Serial passage of the opportunistic pathogen <i>Aspergillus flavus</i> through an insect host yields decreased saprobic capacity
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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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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.001 | 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 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".