Congenital Viral Infections of the Brain: Lessons Learned from Lymphocytic Choriomeningitis Virus in the Neonatal Rat
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The fetal brain is highly vulnerable to teratogens, including many infectious agents. As a consequence of prenatal infection, many children suffer severe and permanent brain injury and dysfunction. Because most animal models of congenital brain infection do not strongly mirror human disease, the models are highly limited in their abilities to shed light on the pathogenesis of these diseases. The animal model for congenital lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV) infection, however, does not suffer from this limitation. LCMV is a well-known human pathogen. When the infection occurs during pregnancy, the virus can infect the fetus, and the developing brain is particularly vulnerable. Children with congenital LCMV infection often have substantial neurological deficits. The neonatal rat inoculated with LCMV is a superb model system of human congenital LCMV infection. Virtually all of the neuropathologic changes observed in humans congenitally infected with LCMV, including microencephaly, encephalomalacia, chorioretinitis, porencephalic cysts, neuronal migration disturbances, periventricular infection, and cerebellar hypoplasia, are reproduced in the rat model. Within the developing rat brain, LCMV selectively targets mitotically active neuronal precursors. Thus, the targets of infection and sites of pathology depend on host age at the time of infection. The rat model has further shown that the pathogenic changes induced by LCMV infection are both virus-mediated and immune-mediated. Furthermore, different brain regions simultaneously infected with LCMV can undergo widely different pathologic changes, reflecting different brain region-virus-immune system interactions. Because the neonatal rat inoculated with LCMV so faithfully reproduces the diverse neuropathology observed in the human counterpart, the rat model system is a highly valuable tool for the study of congenital LCMV infection and of all prenatal brain infections In addition, because LCMV induces delayed-onset neuronal loss after the virus has been cleared, the neonatal rat infected with LCMV may be an excellent model system to study neurodegenerative or psychiatric diseases whose etiologies are hypothesized to be virus-induced, such as autism, schizophrenia, and temporal lobe epilepsy.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 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".