INFECTIOUS ADAPTATION: POTENTIAL HOST RANGE OF A DEFENSIVE ENDOSYMBIONT IN<i>DROSOPHILA</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Maternally transmitted symbionts persist over macroevolutionary timescales by undergoing occasional lateral transfer to new host species. To invade a new species, a symbiont must survive and reproduce in the new host, undergo maternal transmission, and confer a selective benefit sufficient to overcome losses due to imperfect maternal transmission. Drosophila neotestacea is naturally infected with a strain of Spiroplasma that restores fertility to nematode-parasitized females, which are otherwise sterilized by parasitism. We experimentally transferred Spiroplasma from D. neotestacea to four other species of mycophagous Drosophila that vary in their ability to resist and/or tolerate nematode parasitism. In all four species, Spiroplasma achieved within-host densities and experienced rates of maternal transmission similar to that in D. neotestacea. Spiroplasma restored fertility to nematode-parasitized females in one of these novel host species. Based on estimates of maternal transmission fidelity and the expected benefit of Spiroplasma infection in the wild, we conclude that Spiroplasma has the potential to spread and become abundant within Drosophila putrida, which is broadly sympatric with D. neotestacea and in which females are rendered completely sterile by nematode parasitism. Thus, a major adaptation within D. putrida could arise via lateral transmission of a heritable symbiont from D. neotestacea.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".