Splicing and Transcription Differ between Spore and Intracellular Life Stages in the Parasitic Microsporidia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Microsporidia are a diverse group of highly derived fungal relatives that are intracellular parasites of many animals. Both transcription and introns have been shown to be unusual in microsporidia: The complete genome of the human parasite Encephalitozoon cuniculi has only a few very short introns, and two distantly related microsporidian spores have been shown to harbor transcripts encoding several genes that overlap on different strands. However, microsporidia alternate between two life stages: the intracellular proliferative stage and the extracellular and largely metabolically dormant infectious spore. To date, most studies have focused on the spore. Here, we have compared transcription profiles for a number of genes from both life stages of microsporidia and found major differences in both the prevalence of overlapping transcription and splicing. Specifically, spore transcripts in E. cuniculi have longer 5' untranslated regions, overlap more frequently with upstream genes, and have a significantly higher number of transcription initiation sites compared with intracellular transcripts from the same species. In addition, we demonstrate that splicing occurs exclusively in the intracellular stage and not in spore messenger RNAs (mRNAs) in both E. cuniculi and the distantly related Antonospora locustae. These differences between the microsporidian life stages raise questions about the functional importance of transcripts in the spore. We hypothesize that at least some transcripts in spores are a product of the cell's transition into a dormant state and that these unusual mRNAs could play a structural role rather than an informational one.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".