Grow now, pay later: When should a bacterium go into debt?

Microbes grow in a wide variety of environments and must balance growth and stress resistance. Despite the prevalence of such trade-offs, understanding of their role in nonsteady environments is limited. In this study, we introduce a mathematical model of "growth debt," where microbes grow rapidly initially, paying later with slower growth or heightened mortality.

gplas: a comprehensive tool for plasmid analysis using short-read graphs.

Summary: Plasmids can horizontally transmit genetic traits, enabling rapid bacterial adaptation to new environments and hosts. Short-read whole-genome sequencing data are often applied to large-scale bacterial comparative genomics projects but the reconstruction of plasmids from these data is facing severe limitations, such as the inability to distinguish plasmids from each other in a bacterial genome. We developed gplas, a new approach to reliably separate plasmid contigs into discrete components using sequence composition, coverage, assembly graph information and network partitioning based on a pruned network of plasmid unitigs.