The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work. To investigate this connection, we turned to 10 natural history museums in the U.S. These institutions offer more than just public ...

Scientists say a species of bacteria rewrites the history of when an infectious and potentially deadly disease first arrived in the Americas. And it was long before the arrival of European explorers.

Years-old tissue samples from armadillos in museum collections may harbor Mycobacterium leprae, the bacteria that causes Hansen's disease, also called leprosy, according to recent research my ...

Leprosy. We’ve all heard of it, but do you really know what causes it? What does the word make you think of? A disease that people got a long, long time ago? A super-contagious condition that causes ...

In the dry, windswept valleys of Northern Chile, two ancient skeletons are changing how scientists understand the history of a disease that has long carried both medical and cultural weight. Their ...

Evidence from archaeological sites in the medieval English city of Winchester shows that English red squirrels once served as an important host for Mycobacterium leprae strains that caused leprosy in ...

In order to understand the role of the upstream region of the Mycobacterium leprae 18-kDa gene on the gene regulation, the region was divided into two at the -50 position from the first start codon of ...

Leprosy, caused by Mycobacterium leprae, is a chronic but curable infectious disease affecting the skin, nerves, and respiratory tract. It is not highly contagious and can be prevented with early ...

Leprosy, long believed to have been introduced to the Americas by Europeans, has a more complex history. A recent study reveals that Mycobacterium lepromatosis, a leprosy-causing bacteria, existed in ...

Editor's Note: This article was provided by our partner, ScienceNordic. The original is here. Leprosy has plagued us humans for thousands of years. In medieval Europe, the disease was so dreaded that ...

IN 1872 Hansen characterized Mycobacterium leprae as the causative agent in human leprosy. Hitherto, all attempts to cultivate this organism in vitro or to transmit it to experimental animals have met ...

Leprosy has existed since at least Biblical times, yet scientists still don't know exactly how Mycobacterium leprae causes the disease's symptoms. Though antibiotics can treat the illness, researchers ...