ArticlePLoS genetics2021
Essential gene acquisition destabilizes plasmid inheritance.
Article in PLoS genetics, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 28 citations in OpenAlex.
- Rational engineering of combinatorial bacterial therapies for cancer.Genome biology · 2026Review
- A hybrid machine learning model with attention mechanism and multidimensional multivariate feature coding for essential gene prediction.BMC biology · 2025Article
- Chromosomal capture of beneficial genes drives plasmids toward ecological redundancy.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Genomic analysis ofFrontiers in bioinformatics · 2025Article
- Pseudogenes in plasmid genomes reveal past transitions in plasmid mobility.Nucleic acids research · 2024Article
- Bacteria can maintain rRNA operons solely on plasmids for hundreds of millions of years.Nature communications · 2023Article
- A mathematician's guide to plasmids: an introduction to plasmid biology for modellers.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2023Review
- Characterisation and mobilisation of IncA/C plasmid-mediated antibiotic resistance in Edwardsiella ictaluri.Journal of global antimicrobial resistance · 2023Article
- Plasmid Costs Explain Plasmid Maintenance, Irrespective of the Nature of Compensatory Mutations.Antibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Host-specific plasmid evolution explains the variable spread of clinical antibiotic-resistance plasmids.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Gene transferability and sociality do not correlate with gene connectivity.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Bacterial plasmid-associated and chromosomal proteins have fundamentally different properties in protein interaction networks.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- What makes a megaplasmid?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Gene sharing among plasmids and chromosomes reveals barriers for antibiotic resistance gene transfer.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Gene Duplications Are At Least 50 Times Less Frequent than Gene Transfers in Prokaryotic Genomes.Genome biology and evolution · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Extra-chromosomal genetic elements are important drivers of evolutionary transformations and ecological adaptations in prokaryotes with their evolutionary success often depending on their 'utility' to the host. Examples are plasmids encoding antibiotic resistance genes, which are known to proliferate in the presence of antibiotics. Plasmids carrying an essential host function are recognized as permanent residents in their host. Essential plasmids have been reported in several taxa where they often encode essential metabolic functions; nonetheless, their evolution remains poorly understood. Here we show that essential genes are rarely encoded on plasmids; evolving essential plasmids in Escherichia coli we further find that acquisition of an essential chromosomal gene by a plasmid can lead to plasmid extinction. A comparative genomics analysis of Escherichia isolates reveals few plasmid-encoded essential genes, yet these are often integrated into plasmid-related functions; an example is the GroEL/GroES chaperonin. Experimental evolution of a chaperonin-encoding plasmid shows that the acquisition of an essential gene reduces plasmid fitness regardless of the stability of plasmid inheritance. Our results suggest that essential plasmid emergence leads to a dose effect caused by gene redundancy. The detrimental effect of essential gene acquisition on plasmid inheritance constitutes a barrier for plasmid-mediated lateral gene transfer and supplies a mechanistic understanding for the rarity of essential genes in extra-chromosomal genetic elements.
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