Otherwise, we don’t say much about fitness benefits of transfer for the attacker/donor. It’s more a project about understanding how HGT can influence competitions between an attacker and a sensitive. We found metabolic diversity between competitors was key to high abundances of transconjugants

There were very small windows of parameter space where i did actually see a fitness benefit for the donor by giving away the toxin-bearing plasmid to a competitor. This I find very interesting, but outside the scope of this project… maybe something fun for the future.

Limiting the number of possible transconjugants. When we reduce nutrient competition by including a 2nd nutrient and some niche separation, the population of recipients is able to expand which are then rapidly converted to transconjugants.

Hi!
I did the modeling work for this project with Elisa. We take standard equations for modeling a community that starts with donors and recipients, which can be converted to transconjugants. In conditions with high nutrient competition, toxins dominate. Rapidly killing susceptible recipients and …