A reported genetic signal of doxycycline resistance in the bacterium that causes syphilis has been traced to laboratory contamination, and the CDC journal that published the original finding has issued a formal correction. The reversal matters because doxycycline has become central to both treating and preventing syphilis in the United States.
The original study, published in Emerging Infectious Diseases in February by researchers at Public Health Ontario and partner laboratories across Canada, inspected 16S ribosomal RNA sequences from 784 publicly available Treponema pallidum subspecies pallidum genomes alongside newly sequenced Canadian genomes. It reported variants associated with doxycycline resistance in nine non-Canadian genomes and framed the work as establishing a global genomic baseline for monitoring.
