Conjugation Related Costs Have Reduced Impact on *in silico* Plasmid Persistence

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. You must log in to post a comment. There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. Add a Comment You must log in to post a comment. Comments There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. Due to the important role they play in the antimicrobial resistance (AMR) crisis and in microbial evolution in general, a great deal of empirical and theoretical work is currently underway, trying to understand plasmid ecology. One of the key questions is how these often costly genetic elements persist in host populations. Here I show that when modelling plasmid population dynamics, it is not sufficient to treat them as always costly (or beneficial). I argue that conjugation related costs may be more important to plasmids in nature than they are in benign laboratory settings. Furthermore, I show that these conjugation related costs can be very severe and still not lead to extinction of a plasmid from a host population. https://doi.org/10.32942/X2390N Life Sciences plasmids, mathematicalmodelling, ecology, microbiology Published: 2024-01-22 12:15 CC-By Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Data and Code Availability Statement: All code to reproduce this work is available at https://github.com/EvoArt/plasmid-costs Language: English