - Christian Roos AU - Fabian H. Leendertz AU - David Šmajs AU - Kay Nieselt AU - Johannes Krause AU - Sébastien Calvignac-Spencer Y1 - 2017/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/10/135491.abstract N2 - Treponema pallidum subsp. pertenue (TPE) is the causative agent of yaws. The disease was subject to global eradication efforts in the mid 20th century but reemerged in West Africa, Southern Asia, and the Pacific region. Despite its importance for eradication, detailed data on possible nonhuman disease reservoirs are missing. A number of African nonhuman primates (NHPs) have been reported to show skin ulcerations suggestive of treponemal infection in humans. Furthermore antibodies against Treponema pallidum (TP) have been repeatedly detected in wild NHP populations. While genetic studies confirmed that NHPs are infected with TP strains, subspecies identification was only possible once for a strain isolated in 1966, pinpointing the involvement of TPE. We therefore collected a number of recently isolated simian TP strains and determined eight whole genome sequences using hybridization capture or long-range PCR combined with next-generation sequencing. These new genomes were compared with those of known human TP isolates. Our results show that naturally occurring simian TP strains circulating in three African NHP species all cluster with human TPE strains and show the same genomic structure as human TPE strains. These data indicate that humans are not the exclusive host for the yaws bacterium and that a One Health approach is required to achieve sustainable eradication of human yaws. ER -