A major susceptibility locus for leprosy in India maps to chromosome 10p13

. A role for the geneticsof the host in variable susceptibility to leprosy has been indi-cated by familial clustering, twin studies, complex segrega-tion analyses and human leukocyte antigen (HLA) associationstudies. We report here a genetic linkage scan of the genomesof 224 families from South India, containing 245 independentaffected sibpairs with leprosy, mainly of the paucibacillarytype. In a two-stage genome screen using 396 microsatellitemarkers, we found significant linkage (maximum lod score(MLS)=4.09,