Evidence of Leprosy in Ancient India

In a recent PLoS ONE article, Gwen Robbins and colleagues reported analysis of a 4000-year-old skeleton from India, which represents both the earliest archaeological evidence for human infection with Mycobacterium leprae in the world and the first evidence for the disease in prehistoric India. I think the authors need to have clear definitions of 'ancient origins' and 'historic presence'. Leprosy has clear origins from Africa as for tubeculosis (TB). After spreading from Africa the disease may have assumed endemic potentials in certain countries such as India. Therefore, the findings here should be consistent with our own research, published back in 2006 about TB, wherein we suggested that India was a historic cradle for mycobacterial infections and that she served as an ancient corridor for an early worldwide spread of TB. The authors did not cite our work; may be an oversight! But, I am more concerned that they as well forgot to refer to an important PLoS ONE paper which recently attempted to characterize about 9000 year old skeletons from submerged, ancient burials in Israel using paleopathology and DNA based evidence.

How to get cited one hundred times?

Exactly 2 years ago, PLoS ONE published this superb article (Fahlgren N, et al., 2007 High-throughput sequencing of Arabidopsis microRNAs: Evidence for frequent birth and death of MIRNA genes. PLoS ONE 2: e219), a citation classic. Thanks to its being published via Open Access, today it crossed the landmark of one hundred citations in Google Scholar. The paper thus became one of the star articles of PLoS series and the first one from PLoS ONE to log 3 digit citations in a record time of 2 years. The article was also evaluated in F1000 Biology and its corresponding author interviewed at PLoS blog.

Gut Pathogens: a new forum for enteric health at the interface of changing microbiology

Today is the special day for us and the ISOGEM; we launched Gut Pathogens, the 200th Open Access journal of the Biomed Central. Gut Pathogens is a new OA journal publishing articles on all aspects of the biology and pathogenesis of bacterial, parasitic and viral infections of the gut, including their diagnosis and clinical management.

Gut Pathogens shall be the official journal of The International Society for Genomic and Evolutionary Microbiology (ISOGEM) and is supported by a qualified Editorial Board of active scientists and clinicians. We have detailed in the launch Editorial how we hope that an open access journal in this field will provide a high-quality forum for research on enteric infections of humans and animals, facilitating the practice of preventive and social medicine for the benefit of the patients.