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Fig. 3 | BMC Ecology and Evolution

Fig. 3

From: Evolution of the connectivity and indispensability of a transferable gene: the simplicity hypothesis

Fig. 3

Transition from sessile to itinerant as a function of \(\beta\) under the stochastic model: The direction of the evolutionary trajectory of the metapopulation of transferable genes switches from more sessile to more itinerate as the opportunity to colonize naïve microbial populations increases past a threshold value \(\beta >0.06\). Fifty stochastic simulations were conducted with each value of \(\beta\) considered starting with \({10}^{4}\) populations of the transferable gene with \(\left(y,z\right)=\left(10, 10\right)\). Each circle shows a mean value taken across all fifty simulations. The evolutionary outcome changed from sessile (corresponding to higher mean \(\overline{y }\) and \(\overline{z }\)) to itinerant (corresponding to lower mean \(\overline{y }\) and \(\overline{z }\)) somewhere between \(\beta =0.06\) and \(\beta =0.08\). This demonstrates how a combination of gene-host coevolution within populations and either differential rates of persistence or differential rates of multiplication by HGT can cause the transferable gene to evolve to become more sessile or more itinerant, respectively, depending on the level of opportunity to colonize naïve microbial populations by HGT

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