Phylogenetic and Primary Sequence Characterization of Cathepsin B Cysteine Proteases from the Oxymonad Flagellate <i>Monocercomonoides</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cysteine proteases are crucial for general lysosomal function and for the pathogenic mechanisms of many protistan parasites. Cathepsin B cysteine proteases are currently defined by the presence of the "occluding loop" motif and have been best characterized from humans and their parasites. Though related to a variety of pathogenic excavate flagellates, oxymonads are themselves commensals. While studying this cell biologically aberrant protist lineage, we identified 11 different cathepsin B homologues. These were found to be expressed, at comparable levels to common house-keeping genes, such as elongation factor 1-alpha, alpha-tubulin, beta-tubulin, and glyceraldehyde phosphate dehydrogenase. Primary structure examination of the cathepsin B homologues identified putative signal peptide sequences, and the pre-, pro-, and mature domains of the protein. However, the occluding loop motif was either partially or entirely absent. Comparative genomics, sequence alignment, and phylogenetics of cathepsin sequences from across the diversity of eukaryotes demonstrated that absence of the occluding loop is not a feature exclusive to oxymonads, but is relatively common, suggesting that the "occluding loop" should no longer be used as the defining feature of the cathepsin B subfamily. Overall, this report identifies an abundant protein family in oxymonads, and provides insight both into the evolution and classification of cathepsin B cysteine proteases.
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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) | 0.000 | 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".