Serial passage of the opportunistic pathogen <i>Aspergillus flavus</i> through an insect host yields decreased saprobic capacity
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
To study the early stages of the effect of host restriction on pathogen evolution, we subjected the opportunistic fungus Aspergillus flavus to a serial propagation scheme, whereby insect-virulent conidia were selected for repeated passage through an insect host (Galleria mellonella larvae) for 5 generations. Of the 35 lineages promulgated through this scheme, there were no consistent changes in virulence, which was measured by percent mortality of the larvae. There were, however, increases in the number of conidia on the insect cadavers (9 of 35 lineages) and decreases in the number of days between death and the appearance of fungal growth on the cadavers (4 of 35 lineages). Notably, most of the lineages (28 of 35 lineages) demonstrated a statistically significant decrease in the diameter of the colonies subcultured onto artificial media, indicating a decreased ability to grow saprobically. Conversely, most of the A. flavus cultures successively grown on agar media (9 of 10 lineages) exhibited no change in colony diameter after 15 rounds of subculturing. Propagation of the opportunist A. flavus through the insect host G. mellonella resulted in a diminished capacity to grow on an alternate substrate, while maintaining or increasing its ability to use the host as a nutrient supply.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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