Mycobacterium leprae
bacterium that causes leprosy (now called Hansen's disease). It is an intracellular, pleomorphic, but usually rod shaped, acid fast, gram positive, aerobic only remotely and only morphologically related to Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
Optical microscopy shows clumps, rounded masses, or in groups of bacilli side by side.
It was discovered in 1873 by the Norwegian physician Gerhard Henrik Armauer Hansen, who was searching for the bacteria in the skin nodules of patients with leprosy.
It has not been possible to culture Mycobacterium leprae on artificial culture media, but it can be cultivated transiently in the mouse footpad.
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