The Fungal Exopolysaccharide Galactosaminogalactan Mediates Virulence by Enhancing Resistance to Neutrophil Extracellular Traps
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Of the over 250 Aspergillus species, Aspergillus fumigatus accounts for up to 80% of invasive human infections. A. fumigatus produces galactosaminogalactan (GAG), an exopolysaccharide composed of galactose and N-acetyl-galactosamine (GalNAc) that mediates adherence and is required for full virulence. Less pathogenic Aspergillus species were found to produce GAG with a lower GalNAc content than A. fumigatus and expressed minimal amounts of cell wall-bound GAG. Increasing the GalNAc content of GAG of the minimally pathogenic A. nidulans, either through overexpression of the A. nidulans epimerase UgeB or by heterologous expression of the A. fumigatus epimerase Uge3 increased the amount of cell wall bound GAG, augmented adherence in vitro and enhanced virulence in corticosteroid-treated mice to levels similar to A. fumigatus. The enhanced virulence of the overexpression strain of A. nidulans was associated with increased resistance to NADPH oxidase-dependent neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) in vitro, and was not observed in neutropenic mice or mice deficient in NADPH-oxidase that are unable to form NETs. Collectively, these data suggest that cell wall-bound GAG enhances virulence through mediating resistance to NETs.
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.
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".