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Abstract:
Endosymbionts are organisms that live inside the cells of other species. This
lifestyle is ubiquitous across the tree of life and is featured by unicellular
eukaryotes, prokaryotes, and by extrachromosomal genetic elements such
as plasmids. Given that all of these elements dwell in the cytoplasm of their
host cell, they should be subject to similar selection pressures. Here we show
that strikingly similar features have evolved in both bacterial endosymbionts
and plasmids. Since host and endosymbiont are often metabolically tightly
intertwined, they are difficult to disentangle experimentally. We propose that
using plasmids as tractable model systems can help to solve this problem, thus
allowing fundamental questions to be experimentally addressed about the
ecology and evolution of endosymbiotic interactions.
