New PreMiEr Publication: Universal Scaling Laws Discovered Across Thousands of Bacterial Plasmids
A new PreMiEr study published in Nature Communications uncovers three universal scaling laws governing plasmid organization across thousands of bacterial and archaeal genomes, revealing fundamental constraints on how plasmids evolve.
A new PreMiEr study uncovers three universal scaling laws governing how bacterial and archaeal plasmids are organized and function, drawing on analysis of more than 12,000 plasmids across 4,644 genomes. Using a new computational method called pseuPIRA, researchers found that plasmid copy number decreases predictably as plasmid size increases, protein-coding gene content scales linearly with length, and metabolic gene content grows disproportionately in larger plasmids. Together these patterns reveal that as plasmids grow larger they begin to resemble chromosomes in both copy number and gene content, pointing to fundamental constraints on how plasmids evolve. The study was published in Nature Communications.
Read more here: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-61205-2