2-AIN-506, 2-AIN-252: Seminar in Bioinformatics (2), (4)
Summer 2025
Abstrakt

Sergio Arredondo-Alonso, Anna K. Pontinen, Joao A. Gama, Rebecca A. Gladstone, Klaus Harms, Gerry Tonkin-Hill, Harry A. Thorpe, Gunnar S. Simonsen, Orjan Samuelsen, Pal J. Johnsen, Jukka Corander. Plasmid-driven strategies for clone success in Escherichia coli. Nat Commun, 16(1):2921. 2025.

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Download from publisher: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-57940-1 PubMed

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Abstract:

Escherichia coli is the most widely studied microbe in history, but the 
population structure and evolutionary trends of its extrachromosomal elements 
known as plasmids remain poorly delineated. Here we used long-read technology to 
high-resolution sequence the entire plasmidome and the corresponding host 
chromosomes from an unbiased longitudinal survey covering two decades and over 
2000 E. coli isolates. We find that some plasmids have persisted in lineages even 
for centuries, demonstrating strong plasmid-lineage associations. Our analysis 
provides a detailed map of recent vertical and horizontal evolutionary events 
involving plasmids with key antibiotic resistance, competition and virulence 
determinants. We present genomic evidence of both chromosomal and plasmid-driven 
success strategies adopted by distant lineages by independently inheriting the 
same genomic elements. Further, we use in vitro experiments to verify the 
importance of key bacteriocin-producing plasmids for clone success. Our study has 
general implications for understanding plasmid biology and bacterial evolutionary 
strategies.