Use of <i>Tetrahymena thermophila</i> To Study the Role of Protozoa in Inactivation of Viruses in Water
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ability of a ciliate to inactivate bacteriophage was studied because these viruses are known to influence the size and diversity of bacterial populations, which affect nutrient cycling in natural waters and effluent quality in sewage treatment, and because ciliates are ubiquitous in aquatic environments, including sewage treatment plants. Tetrahymena thermophila was used as a representative ciliate; T4 was used as a model bacteriophage. The T4 titer was monitored on Escherichia coli B in a double-agar overlay assay. T4 and the ciliate were incubated together under different conditions and for various times, after which the mixture was centrifuged through a step gradient, producing a top layer free of ciliates. The T4 titer in this layer decreased as coincubation time increased, but no decrease was seen if phage were incubated with formalin-fixed Tetrahymena. The T4 titer associated with the pellet of living ciliates was very low, suggesting that removal of the phage by Tetrahymena inactivated T4. When Tetrahymena cells were incubated with SYBR gold-labeled phage, fluorescence was localized in structures that had the shape and position of food vacuoles. Incubation of the phage and ciliate with cytochalasin B or at 4 degrees C impaired T4 inactivation. These results suggest the active removal of T4 bacteriophage from fluid by macropinocytosis, followed by digestion in food vacuoles. Such ciliate virophagy may be a mechanism occurring in natural waters and sewage treatment, and the methods described here could be used to study the factors influencing inactivation and possibly water quality.
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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".