ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2022
Harmful behaviour through plasmid transfer: a successful evolutionary strategy of bacteria harbouring conjugative plasmids.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
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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, 10 citations in OpenAlex.
- Mobile Genetic Elements as Key Drivers of Bacterial Evolution and Adaptation in Agroecosystems.Microbial ecology · 2026Review
- Do plasmid-dependent phages enable the survival of costly plasmids?bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Plasmid transmission dynamics and evolution of partner quality in a natural population ofmBio · 2025Article
- A chromosomal mutation is superior to a plasmid-encoded mutation for plasmid fitness cost compensation.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Interspecific competition can drive plasmid loss from a focal species in a microbial community.The ISME journal · 2023Article
- 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
- Plasmid Costs Explain Plasmid Maintenance, Irrespective of the Nature of Compensatory Mutations.Antibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- The Impact of Non-Pathogenic Bacteria on the Spread of Virulence and Resistance Genes.International journal of molecular sciences · 2023Review
- Article
- Introduction: the secret lives of microbial mobile genetic elements.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Conjugative plasmids are extrachromosomal mobile genetic elements pervasive among bacteria. Plasmids' acquisition often lowers cells' growth rate, so their ubiquity has been a matter of debate. Chromosomes occasionally mutate, rendering plasmids cost-free. However, these compensatory mutations typically take hundreds of generations to appear after plasmid arrival. By then, it could be too late to compete with fast-growing plasmid-free cells successfully. Moreover, arriving plasmids would have to wait hundreds of generations for compensatory mutations to appear in the chromosome of their new host. We hypothesize that plasmid-donor cells may use the plasmid as a 'weapon' to compete with plasmid-free cells, particularly in structured environments. Cells already adapted to plasmids may increase their inclusive fitness through plasmid transfer to impose a cost to nearby plasmid-free cells and increase the replication opportunities of nearby relatives. A mathematical model suggests conditions under which the proposed hypothesis works, and computer simulations tested the long-term plasmid maintenance. Our hypothesis explains the maintenance of conjugative plasmids not coding for beneficial genes. This article is part of the theme issue 'The secret lives of microbial mobile genetic elements'.
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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.