A class of eukaryotic GTPase with a punctate distribution suggesting multiple functional replacements of translation elongation factor 1α
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Translation elongation factor 1alpha (EF-1alpha, or EF-Tu in bacteria) is a highly conserved core component of the translation machinery that is shared by all cellular life. It is part of a large superfamily of GTPases that are involved in translation initiation, elongation, and termination, as well as several other cellular functions. Eukaryotic EF-1alpha (eEF-1alpha) is well studied and widely sampled and has been used extensively for phylogenetic analyses. It is generally thought that such highly conserved and functionally integrated proteins are unlikely to be involved in events such as lateral gene transfer or ancient duplication and gene sorting, which would undermine phylogenetic reconstruction. Here we describe a GTPase called EF-like (EFL), which is very similar to, but also distinct from, canonical eEF-1alpha. EFL is found in a wide variety of eukaryotes (dinoflagellates, haptophytes, cercozoa, green algae, choanoflagellates, and fungi), but its distribution is punctate: organisms that possess EFL are not closely related to one another, and EFL appears to be absent from the closest relatives of organisms that do possess it. Moreover, in most genomes where EFL is present, canonical eEF-1alpha appears to be absent. Analysis of functional divergence suggests that, whereas EFL is divergent in general, putative functional binding sites involved in translation are not significantly divergent as a whole. Altogether, it appears that EFL has replaced eEF-1alpha several times independently. This finding could be an indication of an ancient paralogy or, more likely, eukaryote-to-eukaryote lateral gene transfer.
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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 | 0.001 | 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".