ArticleMolecular biology and evolution2021
Segregational Drift Constrains the Evolutionary Rate of Prokaryotic Plasmids.
Article in Molecular biology and evolution, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 27 citations in OpenAlex.
- Modelling the role of the microbiome in antimicrobial resistance across scales.Nature microbiology · 2026Review
- Plasmid mutation rates scale with copy number.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Plasmid copy number as a modulator in bacterial pathogenesis and antibiotic resistance.npj antimicrobials and resistance · 2025Review
- The combination of active partitioning and toxin-antitoxin systems is most advantageous for low-copy plasmid fitness.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Evolutionary rescue of bacterial populations by heterozygosity on multicopy plasmids.Journal of mathematical biology · 2025Article
- Phenotypic Plasticity During Organofluorine Degradation Revealed by Adaptive Evolution.Microbial biotechnology · 2024Article
- Continuous evolution of user-defined genes at 1 million times the genomic mutation rate.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2024Article
- Live tracking of a plant pathogen outbreak reveals rapid and successive, multidecade plasmid reduction.mSystems · 2024Article
- Identifying and tracking mobile elements in evolving compost communities yields insights into the nanobiome.ISME communications · 2023Article
- 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
- Mutation-induced infections of phage-plasmids.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Segregational instability of multicopy plasmids: A population genetics approach.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Fixation dynamics of beneficial alleles in prokaryotic polyploid chromosomes and plasmids.Genetics · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Plasmids are extrachromosomal genetic elements in prokaryotes that have been recognized as important drivers of microbial ecology and evolution. Plasmids are found in multiple copies inside their host cell where independent emergence of mutations may lead to intracellular genetic heterogeneity. The intracellular plasmid diversity is thus subject to changes upon cell division. However, the effect of plasmid segregation on plasmid evolution remains understudied. Here, we show that genetic drift during cell division-segregational drift-leads to the rapid extinction of novel plasmid alleles. We established a novel experimental approach to control plasmid allele frequency at the levels of a single cell and the whole population. Following the dynamics of plasmid alleles in an evolution experiment, we find that the mode of plasmid inheritance-random or clustered-is an important determinant of plasmid allele dynamics. Phylogenetic reconstruction of our model plasmid in clinical isolates furthermore reveals a slow evolutionary rate of plasmid-encoded genes in comparison to chromosomal genes. Our study provides empirical evidence that genetic drift in plasmid evolution occurs at multiple levels: the host cell and the population of hosts. Segregational drift has implications for the evolutionary rate heterogeneity of extrachromosomal genetic elements.
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