Whole mitogenome sequencing uncovers a relation between mitochondrial heteroplasmy and leprosy severity.

"availability of data and materials all raw sequences are deposited at the european nucleotide archive (ena) under the accession number prjeb59275. availability of data and materials all raw sequences are deposited at the european nucleotide archive (ena) under the accession number prjeb59275"

"samtools (v 1 15 1) [ ] were used for mapping and sorting sequences while picard was used to mark the duplicated reads (v 2 27 5 available at https://github com/broadinstitute/picard ).; snp annotation was based on the rcrs genome annotation (available at https://github com/seppinho/mutserve )."

"Declarations Ethics approval and consent to participateThe study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by the Ethics Committee of Institute of Health Sciences at the Federal University of Pará (ICS/UFPA n. 197/07). Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study. Consent for publicationNot applicable. Competing interestsThe authors declare that they have no competing interests. Competing interests The authors declare that they have no competing interests."

"Funding This research was funded by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq), Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES/Brazil), Fundação Amazônia de Amparo a Estudos e Pesquisas (FAPESPA) and Pró-Reitoria de Pesquisa e Pós-Graduação da Universidade Federal do Pará (PROPESP/UFPA). This work is part of Rede de Pesquisa em Genômica Populacional Humana (Biocomputacional—Protocol no. 3381/2013/CAPES). VALE S.A. 27756/2019, Fulbright Scholar to Brazil 2019–2020 (JS) and the Heiser Program of the New York Community Trust for Research in Leprosy (JB, MS, CS and JS) grants P15-000827, P16-000796 and P18-000250. The funders had no role in study design, data collection, analysis, interpretation or writing of the report."