Bacteria play important ecological roles and through biodegradation processes, using the pollutants as carbon source to survive, they are fundamental in "cleaning" environments contaminated by anthropogenic activities. We assumed that the main pathways for bacterial adaptation to new contaminants are catabolic genes carried often on plasmids such as IncP-1, IncP-7 and IncP-9 plasmids. To identify "hot spot" environments containing bacterial communities carrying these catabolic plasmids the first step was to understand and predict plasmid dissemination and their functions.weiterlesen