ArticleMolecular biology and evolution2019
Segregational Drift and the Interplay between Plasmid Copy Number and Evolvability.
Article in Molecular biology and evolution, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers.
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Who cites it
39 citing papers in PubMed, 80 citations in OpenAlex.
- The shared evolutionary capacities of plasmids and extrachromosomal DNA.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2026Review
- Plasmid mutation rates scale with copy number.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Intracellular competition shapes plasmid population dynamics.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- Effectiveness of CRISPR-Cas in sensitizing bacterial populations with plasmid-encoded antimicrobial resistance.Genetics · 2025Article
- ACCIO: An Assembly-Based Tool Enabling Plasmid Detection.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- The role of plasmid copy number and mutation rate in evolutionary outcomes.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- The combination of active partitioning and toxin-antitoxin systems is most advantageous for low-copy plasmid fitness.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Universal rules govern plasmid copy number.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Scaling laws of bacterial and archaeal plasmids.Nature communications · 2025Article
- The Spread of Antibiotic Resistance Is Driven by Plasmids Among the Fastest Evolving and of Broadest Host Range.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Birmingham-group IncP-1Microbial genomics · 2025Article
- Evolutionary rescue of bacterial populations by heterozygosity on multicopy plasmids.Journal of mathematical biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Exploring the eco-evolutionary role of plasmids and defense systems in 'Frontiers in microbiology · 2025Article
- Phenotypic Plasticity During Organofluorine Degradation Revealed by Adaptive Evolution.Microbial biotechnology · 2024Article
- Applying rearrangement distances to enable plasmid epidemiology with pling.Microbial genomics · 2024Article
- Heteroplasmy Is Rare in Plant Mitochondria Compared with Plastids despite Similar Mutation Rates.Molecular biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Rational evolution for altering the ligand preference of estrogen receptor alpha.Protein science : a publication of the Protein Society · 2024Article
- Segregational drift hinders the evolution of antibiotic resistance on polyploid replicons.PLoS genetics · 2023Article
- A mathematician's guide to plasmids: an introduction to plasmid biology for modellers.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
The ubiquity of plasmids in all prokaryotic phyla and habitats and their ability to transfer between cells marks them as prominent constituents of prokaryotic genomes. Many plasmids are found in their host cell in multiple copies. This leads to an increased mutational supply of plasmid-encoded genes and genetically heterogeneous plasmid genomes. Nonetheless, the segregation of plasmid copies into daughter cells during cell division is considered to occur in the absence of selection on the plasmid alleles. We investigate the implications of random genetic drift of multicopy plasmids during cell division-termed here "segregational drift"-to plasmid evolution. Performing experimental evolution of low- and high-copy non-mobile plasmids in Escherichia coli, we find that the evolutionary rate of multicopy plasmids does not reflect the increased mutational supply expected according to their copy number. In addition, simulated evolution of multicopy plasmid alleles demonstrates that segregational drift leads to increased loss frequency and extended fixation time of plasmid mutations in comparison to haploid chromosomes. Furthermore, an examination of the experimentally evolved hosts reveals a significant impact of the plasmid type on the host chromosome evolution. Our study demonstrates that segregational drift of multicopy plasmids interferes with the retention and fixation of novel plasmid variants. Depending on the selection pressure on newly emerging variants, plasmid genomes may evolve slower than haploid chromosomes, regardless of their higher mutational supply. We suggest that plasmid copy number is an important determinant of plasmid evolvability due to the manifestation of segregational drift.
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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.