Structural factors underlying the species barrier and susceptibility to infection in prion diseaseThis paper is one of a selection of papers published in this special issue entitled “Canadian Society of Biochemistry, Molecular & Cellular Biology 52nd Annual Meeting — Protein Folding: Principles and Diseases” and has undergone the Journal's usual peer review process.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The term prion disease describes a group of fatal neurodegenerative diseases that are believed to be caused by the pathogenic misfolding of a host cell protein, PrP. Susceptibility to prion disease differs between species and incubation periods before symptom onset can change dramatically when infectious prion strains are transmitted between species. This effect is referred to as the species or transmission barrier. Prion strains represent different structures of PrPSc and the conformational selection model proposes that the source of theses barriers is the preferential incorporation of PrP from a given species into only a subset of PrPSc structures of another species. The basis of this preferential incorporation is predicted to reside in subtle structural differences in PrP from varying species. The overall fold of PrP is highly conserved among species, but small differences in the amino acid sequence give rise to structural variability. In particular, the loop between the second beta-strand and the second alpha-helix has shown structural variability between species, with loop mobility correlating with resistance to prion disease. Single amino acid polymorphisms in PrP within a species can also affect prion susceptibility, but do not appear to drastically alter the biophysical properties of the native form. These polymorphisms affect the propensity of self-association, in recombinant PrP, to form beta-sheet enriched, oligomeric, and amyloid-like forms. These results indicate that the major factor in determining susceptibility to prion disease is the ability of PrP to adopt these misfolded forms by promoting conformational change and self association.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".