
species of bacterium; form of leprosy
SPECIES
麻风杆菌也称为韩森氏杆菌,是一种可引起麻风病的分支杆菌,菌体呈短小棒状或稍弯曲,长约2-6µm,宽约0.2-0.6µm,抗酸染色呈红色(抗酸性),革兰氏染色呈阳性,好氧菌。
via GBIF
Mycobacterium leprae (also known as the leprosy bacillus or Hansen's bacillus) is one of the two species of bacteria that cause Hansen's disease (leprosy), a chronic but curable infectious disease that damages the peripheral nerves and targets the skin, eyes, nose, and muscles.
It is an acid-fast, Gram-positive, rod shaped bacterium and an obligate intracellular parasite, which means, unlike its relative Mycobacterium tuberculosis, it cannot be grown in cell-free laboratory media. This is likely due to gene deletion and decay that the genome of the species has experienced via reductive evolution, which has caused the bacterium to depend heavily on its host for nutrients and metabolic intermediates. It has a narrow host range and apart from humans, the only other natural hosts are nine-banded armadillo and red squirrels. The bacteria infect mainly macrophages and Schwann cells, and are typically found congregated as a palisade.
via PubMed
via Wikidata · CC0
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).