VEGF <sub>189</sub> Expression Is Highly Related to Adaptation of the Plateau Pika ( <i>Ochotona curzoniae</i> ) Inhabiting High Altitudes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The plateau pika (Ochotona curzonia) has adapted to high-altitude hypoxia during evolution. Higher microvessel density in specific tissues and a blunted hypoxic pulmonary vasoconstriction response are the critical components of this adaptation. VEGF, vascular endothelial growth factor, has proved to be a key regulator of angiogenesis in response to tissue hypoxia and to play an important role in vascular vasodilation. However, the role of VEGF in adaptation to high-altitude hypoxia in the plateau pika remains unknown. In this study, we cloned cDNAs for VEGF165 and VEGF189 and examined their expression in pikas inhabiting altitudes of 3200 and 4750 m. Phylogenetic analysis reveals that pika VEGF165 and VEGF189 are evolutionarily conserved. Real-time PCR analysis demonstrates that VEGF165 and VEGF189 display tissue and altitude-specific expression patterns. Interestingly, we found that the levels of VEGF189 mRNA are significantly higher than those of VEGF165 in the brain and muscle tissues of the pika, which is different from what was previously observed in sea-level mammals. VEGF189 mRNA levels in brain, muscle, and lung of the pika increased with increased habitat altitude, whereas VEGF165 shows less change. Our study suggests an important role for VEGF189 in adaptation to hypoxia by the plateau pika in the high-altitude environment.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".