> In 2013, Sorcha Mc Ginty, a biologist then at the University of Zurich, and her colleagues created a computer model showing that plasmids — genes that move from one bacterium to another — help spur the evolution of cooperation within bacterial communities.
In 2015, a group at Paris Descartes University experimentally demonstrated that when bacteria exchange certain plasmids, the plasmids reprogram the recipient bacteria with genetic information that compels them to contribute to the common good.