Differential Recognition and Hydrolysis of Host Carbohydrate Antigens by Streptococcus pneumoniae Family 98 Glycoside Hydrolases
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The presence of a fucose utilization operon in the Streptococcus pneumoniae genome and its established importance in virulence indicates a reliance of this bacterium on the harvesting of host fucose-containing glycans. The identities of these glycans, however, and how they are harvested is presently unknown. The biochemical and high resolution x-ray crystallographic analysis of two family 98 glycoside hydrolases (GH98s) from distinctive forms of the fucose utilization operon that originate from different S. pneumoniae strains reveal that one enzyme, the predominant type among pneumococcal isolates, has a unique endo-beta-galactosidase activity on the LewisY antigen. Altered active site topography in the other species of GH98 enzyme tune its endo-beta-galactosidase activity to the blood group A and B antigens. Despite their different specificities, these enzymes, and by extension all family 98 glycoside hydrolases, use an inverting catalytic mechanism. Many bacterial and viral pathogens exploit host carbohydrate antigens for adherence as a precursor to colonization or infection. However, this is the first evidence of bacterial endoglycosidase enzymes that are known to play a role in virulence and are specific for distinct host carbohydrate antigens. The strain-specific distribution of two distinct types of GH98 enzymes further suggests that S. pneumoniae strains may specialize to exploit host-specific antigens that vary from host to host, a factor that may feature in whether a strain is capable of colonizing a host or establishing an invasive infection.
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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) | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".