Evolution of the connectivity and indispensability of a transferable gene: the simplicity hypothesis
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The number of interactions between a transferable gene or its protein product and genes or gene products native to its microbial host is referred to as connectivity. Such interactions impact the tendency of the gene to be retained by evolution following horizontal gene transfer (HGT) into a microbial population. The complexity hypothesis posits that the protein product of a transferable gene with lower connectivity is more likely to function in a way that is beneficial to a new microbial host compared to the protein product of a transferable gene with higher connectivity. A gene with lower connectivity is consequently more likely to be fixed in any microbial population it enters by HGT. The more recently proposed simplicity hypothesis posits that the connectivity of a transferable gene might increase over time within any single microbial population due to gene-host coevolution, but that differential rates of colonization of microbial populations by HGT in accordance with differences in connectivity might act to counter this and even reduce connectivity over time, comprising an evolutionary trade-off. RESULTS: We present a theoretical model that can be used to predict the conditions under which gene-host coevolution might increase or decrease the connectivity of a transferable gene over time. We show that the opportunity to enter new microbial populations by HGT can cause the connectivity of a transferable gene to evolve toward lower values, particularly in an environment that is unstable with respect to the function of the gene's protein product. We also show that a lack of such opportunity in a stable environment can cause the connectivity of a transferable gene to evolve toward higher values. CONCLUSION: Our theoretical model suggests that the connectivity of a transferable gene can change over time toward higher values corresponding to a more sessile state of lower transferability or lower values corresponding to a more itinerant state of higher transferability, depending on the ecological milieu in which the gene exists. We note, however, that a better understanding of gene-host coevolutionary dynamics in natural microbial systems is required before any further conclusions about the veracity of the simplicity hypothesis can be drawn.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it