ArticlePLoS genetics2023
Segregational drift hinders the evolution of antibiotic resistance on polyploid replicons.
Article in PLoS genetics, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Plasmid mutation rates scale with copy number.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Intracellular competition shapes plasmid population dynamics.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- SegMantX: A Novel Tool for Detecting DNA Duplications Uncovers Prevalent Duplications in Plasmids.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- 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
- Quantifying stochastic establishment of mutants in microbial adaptation.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2023Review
- A mathematician's guide to plasmids: an introduction to plasmid biology for modellers.Microbiology (Reading, England) · 2023Review
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
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Abstract
The emergence of antibiotic resistance under treatment depends on the availability of resistance alleles and their establishment in the population. Novel resistance alleles are encoded either in chromosomal or extrachromosomal genetic elements; both types may be present in multiple copies within the cell. However, the effect of polyploidy on the emergence of antibiotic resistance remains understudied. Here we show that the establishment of resistance alleles in microbial populations depends on the ploidy level. Evolving bacterial populations under selection for antibiotic resistance, we demonstrate that resistance alleles in polyploid elements are lost frequently in comparison to alleles in monoploid elements due to segregational drift. Integrating the experiments with a mathematical model, we find a remarkable agreement between the theoretical and empirical results, confirming our understanding of the allele segregation process. Using the mathematical model, we further show that the effect of polyploidy on the establishment probability of beneficial alleles is strongest for low replicon copy numbers and plateaus for high replicon copy numbers. Our results suggest that the distribution of fitness effects for mutations that are eventually fixed in a population depends on the replicon ploidy level. Our study indicates that the emergence of antibiotic resistance in bacterial pathogens depends on the pathogen ploidy level.
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