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Updated: Jan 24, 2026

Author Spotlight: Advancing Syphilis Research — Innovations in Treponema pallidum Cultivation and Genetic Engineering
Published on: January 24, 2025
A 5500-year-old Treponema pallidum genome from Sabana de Bogotá, Colombia
Davide Bozzi1,2, Nasreen Z Broomandkhoshbacht3, Miguel Delgado4,5,6
1Department of Computational Biology, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland.
Abstract:
Treponematosis, a bacterial infection caused by Treponema pallidum subspecies and T. carateum (yaws, bejel, syphilis, pinta), has afflicted humans for millennia. Despite paleopathological evidence and emerging genomic data, little is known about the evolutionary history of these pathogens. We report a 5500-year-old Treponema genome (TE1-3) from Middle Holocene hunter-gatherer contexts of the rock shelter Tequendama I in Colombia. Our analyses place TE1-3 as a sister lineage to all known T. pallidum subspecies, positioning this pathogen in the Americas millennia before European contact and before diversification of the subspecies causing syphilis, yaws, and bejel. This discovery broadens the known diversity of T. pallidum while extending the genomic record of treponemal pathogens by millennia, providing molecular support for a deep history of T. pallidum in the Americas.
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