Beyond the bounds of orthology: functional inference from metagenomic context
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The effectiveness of the computational inference of function by genomic context is bounded by the diversity of known microbial genomes. Although metagenomes offer access to previously inaccessible organisms, their fragmentary nature prevents the conventional establishment of orthologous relationships required for reliably predicting functional interactions. We introduce a protocol for the prediction of functional interactions using data sources without information about orthologous relationships. To illustrate this process, we use the Sargasso Sea metagenome to construct a functional interaction network for the Escherichia coli K12 genome. We identify two reliability metrics, target intergenic distance and source interaction count, and apply them to selectively filter the predictions retained to construct the network of functional interactions. The resulting network contains 2297 nodes with 10 072 edges with a positive predictive value of 0.80. The metagenome yielded 8423 functional interactions beyond those found using only the genomic orthologs as a data source. This amounted to a 134% increase in the total number of functional interactions that are predicted by combining the metagenome and the genomic orthologs versus the genomic orthologs alone. In the absence of detectable orthologous relationships it remains feasible to derive a reliable set of predicted functional interactions. This offers a strategy for harnessing other metagenomes and homologs in general. Because metagenomes allow access to previously unreachable microorganisms, this will result in expanding the universe of known functional interactions thus furthering our understanding of functional organization.
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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 it