A reverse transcriptase-related protein mediates phage resistance and polymerizes untemplated DNA in vitro
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reverse transcriptases (RTs) are RNA-dependent DNA polymerases that usually function in the replication of selfish DNAs such as retrotransposons and retroviruses. Here, we have biochemically characterized a RT-related protein, AbiK, which is required for abortive phage infection in the Gram-positive bacterium Lactococcus lactis. In vitro, AbiK does not exhibit the properties expected for an RT, but polymerizes long DNAs of 'random' sequence, analogous to a terminal transferase. Moreover, the polymerized DNAs appear to be covalently attached to the AbiK protein, presumably because an amino acid serves as a primer. Mutagenesis experiments indicate that the polymerase activity resides in the RT motifs and is essential for phage resistance in vivo. These results establish a novel biochemical property and a non-replicative biological role for a polymerase.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".