Deviation of islet autoreactivity to cryptic epitopes protects NOD mice from diabetes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To better understand loss of self-tolerance in diabetes-prone NOD mice, we are generating ICA69 transgenes under control of the tetracycline-regulated tet07 minimal promoter. In vitro pilot studies showed leaky transgene expression, but addition of beta-globin genomic insulator flanks prevented leakage and dramatically enhanced transgene expression even in transient transfection, with excellent suppression by Doxycycline. In vivo, the accidental loss of insulator flanks during transgene insertion in one transgenic NOD founder, tet1, re-established leakiness with high level, exclusive ICA69-transgene expression in stromal elements of thymus and spleen. This led to persistent deletion of T cells targeting the immunodominant ICA69 epitope, Tep69, but emergence of T cell pools targeting cryptic ICA69 epitopes not normally generated in sufficient density to select and maintain ICA69-autoreactive T cells. This subtle modification of T cell repertoires reduced insulitis, and protected from diabetes in transgenics and in wild-type mice carrying irradiated tet1 thymus grafts. The low pathogenicity of T cells targeting cryptic epitopes likely reflects the fact that the major ICA69 determinant presented in the islet milieu remains Tep69, while cryptic epitopes are under-represented. Deviation of T cell autoreactivity from major to cryptic target epitopes in tet1 mice provides a fortuitous model to explain previously observed diabetes protection by immunotherapy or autoantigen transgenes despite apparent failure to achieve tolerance to the full length islet antigens.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".