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pubmed:abstractText |
Most plasmids depend on the host replication machinery and possess partitioning genes. These properties confine plasmids to a limited range of hosts, yielding a close and presumably stable relationship between plasmid and host. Hence, it is anticipated that due to amelioration the dinucleotide composition of plasmids is similar to that of the genome of their hosts. However, plasmids are also thought to play a major role in horizontal gene transfer and thus are frequently exchanged between hosts, suggesting dinucleotide composition dissimilarity between plasmid and host genome. We compared the dinucleotide composition of a large collection of plasmids with that of their host genomes to shed more light on this enigma.
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