The role of hosts, plasmids and environment in determining plasmid transfer rates: A meta-analysis

Plasmids transfer at highly variable rates that spread over 10 orders of magnitude. While rates have been measured for decades and it is known that the rates are affected bysome biotic and abiotic factors, it is unclear how and to what extent these factors determine the rates of transfer. We performed a meta-analysis of 1224 published transfer rates from 33 papers (filtered to 612 transfer rates) to assess this variation. Over three quarters of...