Adhesion of <i>Aspergillus</i> Species to Extracellular Matrix Proteins: Evidence for Involvement of Negatively Charged Carbohydrates on the Conidial Surface
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Invasive lung disease caused by Aspergillus species is a potentially fatal infection in immunocompromised patients. The adhesion of Aspergillus fumigatus conidia to proteins in the basal lamina is thought to be an initial step in the development of invasive aspergillosis. The purpose of this study was to determine the mechanism of adhesion of A. fumigatus conidiospores to basal-lamina proteins and to determine whether conidia possess unique adhesins which allow them to colonize the host. We compared conidia from different Aspergillus species for the ability to bind to purified fibronectin and intact basal lamina. Adhesion assays using immobilized fibronectin or type II pneumocyte-derived basal lamina showed that A. fumigatus conidia bound significantly better than those of other Aspergillus species to both fibronectin and intact basal lamina. Neither desialylation nor complete deglycosylation of fibronectin decreased the binding of A. fumigatus conidia to fibronectin, suggesting that oligosaccharides on fibronectin were not involved in conidiospore binding. Further evidence for this hypothesis came from experiments using purified fragments of fibronectin; A. fumigatus conidia preferentially bound to the nonglycosylated 40-kDa fragment which contains the glycosaminoglycan (GAG) binding domain. Negatively charged carbohydrates, including dextran sulfate and heparin, as well as high-ionic-strength buffers, inhibited binding of A. fumigatus conidia to both fibronectin and intact basal lamina, suggesting that negatively charged carbohydrates on the surface of the conidium may bind to the GAG binding domain of fibronectin and other basal-lamina proteins. These data provide evidence for a novel mechanism of conidial attachment whereby adherence to fibronectin and other basal-lamina proteins is mediated via negatively charged carbohydrates on the conidial surface.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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".