Antonio Prestes García edited untitled.tex  over 8 years ago

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The Domain Bacteria encompass one of most diverse and abundant form of life on earth. Part of this diversity is certainly in part a direct consequence of a succinct genome complemented by the existence of a feature rich supra-individual gene pool which is readily available for individuals in a population through different mechanisms. One of these mechanisms is the bacterial conjugation which is basically a form of horizontal gene transfer where cluster of genes are transferred from cell to cell in some population. The plasmids, which are the fundamental unit of horizontal gene transfer, are circular double stranded DNA and they are also autonomous replicons replicating independently of bacterial chromosome and having their own life-cycle.   Plasmids can also cross the domain boundaries and infect eukaryotic cells, as can be observed in genus Agrobacterium, {\it Agrobacterium},  responsible for causing plant diseases. That is the case of {\it  A. rhizogenes rhizogenes}  and {\it  A. tumefaciens tumefaciens}  and their associated plasmids which are termed Ri and Ti standing respectively for root inducer and tumor inducer plasmids. These plasmids are responsible for hairy root and crown gall plant diseases respectively. On the other hand the genus Rhizobium and its associated plasmids induce the nodule formation on plant roots acting as symbionts in the atmospheric nitrogen fixation process. These plasmids can also be harnessed for the insertion of T-DNA in plants to create transgenic cultivars. The bacterial gene pool is also used for genetic engineered plant cultivar creation such as herbicide resistant transgenic plants. That is the case of aroA gene coding the AprA enzymes which makes the plant show tolerance to glyphosate. Last but not least important, plasmids are deemed to be the main cause of spreading the multi-drug resistance associated with bacterial populations exposed to the antibiotic selective pressure. In fact this severely limits the arsenal of drugs available to fight against bacterial infections. Conjugative plasmids are also the basic bricks for more complex applications [cite goñi, benes, ..] in synthetic biology but despite of the high relevance, there are either no dependable technique readily available yet which have been thoroughly test and systematically validated against the experimental data or just an accepted standard to model the plasmid spread dynamics using single cell resolution.