Plasmids facilitate pathogenicity, not cooperation, in bacteria
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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 both theoretical and genomic analyses. In contrast, with a comparative analysis across 51 diverse species, we found that genes for extracellular proteins, which are likely to act as cooperative ‘public goods’, were not more likely to be carried on either: (i) plasmids compared to chromosomes; or (ii) 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 does not favour 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. Taken together, these results support an alternate hypothesis, that plasmid gene location confers benefits other than horizontal gene transfer.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".