Yes, there next week! Will drop you a line! Somehow thought you had moved

sorry to miss this!

Omg

Congrats on both scores Fernando!

Happy birthday 🎂 🥳

Welcome!

Congrats @taliamycota.bsky.social @hernanaburbano.bsky.social ! Going travelling tomorrow and will def read this, v interesting!

This work touches on many things. It shows within-cell evolution constrains which genes will spread on high-copy plasmids. It also gives a strong hint of the origins of highly-abundant “cryptic” plasmids, showing that multicopy plasmids have strong incentives to lose genes. 13/

Now that we understood neutral dynamics, we turned to competition. What could cause one plasmid to replicate better than another? Our first thought was transcription might interfere with replication, and it turns out there was a much larger tradeoff than we expected! 7/

With this working, as a first test we took two plasmids, identical save for 8 point mutations changing the color, and competed them against one another. Here’s a video of what it looked like when we activated the recombinase. You can see the two compete in real time: 4/

How the genes plasmids carry affect their hosts has been well studied, but this smaller scale of evolution has proven much tougher despite decades of theory. Plasmids are small and replication is fast and hard to measure. 2/

This is fantastic, many congratulations!

The data was collected by the CABBAGE project, which has just been preprinted too: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...