Translocation domain mutations affecting cellular toxicity identify the <i>Clostridium difficile</i> toxin B pore
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Disease associated with Clostridium difficile infection is caused by the actions of the homologous toxins TcdA and TcdB on colonic epithelial cells. Binding to target cells triggers toxin internalization into acidified vesicles, whereupon cryptic segments from within the 1,050-aa translocation domain unfurl and insert into the bounding membrane, creating a transmembrane passageway to the cytosol. Our current understanding of the mechanisms underlying pore formation and the subsequent translocation of the upstream cytotoxic domain to the cytosol is limited by the lack of information available regarding the identity and architecture of the transmembrane pore. Here, through systematic perturbation of conserved sites within predicted membrane-insertion elements of the translocation domain, we uncovered highly sensitive residues--clustered between amino acids 1,035 and 1,107--that when individually mutated, reduced cellular toxicity by as much as >1,000-fold. We demonstrate that defective variants are defined by impaired pore formation in planar lipid bilayers and biological membranes, resulting in an inability to intoxicate cells through either apoptotic or necrotic pathways. These findings along with the unexpected similarities uncovered between the pore-forming "hotspots" of TcdB and the well-characterized α-helical diphtheria toxin translocation domain provide insights into the structure and mechanism of formation of the translocation pore for this important class of pathogenic toxins.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".