Evolution of a Novel Appendage Ground Plan in Water Striders Is Driven by Changes in the Hox Gene Ultrabithorax
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
Water striders, a group of semi-aquatic bugs adapted to life on the water surface, have evolved mid-legs (L2) that are long relative to their hind-legs (L3). This novel appendage ground plan is a derived feature among insects, where L2 function as oars and L3 as rudders. The Hox gene Ultrabithorax (Ubx) is known to increase appendage size in a variety of insects. Using gene expression and RNAi analysis, we discovered that Ubx is expressed in both L2 and L3, but Ubx functions to elongate L2 and to shorten L3 in the water strider Gerris buenoi. Therefore, within hemimetabolous insects, Ubx has evolved a new expression domain but maintained its ancestral elongating function in L2, whereas Ubx has maintained its ancestral expression domain but evolved a new shortening function in L3. These changes in Ubx expression and function may have been a key event in the evolution of the distinct appendage ground plan in water striders.
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.
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