Large extrachromosomal replicons are widespread across bacterial lineages and show coordinated replication termination and spatial coupling with the chromosome
Jakub Czarnecki, Morgan Lamberioux, Ole Skovgaard, Amaury Bignaud, Najwa Taib, Théophile Niault, Jasmin Ostermayer, Pascale Bourhy, Julia Bos, Elvira Krakowska, Dariusz Bartosik, Romain Koszul, Martial Marbouty, Didier Mazel, Marie-Eve Val · 2026
Read Large extrachromosomal replicons are widespread across bacterial lineages and show coordinated replication termination and spatial coupling with the chromosome by Jakub Czarnecki, Morgan Lamberioux, Ole Skovgaard, Amaury Bignaud, Najwa Taib, Théophile Niault, Jasmin Ostermayer, Pascale Bourhy, Julia Bos, Elvira Krakowska, Dariusz Bartosik, Romain Koszul, Martial Marbouty, Didier Mazel, Marie-Eve Val (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13342612.txt.
Description
Many bacteria carry large extra chromosomes and plasmids, called replicons, alongside the main one, and Jakub Czarnecki and co-authors ask how widespread and coordinated they are. The team analyzed over forty thousand complete bacterial genomes. Big replicons turned out to be common across many groups, and their chemical makeup drifts toward the main chromosome's as they grow.
For chosen strains from five classes of bacteria, lab measurements showed the extra replicons kept the same copy number as the chromosome and often finished copying at the same time. Contact maps revealed the extra DNA physically touching the chromosome, origin to origin and along whole arms. The study lays groundwork for finding the machinery behind this coordination.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Jakub Czarnecki, Morgan Lamberioux, Ole Skovgaard, Amaury Bignaud, Najwa Taib, Théophile Niault, Jasmin Ostermayer, Pascale Bourhy, Julia Bos, Elvira Krakowska, Dariusz Bartosik, Romain Koszul, Martial Marbouty, Didier Mazel, Marie-Eve Val |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 84 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |