Posts Categorized:

Displacement of Bacterial Plasmids by Engineered Unilateral Incompatibility

By Robert Gooding-Townsend, Steven Ten Holder, and Brian Ingalls
Published August 19, 2015.

Bacterial plasmids employ copy number control systems to ensure that they do not overburden their hosts. Plasmid incompatibility is caused by shared components of copy number control systems, resulting in mutual inhibition of replication. Incompatible plasmids cannot be stably maintained within a host cell. Unilateral incompatibility, in which the plasmid replicons are compatible but one plasmid encodes for the replication inhibitor of the other, leads to rapid displacement of the inhibited plasmid. Thus, we propose that the unilateral incompatibility can be used to eradicate an undesirable plasmid from a population. To investigate this process, we developed deterministic and stochastic models of plasmid dynamics. An analysis of these models provides predictions about the efficacy of plasmid displacement.

View the full article at IEEE Xplore

About the Life Sciences Letters

IEEE Life Sciences Letters (LSL) is a new digital, peer reviewed open access journal. The LSL publication will focus on shorter papers with a quick turnaround, in the area of personalized medicine, pharmaceutical engineering, synthetic biology, and systems biology. Learn more about the scope here. Information for authors can be found here.

Editor-in-Chief

Paolo BonatoInterim Editor-in-Chief
Paolo Bonato

Senior Editors

Leroy HoodSenior Editor for Personalized Medicine
Leroy Hood

Richard D. BraatzSenior Editor for Pharmaceutical Engineering
Richard D. Braatz

Ron WeissSenior Editor for Synthetic Biology
Ron Weiss

Hiroaki KitanoSenior Editor for Systems Biology
Hiroaki Kitano

For biographies and the list of all of the editors, click here.