ArticleNature ecology & evolution2021
Plasmids do not consistently stabilize cooperation across bacteria but may promote broad pathogen host-range.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers.
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Who cites it
33 citing papers in PubMed.
- How social is social resistance?Essays in biochemistry · 2026Review
- Article
- The Evolutionary and Ecological Consequences of Cooperation.The American naturalist · 2026Review
- Cooperation and the evolution of bacterial niche breadth.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Studying adaptation at the invisible scale.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Cooperative antibiotic resistance in bacteria: beyond biofilms.Frontiers in microbiology · 2026Review
- Horizontal gene transfer, segregation loss, and the speed of microbial adaptation.Evolution letters · 2025Article
- Comparative Genomic Analysis and Antimicrobial Resistance Profile ofVeterinary sciences · 2025Article
- Cooperative resistance varies among β-lactamases in E. coli, with some enabling cross-protection and sustained extracellular activity.Communications biology · 2025Article
- A phylogenetic approach to comparative genomics.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2025Review
- Spatial population dynamics of bacterial colonies with social antibiotic resistance.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Chromosomal capture of beneficial genes drives plasmids toward ecological redundancy.The ISME journal · 2025Article
- Elevated Rates of Molecular Evolution Genome-wide in Mutualist Legumes and Rhizobia.Molecular biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Bacterial lifestyle shapes pangenomes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Co-localization of antibiotic resistance genes is widespread in the infant gut microbiome and associates with an immature gut microbial composition.Microbiome · 2024Article
- Genes for cooperation are not more likely to be carried by plasmids.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- SOCfinder: a genomic tool for identifying social genes in bacteria.Microbial genomics · 2023Article
- The social lives of viruses and other mobile genetic elements: a commentary on Leeks et al. 2023.Journal of evolutionary biology · 2023Article
- Signatures of kin selection in a natural population of the bacteriaEvolution letters · 2023Article
- Interspecific competition can drive plasmid loss from a focal species in a microbial community.The ISME journal · 2023Article
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7 authors.
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Abstract
Horizontal gene transfer via plasmids could favour cooperation in bacteria, because transfer of a cooperative gene turns non-cooperative cheats into cooperators. This hypothesis has received support from theoretical, genomic and experimental analyses. By contrast, we show here, with a comparative analysis across 51 diverse species, that genes for extracellular proteins, which are likely to act as cooperative 'public goods', were not more likely to be carried on either: (1) plasmids compared to chromosomes; or (2) plasmids that transfer at higher rates. Our results were supported by theoretical modelling which showed that, while horizontal gene transfer can help cooperative genes initially invade a population, it has less influence on the longer-term maintenance of cooperation. Instead, we found that genes for extracellular proteins were more likely to be on plasmids when they coded for pathogenic virulence traits, in pathogenic bacteria with a broad host-range.
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