Spatial structure and benefits to hosts allow plasmids with and without post-segregational killing systems to coexist
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To persist, a plasmid relies on being passed on to a daughter cell, but this does not always occur. Plasmids with post-segregational killing (PSK) systems kill a daughter cell if the plasmid has not been passed on. By killing the host, it also kills competing plasmids in the same host, something competing plasmids without a similar system cannot do. Accordingly, plasmids with PSK systems can displace other plasmids. In nature, plasmids with and without PSK systems coexist and prior theory has suggested this is expected to be very rare or unstable, such that one or the other type of plasmid eventually takes over. Here, we show that if there is spatial structure and plasmids confer benefits to hosts, coexistence of plasmids occurs broadly. Often plasmids confer benefits (even ones with a PSK system) and bacteria are often spatially structured. So, our results may be generally applicable.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 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".