Microsporidian Infection in a Free-Living Marine Nematode
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
Microsporidia are unicellular fungi that are obligate endoparasites. Although nematodes are one of the most abundant and diverse animal groups, the only confirmed report of microsporidian infection was that of the "nematode killer" (Nematocida parisii). N. parisii was isolated from a wild Caenorhabditis sp. and causes an acute and lethal intestinal infection in a lab strain of Caenorhabditis elegans. We set out to characterize a microsporidian infection in a wild nematode to determine whether the infection pattern of N. parisii in the lab is typical of microsporidian infections in nematodes. We describe a novel microsporidian species named Sporanauta perivermis (marine spore of roundworms) and characterize its infection in its natural host, the free-living marine nematode Odontophora rectangula. S. perivermis is not closely related to N. parisii and differs strikingly in all aspects of infection. Examination by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) revealed that the infection was localized in the hypodermal and muscle tissues only and did not involve the intestines. Fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) confirmed infection in the muscle and hypodermis, and surprisingly, it also revealed that the parasite infects O. rectangula eggs, suggesting a vertical mode of transmission. Our observations highlight the importance of studying parasites in their natural hosts and indicate that not all nematode-infecting microsporidia are "nematode killers"; instead, microsporidiosis can be more versatile and chronic in the wild.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
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