ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2024
Genes for cooperation are not more likely to be carried by plasmids.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- 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
- A phylogenetic approach to comparative genomics.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2025Review
- Parallel ecological and evolutionary responses to selection in a natural bacterial community.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Genes for cooperation are not more likely to be carried by plasmids.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
Cooperation is prevalent across bacteria, but risks being exploited by non-cooperative cheats. Horizontal gene transfer, particularly via plasmids, has been suggested as a mechanism to stabilize cooperation. A key prediction of this hypothesis is that genes which are more likely to be transferred, such as those on plasmids, should be more likely to code for cooperative traits. Testing this prediction requires identifying all genes for cooperation in bacterial genomes. However, previous studies used a method which likely misses some of these genes for cooperation. To solve this, we used a new genomics tool, SOCfinder, which uses three distinct modules to identify all kinds of genes for cooperation. We compared where these genes were located across 4648 genomes from 146 bacterial species. In contrast to the prediction of the hypothesis, we found no evidence that plasmid genes are more likely to code for cooperative traits. Instead, we found the opposite-that genes for cooperation were more likely to be carried on chromosomes. Overall, the vast majority of genes for cooperation are not located on plasmids, suggesting that the more general mechanism of kin selection is sufficient to explain the prevalence of cooperation across bacteria.
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