Bibliographic record
Abstract
Melanins represent a group of dark pigments made of polymerized phenolic and indole subunits and whose exact structures are undefined. Melanin plays a number of roles in the biology of fungi, including being essential for pathogenesis via several mechanisms. Plant pathogens use melanin to build rigid appressoria structures to penetrate plant cell walls while human pathogens use it to protect against host immune responses. Despite this requirement for pathogenesis in diverse organisms, we remain in the dark about many features of melanin. In this issue of Virulence, Eisenman et al. reveal some surprising new aspects about melanization in the human pathogenic fungus Cryptococcus neoformans. C. neoformans and C. gattii are pathogens found around the world, causing disease in both immunocompromised and healthy patients, as well as in diverse mammalian species that include domestic pets, livestock, marsupials and even porpoises. The predominance of fatal cases is in AIDS patients in sub-Saharan Africa. The sudden emergence of C. gattii on Vancouver Island and subsequent spread into mainland Canada and the United States during the last decade, causing disease in healthy people and their pets, further illustrates the complex health challenges posed globally by this pair of species. Cryptococcus is contracted by inhalation to initiate a pulmonary disease in susceptible individuals. The fungus spreads from the lungs throughout the body, with the unusual ability to cross the blood-brain barrier to cause fatal meningoencephalitis. C. neoformans requires phenolic substrates to produce melanin. Those substrates are most prevalent in the New surprises from within the black box of fungal melanization
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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".