“…Our results support a novel function for nodules, highlighting a clear benefit for the bacteria, regarding their diversification and evolution through conjugative transfer. Nodulation is usually a specific process, where certain bacteria interact with certain legumes (Gage, 2004;Popp and Ott, 2011;Westhoek et al, 2017) however, nodules have been shown to contain other endogenous bacteria, including diverse rhizobial and non-rhizobial genera, such as Agrobacterium, Enterobacter, Chryseobacterium, Sphingobacterium, Actinobacteria and unclassified Enterobacteriaceae (Dudeja et al, 2012;Mora et al, 2014;De Meyer et al, 2015;Leite et al, 2016;Lu et al, 2017). Nodules contain a high number of bacteria, about 10 9 (Downie, 2014); even if the most abundant are rhizobia, 10 5 -10 8 may belong to other genera (Sturz et al, 1997;Martínez-Hidalgo and Hirsch, 2017).…”