No maternal effects after stimulation of the melanization response in the yellow fever mosquito <i>Aedes aegypti</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The costs and benefits of activating the immune system can reach across generations. Thus, in vertebrates and in several invertebrates, stimulating the immune system of a female can enhance immunity of her offspring or decrease offspring fitness. We evaluated the potential maternally transmitted costs and benefits of the melanization response, an innate immune response of insects that helps to protect mosquitoes from malaria parasites. We manipulated the maternal melanization response of the yellow fever mosquito Aedes aegypti by inoculating female mosquitoes with negatively charged sephadex beads or with immunologically inert glass beads; a control group was not inoculated. In the next generation, we assayed the melanization response and measured three other life‐history traits: survival up to emergence, the age at emergence, and body size (estimated as wing length). We found no evidence of fitness costs or benefits for the offspring. A retrospective power analysis found that our experiment would have detected an effect size that is three times smaller than the maternal immune priming effects that have been reported in the literature. We did find a strong correlation between offspring wing length and melanization response. Overall, our findings indicate that trans‐generational immune priming in invertebrates cannot be generalized, and that it may depend on the species, the immune challenge, and the environmental conditions.
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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 | 0.001 | 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) | 0.000 | 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 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".