ArticlePLoS pathogens2013
Conservative sex and the benefits of transformation in Streptococcus pneumoniae.
Article in PLoS pathogens, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed, 40 citations in OpenAlex.
- Sex decreases the pleiotropic costs of local adaptation by purging hitchhiking load.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2026Article
- Surviving the storm: exploring the role of natural transformation in nutrition and DNA repair of stressedApplied and environmental microbiology · 2025Article
- Naturally competent bacteria and their genetic parasites-a battle for control over horizontal gene transfer?FEMS microbiology reviews · 2025Review
- Molecular mechanisms and applications of natural transformation in bacteria.Frontiers in microbiology · 2025Review
- Time-resolved RNA-seq analysis to unravel theMicrobiology spectrum · 2024Article
- Natural transformation-specific DprA coordinate DNA double-strand break repair pathways in heavily irradiatedApplied and environmental microbiology · 2024Article
- Nonkin interactions between Bacillus subtilis soil isolates limit the spread of swarming deficient cheats.The ISME journal · 2024Article
- Distribution of fitness effects of cross-species transformation reveals potential for fast adaptive evolution.The ISME journal · 2023Article
- Repeat sequences limit the effectiveness of lateral gene transfer and favored the evolution of meiotic sex in early eukaryotes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- "Take It or Leave It"-Factors Regulating Competence Development and DNA Uptake inInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2021Article
- Adaptive evolution of hybrid bacteria by horizontal gene transfer.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Natural Transformation ofFrontiers in microbiology · 2021Article
- Article
- Designing cyclic competence-stimulating peptide (CSP) analogs with pan-group quorum-sensing inhibition activity inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Article
- Recombination and mutational robustness in neutral fitness landscapes.PLoS computational biology · 2019Article
- Intensive targeting of regulatory competence genes by transposable elements in streptococci.Molecular genetics and genomics : MGG · 2019Article
- Sampling the mobile gene pool: innovation via horizontal gene transfer in bacteria.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Review
- Panel 4: Report of the Microbiology Panel.Otolaryngology--head and neck surgery : official journal of American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery · 2017Review
- Costs and benefits of natural transformation in Acinetobacter baylyi.BMC microbiology · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Natural transformation has significant effects on bacterial genome evolution, but the evolutionary factors maintaining this mode of bacterial sex remain uncertain. Transformation is hypothesized to have both positive and negative evolutionary effects on bacteria. It can facilitate adaptation by combining beneficial mutations into a single individual, or reduce the mutational load by exposing deleterious alleles to natural selection. Alternatively, it may expose transformed cells to damaged or otherwise mutated environmental DNA and is energetically expensive. Here, we examine the long-term effects of transformation in the naturally competent species Streptococcus pneumoniae by evolving populations of wild-type and competence-deficient strains in chemostats for 1000 generations. Half of these populations were exposed to periodic mild stress to examine context-dependent benefits of transformation. We find that competence reduces fitness gain under benign conditions; however, these costs are reduced in the presence of periodic stress. Using whole genome re-sequencing, we show that competent populations fix fewer new mutations and that competence prevents the emergence of mutators. Our results show that during evolution in benign conditions competence helps maintain genome stability but is evolutionary costly; however, during periods of stress this same conservativism enables cells to retain fitness in the face of new mutations, showing for the first time that the benefits of transformation are context dependent.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.