Comparative Toxicity of Fumigants and a Phosphine Synergist Using a Novel Containment Chamber for the Safe Generation of Concentrated Phosphine Gas
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: With the phasing out of ozone-depleting substances in accordance with the United Nations Montreal Protocol, phosphine remains as the only economically viable fumigant for widespread use. However the development of high-level resistance in several pest insects threatens the future usage of phosphine; yet research into phosphine resistance mechanisms has been limited due to the potential for human poisoning in enclosed laboratory environments. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Here we describe a custom-designed chamber for safely containing phosphine gas generated from aluminium phosphide tablets. In an improvement on previous generation systems, this chamber can be completely sealed to control the escape of phosphine. The device has been utilised in a screening program with C. elegans that has identified a phosphine synergist, and quantified the efficacy of a new fumigant against that of phosphine. The phosphine-induced mortality at 20 degrees C has been determined with an LC(50) of 732 ppm. This result was contrasted with the efficacy of a potential new botanical pesticide dimethyl disulphide, which for a 24 hour exposure at 20 degrees C is 600 times more potent than phosphine (LC(50) 1.24 ppm). We also found that co-administration of the glutathione depletor diethyl maleate (DEM) with a sublethal dose of phosphine (70 ppm, <LC(5)), results in a doubling of mortality in C. elegans relative to DEM alone. CONCLUSIONS: The prohibitive danger associated with the generation, containment, and use of phosphine in a laboratory environment has now been substantially reduced by the implementation of our novel gas generation chamber. We have also identified a novel phosphine synergist, the glutathione depletor DEM, suggesting an effective pathway to be targeted in future synergist research; as well as quantifying the efficacy of a potential alternative to phosphine, dimethyl disulphide.
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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".