A Plastid without a Genome: Evidence from the Nonphotosynthetic Green Algal Genus <i>Polytomella</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Polytomella spp. are free-living, nonphotosynthetic green algae closely related to the model organism Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Although colorless, Polytomella spp. have a plastid, but it is still unknown whether they harbor a plastid genome. We took a next generation sequencing approach, along with transcriptome sequencing, to search for a plastid genome and an associated gene expression system in Polytomella spp. Illumina sequencing of total DNA from four Polytomella spp. did not produce any recognizable plastid-derived reads but did generate a large number of mitochondrial DNA sequences. Transcriptomic analysis of Polytomella parva uncovered hundreds of putative nuclear-encoded, plastid-targeted proteins, which support the presence of plastid-based metabolic functions, similar to those observed in the plastids of other nonphotosynthetic algae. Conspicuously absent, however, were any plastid-targeted proteins involved in the expression, replication, or repair of plastid DNA. Based on these findings and earlier findings, we argue that the Polytomella genus represents the first well-supported example, to our knowledge, of a primary plastid-bearing lineage without a plastid genome.
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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".