Highly Reliable Heterologous System for Evaluating Resistance of Clinical Herpes Simplex Virus Isolates to Nucleoside Analogues
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Clinical resistance of herpes simplex virus (HSV) types 1 and 2 to acyclovir (ACV) is usually caused by the presence of point mutations within the coding region of the viral thymidine kinase (TK) gene. The distinction between viral TK mutations involved in ACV resistance or part of viral polymorphism can be difficult to evaluate with current methodologies based on transfection and homologous recombination. We have developed and validated a new heterologous system based on the expression of the viral TK gene by the protozoan parasite Leishmania, normally devoid of TK activity. The viral TK genes from 5 ACV-susceptible and 13 ACV-resistant clinical HSV isolates and from the reference strains MS2 (type 2) and KOS (type 1) were transfected as part of an episomal expression vector in Leishmania. The susceptibility of TK-recombinant parasites to ganciclovir (GCV), a closely related nucleoside analogue, was evaluated by a simple measurement of the absorbance of Leishmania cultures grown in the presence of the drug. Expression of the TK gene from ACV-susceptible clinical isolates resulted in Leishmania susceptibility to GCV, whereas expression of a TK gene with frameshift mutations or nucleotide substitutions from ACV-resistant isolates gave rise to parasites with high levels of GCV resistance. The expression of the HSV TK gene in Leishmania provides an easy, reliable, and sensitive assay for evaluating HSV susceptibility to nucleoside analogues and for assessing the role of specific viral TK mutations.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 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".