Month: September 2022

SELF-REPLICATING PLASMIDS. "Many are mobile genetic elements that direct their own transmission to new host cells during conjugation (the unicellular equivalent of sex), thereby spreading themselves to closely related and evolutionarily distant prokaryotes. They are then transmitted vertically, from mother to daughter cells." https://lnkd.in/e7VVjkg View in LinkedIn

INDEPENDENT GOALS. "The complexities of plasmid characteristics have led some biologists to describe them as ‘subcellular organisms’ or endosymbionts with distinct autonomy from their host. Plasmids are often described as selfish in the same way that other genetic elements are because they encode genes that are not essential for the host and may impose fitness costs." https://lnkd.in/e7VVjkg View in LinkedIn

COLLABORATIVE ACTIVES. "Plasmids often encode and express genes of a variety of functions apart from those for their own mobility and replication, such as antibiotic resistance, virulence, environmental protection (including biofilm formation), DNA repair and supplementary metabolic pathways. They can thus be seen as collaborative elements that enhance the functionality and adaptiveness of their host cells." https://lnkd.in/e7VVjkg View in LinkedIn

OVERLAPPING GENE SETS. "The extended virus world, which includes both bona fide viruses and related mobile elements, is a complex network of genomes that share partially overlapping sets of genes." https://lnkd.in/eqriJpu View in LinkedIn

PLASMID FIRST ROLE. "Prokaryotic plasmids have a dual importance in the microbial world: first they have a great impact on the metabolic functions of the host cell, providing additional traits that can be accumulated in the cell without altering the gene content of the bacterial chromosome." https://lnkd.in/e4bYaQJ View in LinkedIn

PLASMID SECOND ROLE. "Plasmids can provide a basis for genomic rearrangements via homologous recombination and so they can facilitate the loss or acquisition of genes during these events, which eventually may lead to horizontal gene transfer (HGT)." http://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-10-59 View in LinkedIn

PLASMIDS "are actually involved in many accessory functions and constitute, together with "not essential" chromosomal regions, what is referred to as the "dispensable genome" in the microbial pan-genome concept." http://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-10-59 View in LinkedIn

FRESH GENES. "Typically, a plasmid includes one or more essential genes encoding replicative functions. In addition, it may harbor one or more genes coding for a variable panoply of accessory metabolic processes and functions that are, in general, different from those encoded by chromosome(s)." http://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-10-59 View in LinkedIn

PRIMITIVE REPLICONS. "Studies on the origin and evolution of plasmids may provide valuable insights on the promiscuous nature of DNA. The first examples of the selfish nature of nucleic acids are exemplified by primordial oligoribonucleotides which evolved into primitive replicons." https://lnkd.in/etHekGu View in LinkedIn

SEPARATE SELECTION. " Plasmids genes are in fact under differential selection while moving through the prokaryotic community, and consequently, they frequently gain and lose genes, revealing a very dynamic organization. This flexibility is mostly due to the abundance of transposable elements they harbor and that facilitate intra- and intermolecular recombination by creating homology regions. Moreover, plasmids can be both vertically and horizontally inherited in a prokaryotic community." http://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-10-59 View in LinkedIn