Fig. 5.

Flow diagram (a) and system of ODES (b) for the model of Levin et al. [220]. Three types of cells are distinguished: plasmid-free (with density ${\displaystyle n}$ ), an original plasmid-carrying population (with density _{${\displaystyle n_{+}}$} , not shown in the flow diagram) and transconjugants (with density ${\displaystyle n_{\ast }}$ ). Conjugation is modelled through a mass-action kinetics term with conjugation coefficient ${\displaystyle \gamma }$ , and the bacterial populations grow exponentially at rate ${\displaystyle \psi }$ .