New observations on the secondary chemistry of world <i>Ephedra</i> (Ephedraceae)
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
For several millennia, stem extracts of Ephedra (Ephedraceae, Gnetales) have been used as folk medicines in both the Old and New World. Some species were used in treatments of questionable efficacy for venereal disease in North America during the last century. Many Eurasian species produce phenylethylamine alkaloids, mostly ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, that interact with adrenergic receptors in the mammalian sympathetic nervous system. Asian Ephedra have been used recently in the clandestine manufacture of a street drug, methamphetamine. Although ephedrine alkaloids are not detectable in New World species of Ephedra, together with Asian species they contain other nitrogen-containing secondary metabolites with known neuropharmacological activity. Many mesic and particularly xeric species worldwide accumulate substantial amounts of quinoline-2-carboxylic acids, or kynurenates, in their aerial parts. Many species of Ephedra accumulate cyclopropyl amino acid analogues of glutamate and proline in their stems and roots, and particularly in the seed endosperm. Mesic species synthesize substantial amounts of three L-2-(carboxycyclopropyl)glycine stereomers rarely seen in nature. A cyclopropyl analogue of proline with known antimicrobial activity, cis-3,4-methanoproline, is found in large amounts in the stems and seeds of many Ephedra species. The ability to synthesize cyclopropyl amino acids may be an ancestral feature in the taxon. The natural function in the taxon of these three groups of secondary compounds remains to be established.
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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) | 0.001 | 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 it