The D3 Bacteriophage α-Polymerase Inhibitor (Iap) Peptide Disrupts O-Antigen Biosynthesis through Mimicry of the Chain Length Regulator Wzz in Pseudomonas aeruginosa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Lysogenic bacteriophage D3 causes seroconversion of Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO1 from serotype O5 to O16 by inverting the linkage between O-specific antigen (OSA) repeat units from α to β. The OSA units are polymerized by Wzy to modal lengths regulated by Wzz1 and Wzz2. A key component of the D3 seroconversion machinery is the inhibitor of α-polymerase (Iap) peptide, which is able to solely suppress α-linked long-chain OSA production in P. aeruginosa PAO1. To establish the target specificity of Iap for Wzyα, changes in OSA phenotypes were examined via Western immunoblotting for wzz1 and wzz2 single-knockout strains, as well as a wzz1 wzz2 double knockout, following the expression of iap from a tuneable vector. Increased induction of Iap expression completely abrogated OSA production in the wzz1 wzz2 double mutant, while background levels of OSA production were still observed in either of the single mutants. Therefore, Iap inhibition of OSA biosynthesis was most effective in the absence of both Wzz proteins. Sequence alignment analyses revealed a high degree of similarity between Iap and the first transmembrane segment (TMS) of either Wzz1 or Wzz2. Various topology prediction analyses of the Iap sequence consistently predicted the presence of a single TMS, suggesting a propensity for Iap to insert itself into the inner membrane (IM). The compromised ability of Iap to abrogate Wzyα function in the presence of Wzz1 or Wzz2 provides compelling evidence that inhibition occurs after Wzyα inserts itself into the IM and is achieved through mimicry of the first TMS from the Wzz proteins of P. aeruginosa PAO1.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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 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".