Microecology of<i>Blastomyces dermatitidis</i>: the Ammonia Hypothesis
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
The precise microecology of Blastomyces dermatitidis is unknown, but the fungus has been associated with nitrogenous waste products and rapidly changing environmental conditions. Ammonia accumulates in certain microenvironments, is toxic to most fungi, but may not be identified in processed soil samples. Ammonia tolerance of B. dermatitidis was investigated with two strains recovered in Wisconsin, one from a dog and the other from an environmental source. The samples were grown on phosphate and HEPES buffered agar media supplemented with mineral salts, low (1 g/l) and high (20 g/l) dextrose and increasing amounts of ammonium sulfate, at pH 7-8.2, in gas-impermeable bags at 20 degrees C. Moderate mold growth and sporulation of the strains were observed at low glucose concentration and calculated ammonia concentrations of 4.2 mmol/l when plates were inoculated with either mold or yeast forms. Three recent B. dermatitidis human clinical isolates also exhibited similar growth on this media, and 4/5 strains tolerated ammonia concentrations of 42-62 mmol/l. Growth of virtually all soil fungi from 206 aqueous slurries of fresh and frozen soil from the northern USA and Canada was inhibited at ammonia concentrations of 2.1-4.2 mmol/l. The ability of B. dermatitidis to survive and grow in organic carbon-poor, high ammonia microenvironments may be important to the competitive success of this fungus. These findings may have implications for other dimorphic fungi.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.018 | 0.001 |
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