Do mosquitoes filter the access of <i>Plasmodium</i> cytochrome <i>b</i> lineages to an avian host?
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
Many parasites show fidelity to a set of hosts in ecological time but not evolutionary time and the determinants of this pattern are poorly understood. Malarial parasites use vertebrate hosts for the asexual stage of their life cycle but use Dipteran hosts for the sexual stage. Despite the potential evolutionary importance of Dipteran hosts, little is known of their role in determining a parasite's access to vertebrate hosts. Here, we use an avian malarial system in Panama to explore whether mosquitoes act as an access filter that limits the range of vertebrate hosts used by particular parasite lineages. We amplified and sequenced Plasmodium mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from Turdus grayi (clay-coloured robin) and from mosquitoes at the same study site. We trapped and identified to species 123 141 female mosquitoes and completed polymerase chain reaction (PCR) screening for Plasmodium parasites in 435 pools of 20 mosquitoes per pool (8700 individuals total) spanning the 11 most common mosquito species. Our primers amplified nine Plasmodium lineages, whose sequences differed by 1.72%-10.0%. Phylogenetic analyses revealed partial clustering of lineages that co-occurred in mosquito hosts. However PAN3 and PAN6, the two primary parasite lineages of T. grayi, exhibited sequence divergence of 8.59% and did not cluster in the phylogeny. We detected these two lineages exclusively in mosquitoes from different genera - PAN3 was found only in Culex (Melanoconion) ocossa, and PAN6 was found only in Aedeomyia squamipennis. Furthermore, each of these two parasite lineages co-occurred in mosquitoes with other Plasmodium lineages that were not found in the vertebrate host T. grayi. Together, this evidence suggests that parasite-mosquito associations do not restrict the access of parasites to birds but instead may actually facilitate the switching of vertebrate hosts that occurs over evolutionary time.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it