Detection of Chronic Wasting Disease in the Lymph Nodes of Free-Ranging Cervids by Real-Time Quaking-Induced Conversion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Chronic wasting disease (CWD), a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy of deer, elk, and moose, is the only prion disease affecting free-ranging animals. Since the disease was first identified in northern Colorado and southern Wyoming in 1967, new epidemic foci of the disease have been identified in 20 additional states, as well as two Canadian provinces and the Republic of South Korea. Identification of CWD-affected animals currently requires postmortem analysis of brain or lymphoid tissues using immunohistochemistry (IHC) or an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), with no practical way to evaluate potential strain types or to investigate the epidemiology of existing or novel foci of disease. Using a standardized real-time (RT)-quaking-induced conversion (QuIC) assay, a seeded amplification assay employing recombinant prion protein as a conversion substrate and thioflavin T (ThT) as an amyloid-binding fluorophore, we analyzed, in a blinded manner, 1,243 retropharyngeal lymph node samples from white-tailed deer, mule deer, and moose, collected in the field from areas with current or historic CWD endemicity. RT-QuIC results were then compared with those obtained by conventional IHC and ELISA, and amplification metrics using ThT and thioflavin S were examined in relation to the clinical history of the sampled deer. The results indicate that RT-QuIC is useful for both identifying CWD-infected animals and facilitating epidemiological studies in areas in which CWD is endemic or not endemic.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| 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".