Surveying Diverse <i>Zea</i> Seed for Populations of Bacterial Endophytes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Endophytes are nonpathogenic microbes that inhabit plants. We asked whether bacterial endophytes were conserved in the agriculturally important plant genus Zea as it was domesticated from its wild ancestors (teosintes) to modern maize (corn) and shifted from Mexico to Canada. Kernels from populations of diverse teosintes and maize varieties were screened for bacterial endophytes by culturing, cloning, and DNA fingerprinting using terminal-restriction fragment length polymorphism (TRFLP) of 16S rDNA. Principle component analysis (PCA) of TRFLP data demonstrated that seed endophyte community composition covaries with plant host phylogeny. This result suggests that as humans bred maize plants, they gradually also altered their microbial communities. Interestingly, a core microbiota of endophytes was identified that was conserved in Zea seed across boundaries of evolution, ethnography, and ecology. Consistent with this observation, the majority of seed endophytes in the wild ancestor were found to persist in domesticated maize. Use of GFP-tagged endophytes showed that a subset of seed endophytes could spread systemically through the plant. The seed isolate, Enterobacter asburiae, was able to exit the root and colonize the rhizosphere. We discuss the conservation and diversity of these endophytes in relation to their Zea hosts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".