mutL as a genetic switch of bacterial mutability: turned on or off through repeat copy number changes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bacterial adaptation to changing environments can be achieved through the acquisition of genetic novelty by accumulation of mutations and recombination of laterally transferred genes into the genome, but the mismatch repair (MMR) system strongly inhibits both these types of genetic changes. As mutation and recombination do occur in bacteria, it is of interest to understand how genetic novelty may be achieved in the presence of MMR. Previously, we observed associations of a defective MMR genotype, 6bpΔmutL, with greatly elevated bacterial mutability in Salmonella typhimurium. To validate these observations, we experimentally converted the mutL gene between the wild-type and 6bpΔmutL in S. typhimurium and inspected the bacterial mutability status. When 6bpΔmutL was converted to mutL, the originally highly mutable Salmonella strains regained genetic stability; when mutL was converted to 6bpΔmutL, the mutability was elevated 100-fold. Interestingly, mutL cells were found to grow out of 6bpΔmutL cells; the new mutL cells eventually replaced the original 6bpΔmutL population. As conversion between mutL and 6bpΔmutL may occur readily during DNA replication, it may represent a previously unrecognized mechanism to modulate bacterial mutability at the population level, allowing bacteria to respond rapidly to changing environments while minimizing the risks associated with persistent hypermutability.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".