ArticleEcology and evolution2022
Segregational instability of multicopy plasmids: A population genetics approach.
Article in Ecology and evolution, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed, 10 citations in OpenAlex.
- Plasmid mutation rates scale with copy number.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Bacterial strain type and TEM-1 enzyme allele impact antibiotic susceptibility distribution in monoclonal populations: a single-cell droplet approach.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Evolutionary rescue of bacterial populations by heterozygosity on multicopy plasmids.Journal of mathematical biology · 2025Article
- A mathematician's guide to plasmids: an introduction to plasmid biology for modellers.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2023Review
- Segregational instability of multicopy plasmids: A population genetics approach.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Plasmids are extra-chromosomal genetic elements that encode a wide variety of phenotypes and can be maintained in bacterial populations through vertical and horizontal transmission, thus increasing bacterial adaptation to hostile environmental conditions like those imposed by antimicrobial substances. To circumvent the segregational instability resulting from randomly distributing plasmids between daughter cells upon division, nontransmissible plasmids tend to be carried in multiple copies per cell, with the added benefit of exhibiting increased gene dosage and resistance levels. But carrying multiple copies also results in a high metabolic burden to the bacterial host, therefore reducing the overall fitness of the population. This trade-off poses an existential question for plasmids: What is the optimal plasmid copy number? In this manuscript, we address this question by postulating and analyzing a population genetics model to evaluate the interaction between selective pressure, the number of plasmid copies carried by each cell, and the metabolic burden associated with plasmid bearing in the absence of selection for plasmid-encoded traits. Parameter values of the model were estimated experimentally using
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