ArticleThe ISME journal2021
Modeling the ecology of parasitic plasmids.
Article in The ISME journal, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 11 papers.
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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.
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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
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- CRISPR-Cas immune repertoires as an ecological record of bacterial interactions with mobile genetic elements in the human gut.Gut microbes · 2026Article
- Eco-evolutionary dynamics of defense systems in mobile genetic elements: Cui bono?Research square · 2026Article
- Do plasmid-dependent phages enable the survival of costly plasmids?bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Eco-evolutionary dynamics of defense systems in mobile genetic elements: Cui bono?bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Microbiome and plasmidome shifts drive carbon, nitrogen, and greenhouse gas dynamics within transitioning permafrost.Environmental microbiome · 2026Article
- Communities of plasmids as strategies for antimicrobial resistance gene survival in wastewater treatment plant effluent.npj antimicrobials and resistance · 2025Article
- The evolutionary landscape of prokaryotic chromosome/plasmid balance.Communications biology · 2024Article
- A mathematician's guide to plasmids: an introduction to plasmid biology for modellers.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2023Review
- Plasmids Increase the Competitive Ability of Plasmid-Bearing Cells Even When Transconjugants Are Poor Donors, as Shown by Computer Simulations.Microorganisms · 2023Article
- Segregational instability of multicopy plasmids: A population genetics approach.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Mathematical Models of Plasmid Population Dynamics.Frontiers in microbiology · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Plasmids are autonomous genetic elements that can be exchanged between microorganisms via horizontal gene transfer (HGT). Despite the central role they play in antibiotic resistance and modern biotechnology, our understanding of plasmids' natural ecology is limited. Recent experiments have shown that plasmids can spread even when they are a burden to the cell, suggesting that natural plasmids may exist as parasites. Here, we use mathematical modeling to explore the ecology of such parasitic plasmids. We first develop models of single plasmids and find that a plasmid's population dynamics and optimal infection strategy are strongly determined by the plasmid's HGT mechanism. We then analyze models of co-infecting plasmids and show that parasitic plasmids are prone to a "tragedy of the commons" in which runaway plasmid invasion severely reduces host fitness. We propose that this tragedy of the commons is averted by selection between competing populations and demonstrate this effect in a metapopulation model. We derive predicted distributions of unique plasmid types in genomes-comparison to the distribution of plasmids in a collection of 17,725 genomes supports a model of parasitic plasmids with positive plasmid-plasmid interactions that ameliorate plasmid fitness costs or promote the invasion of new plasmids.
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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.