Association between avian necrotic enteritis and<i>Clostridium perfringens</i>strains expressing NetB toxin
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A novel toxin, NetB, has recently been identified in virulent avian Clostridium perfringens isolates and shown to be an essential virulence factor in a clinical necrotic enteritis isolate. To assess whether NetB is more generally associated with avian necrotic enteritis isolates we have screened a range of C. perfringens strains from geographically diverse locations for both the presence and expression of the netB gene. Forty-four isolates were derived from necrotic enteritis disease cases from Australia, Belgium, Denmark and Canada and 55 isolates from healthy chickens from Australia and Belgium. The majority of strains isolated from necrotic enteritis-affected birds were netB positive (70%) and there was an absolute correlation between the presence of netB and in vitro expression of the NetB protein. Only two of the C. perfringens isolates from healthy chickens carried netB. Sequencing of the netB gene from 23 positive isolates showed that NetB is highly conserved, with only one predicted amino acid (A168T) difference, in six isolates, compared to the published sequence. This change did not alter the in vitro activity of the NetB toxin. The gene encoding the recently discovered TpeL toxin was also screened using PCR and only found in a small proportion of NetB-positive isolates from diseased birds. A selection of NetB-negative isolates, originating from diseased birds, was unable to cause disease in a necrotic enteritis induction model. This study provides further evidence that NetB is important in pathogenesis and advances our current understanding of C. perfringens virulence factors in avian necrotic enteritis.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| 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 it