We found something interesting in the evolution of plant microbiota. It is under review and we published the preprint today. Avi Bograd from my lab analyzed the genomes of 38,912 bacteria and identified a clear depletion of all MGE types in plant-associated bacteria vs. non-plant associated bacteria
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This pehnomenon is taxonomy-independent and appears in many bacterial families.
We tested if this phenomenon is reproducible also in 6,073 shotgun metagenomes and indeed, it is mostly reproducible.
Prophages, plasmids, and defense system are found lower abundance in plant microbiomes vs. other microbiomes,
We have some ideas but we don't fully understand why this happened as part of bacterial adaptation to the plant envrionment. Some of the effect is likely soil mediated.
More in this short report:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.17.623994v1
still absorbing your results but had to comment on that word
Also
..if your effect is soil-mediated does that imply Agrobacterium?
It affects many families, not only Agrobacterium.
We think there is some effect to soil, which is the reservoir of many plant microbes, because we saw some reduction in MGEs between other environments and soil bacteria (fig. 1C).
Is there any study or indication that suggests minerals or electric potential plays a role in competency for Mobility of the MBEs?
Like could it be a chemical rather than biological factor which increases/reduces?
BTW, for some reason, transposons show opposite distribution based on isolate genomes and metagenomes. The rest of MGEs behave in a coherent way.