Discrimination of the toxigenic dinoflagellates <i>Alexandrium tamarense</i> and <i>A. ostenfeldii</i> in co-occurring natural populations from Scottish coastal waters
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Blooms of the toxic dinoflagellate Alexandrium tamarense (Lebour) Balech, a known producer of potent neurotoxins associated with paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP), are common annual events along the Scottish east coast. The cooccurrence of a second Alexandrium species, A. ostenfeldii (Paulsen) Balech & Tangen is reported in this study from waters of the Scottish east coast. The latter species has been suspected to be an alternative source of PSP toxins in northern Europe. Recent identification of toxic macrocyclic imines known as spirolides in A. ostenfeldii indicates a potential new challenge for monitoring toxic Alexandrium species and their respective toxins in natural populations. In mixed Phytoplankton assemblages, Alexandrium species are difficult to discriminate accurately by conventional light microscopy. Species-specific rRNA probes based upon 18S and 28S ribosomal DNA sequences were developed for A. ostenfeldii and tested by dot-blot and fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) techniques. Hybridization patterns of A. ostenfeldii probes for cultured Alexandrium isolates, and cells from field populations from the Scottish east coast, were compared with those of rDNA probes for A. tamarense and a universal dinoflagellate probe. Alexandrium cell numbers in field samples determined by whole-cell in situ hybridization were much lower than those determined by optical microscopy with the Utermöhi method involving sedimentation chambers, but the results were highly correlated (e.g. r 2 = 0.94; n = 6 for A. tamarense). Determination of spirolides and PSP toxins by instrumental analysis on board ship demonstrated the presence of both toxin groups in plankton assemblages collected from surface waters near the Orkney Islands, and confirmed the association of A. ostenfeldii with spirolides in northern Europe. These results show that rRNA probes for A. tamarense and A. ostenfeldii are useful, albeit only semi-quantitative, tools to detect and discriminate these species in field studies.
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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 | 0.000 | 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