ArticleThe ISME journal2015
Broad host range plasmids can invade an unexpectedly diverse fraction of a soil bacterial community.
Article in The ISME journal, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 186 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
186 citing papers in PubMed, 458 citations in OpenAlex.
- Plasmidomics: studying plasmids as ecological entities beyond their hosts.Microbial genomics · 2026Review
- Invasive plasmids as ecosystem engineers-from mechanism to application.Essays in biochemistry · 2026Review
- Soil Acidification Enriches Antibiotic Resistome.Global change biology · 2026Article
- Inter-species horizontal transfer of biosynthetic gene clusters: an evolutionary driver for chemical diversity in bacterial communities.Essays in biochemistry · 2026Review
- Horizontal Gene Transfer and Genome Rearrangements Shape Bacterial Adaptation for Bioremediation.Environmental microbiology · 2026Review
- Using auxotrophic donor strains to explore pQBR57 plasmid host range among environmental soil bacterial isolates.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2026Article
- Mobile Genetic Elements as Key Drivers of Bacterial Evolution and Adaptation in Agroecosystems.Microbial ecology · 2026Review
- A Seven-Year Study of Carbapenem-ResistantAntibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Urban greenspaces harbour distinct plasmid communities enriched in heavy metal resistance and competitive traits in arid soils.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2026Article
- Plastic leachates drive conjugative transfer of antibiotic resistance genes.Environmental science and ecotechnology · 2026Article
- The interplay between ecological networks drives host-plasmid community dynamics.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Horizontal and vertical gene transfer shape the plasmid host range in surface-associated microbial systems.iScience · 2026Article
- PlasRAG: comprehensive plasmid characterization and retrieval through sequence-text alignment.Genome biology · 2026Article
- Information storage across a microbial community using universal RNA barcoding.Nature biotechnology · 2026Article
- CRISPR-Cas is beneficial in plasmid competition, but limited by competitor toxin-antitoxin activity when horizontally transferred.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Synthetic Biology of Plants and Microbes for Agriculture, Environment, and Future Applications.Chemical reviews · 2026Review
- Host range and antibiotic resistance dissemination are shaped by distinct survival strategies of conjugative plasmids.Nucleic acids research · 2026Article
- Membrane perturbation by the last-resort antibiotic polymyxin B drives biphasic regulation of horizontal gene transfer.The ISME journal · 2026Article
- Effect of biofilm lifestyle caused by water matric potential on invasion of exogenous plasmid.ISME communications · 2026Article
- Selective shifts in mobile antibiotic resistance genes under carbamazepine exposure in wastewater microbiomes.ISME communications · 2026Article
126 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Conjugal plasmids can provide microbes with full complements of new genes and constitute potent vehicles for horizontal gene transfer. Conjugal plasmid transfer is deemed responsible for the rapid spread of antibiotic resistance among microbes. While broad host range plasmids are known to transfer to diverse hosts in pure culture, the extent of their ability to transfer in the complex bacterial communities present in most habitats has not been comprehensively studied. Here, we isolated and characterized transconjugants with a degree of sensitivity not previously realized to investigate the transfer range of IncP- and IncPromA-type broad host range plasmids from three proteobacterial donors to a soil bacterial community. We identified transfer to many different recipients belonging to 11 different bacterial phyla. The prevalence of transconjugants belonging to diverse Gram-positive Firmicutes and Actinobacteria suggests that inter-Gram plasmid transfer of IncP-1 and IncPromA-type plasmids is a frequent phenomenon. While the plasmid receiving fractions of the community were both plasmid- and donor- dependent, we identified a core super-permissive fraction that could take up different plasmids from diverse donor strains. This fraction, comprising 80% of the identified transconjugants, thus has the potential to dominate IncP- and IncPromA-type plasmid transfer in soil. Our results demonstrate that these broad host range plasmids have a hitherto unrecognized potential to transfer readily to very diverse bacteria and can, therefore, directly connect large proportions of the soil bacterial gene pool. This finding reinforces the evolutionary and medical significances of these plasmids.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.