Abstract
An earlier perspective on the diversity of conjugative elements in microbes [1] attempted to provide a broad audience with an introductory overview of the arcane biology of mobile genetic elements and their terminologies. It might well have been entitled “Plasmids, ICEs, IMEs, and Other Mobile Elements for Dummies,” but common sense prevailed. This perspective introduces two related articles in the current issue of PLOS Genetics [2], [3] and might have equally aptly been entitled “Antibiotic-Resistant Plasmids and Their Epidemiology for Dummies.”
Highlights
An earlier perspective on the diversity of conjugative elements in microbes [1] attempted to provide a broad audience with an introductory overview of the arcane biology of mobile genetic elements and their terminologies
Published analyses based on short reads are not immediately useful for incremental analyses because short reads are submitted to public databases, their assemblies and SNP calls are rarely made publicly available
Lanza et al [2] reconstruct the genomes of several ST131 Escherichia coli genomes and use a novel method, PLACNET, to reconstruct an average of four plasmid genomes per strain
Summary
An earlier perspective on the diversity of conjugative elements in microbes [1] attempted to provide a broad audience with an introductory overview of the arcane biology of mobile genetic elements and their terminologies. Published analyses based on short reads (including the two described here) are not immediately useful for incremental analyses because short reads are submitted to public databases, their assemblies and SNP calls are rarely made publicly available. To reconstruct plasmid genomes from several sets of E. coli strains isolated from farm animals and humans, each of which was previously thought to represent recent host jumps.
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