The HtrA/DegP family protease MamE is a bifunctional protein with roles in magnetosome protein localization and magnetite biomineralization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Magnetotactic bacteria contain nanometre-sized, membrane-bound organelles, called magnetosomes, which are tasked with the biomineralization of small crystals of the iron oxide magnetite allowing the organism to use geomagnetic field lines for navigation. A key player in this process is the HtrA/DegP family protease MamE. In its absence, Magnetospirillum magneticum str AMB-1 is able to form magnetosome membranes but not magnetite crystals, a defect previously linked to the mislocalization of magnetosome proteins. In this work we use a directed genetic approach to find that MamE, and another predicted magnetosome-associated protease, MamO, likely function as proteases in vivo. However, as opposed to the complete loss of mamE where no biomineralization is observed, the protease-deficient variant of this protein still supports the initiation and formation of small, 20 nm-sized crystals of magnetite, too small to hold a permanent magnetic dipole moment. This analysis also reveals that MamE is a bifunctional protein with a protease-independent role in magnetosome protein localization and a protease-dependent role in maturation of small magnetite crystals. Together, these results imply the existence of a previously unrecognized 'checkpoint' in biomineralization where MamE moderates the completion of magnetite formation and thus committal to magneto-aerotaxis as the organism's dominant mode of navigating the environment.
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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) | 0.000 | 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".