Localization and nucleotide specificity of <i>Blastocystis</i> succinyl‐CoA synthetase
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The anaerobic lifestyle of the intestinal parasite Blastocystis raises questions about the biochemistry and function of its mitochondria-like organelles. We have characterized the Blastocystis succinyl-CoA synthetase (SCS), a tricarboxylic acid cycle enzyme that conserves energy by substrate-level phosphorylation. We show that SCS localizes to the enigmatic Blastocystis organelles, indicating that these organelles might play a similar role in energy metabolism as classic mitochondria. Although analysis of residues inside the nucleotide-binding site suggests that Blastocystis SCS is GTP-specific, we demonstrate that it is ATP-specific. Homology modelling, followed by flexible docking and molecular dynamics simulations, indicates that while both ATP and GTP fit into the Blastocystis SCS active site, GTP is destabilized by electrostatic dipole interactions with Lys 42 and Lys 110, the side-chains of which lie outside the nucleotide-binding cavity. It has been proposed that residues in direct contact with the substrate determine nucleotide specificity in SCS. However, our results indicate that, in Blastocystis, an electrostatic gatekeeper controls which ligands can enter the binding site.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".