Genome of the inferred most recent common ancestor of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex

Genome of the inferred most recent common ancestor of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC) as described in Human T cell epitopes of Mycobacterium tuberculosis are evolutionarily hyperconserved. Comas et al 2010; Nature Genetics (doi:10.1038/ng.590). Mapping to the inferred MTBC ancestor instead of an extant, Lineage 4/LAM strain, allows to better distinguish between ancestral and derived mutations. This is exemplified by the number of single-nucleotide polymorphisms called for strains from different MTBC lineages (Figure 1). Figure 1 shows the number of fixed SNPs (fSNPs; allele frequency >= 90%), called for Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates from different MTBC lineages when aligning to the reference strain H37Rv or to the MTBC ancestor. Each dot is an isolate. When aligning to the MTBC ancestor, some isolates appear as "outliers", with less fSNPs than the average. These are mixed infections.