A cysteine/methionine auxotroph of the opportunistic fungus Aspergillus flavus is associated with host-range restriction: a model for emerging diseases
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The evolution of host specialization in pathogens is a topic of considerable interest, particularly since it can represent a decisive step in the emergence of infectious diseases. Aspergillus flavus is an opportunistic fungus capable of infecting a wide variety of hosts, including plants, insects and mammals, although with low virulence. Here the derivation of an A. flavus strain that exhibits severe host restriction is reported. This strain exhibited a severe diminution or a complete lack of conidial production on a variety of standard agar media and on various plant species. However, it retained its ability to infect insects from various orders and to re-emerge from and adequately conidiate on the insect cadavers as a culmination of the pathogenic life cycle. This strain, demonstrating insect-dependent conidiation, was discovered to be a cysteine/methionine auxotroph due to an inability to reduce sulfate to sulfite. However, other A. flavus auxotrophs tested for plant and insect host range failed to show insect-dependent conidiation. An association between this specific auxotroph and a decreased host range is shown, emphasizing the role of nutrition in the host-pathogen relationship with respect to host restriction and evolution towards obligate pathogenesis.
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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) | 0.001 | 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".