The <i>Aspergillus fumigatus</i> transcription factor Ace2 governs pigment production, conidiation and virulence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Aspergillus fumigatus causes serious and frequently fatal infections in immunocompromised patients. To investigate the regulation of virulence of this fungus, we constructed and analysed an A. fumigatus mutant that lacked the transcription factor Ace2, which influences virulence in other fungi. The Deltaace2 mutant had dysmorphic conidiophores, reduced conidia production and abnormal conidial cell wall architecture. This mutant produced an orange pigment when grown on solid media, although its conidia had normal pigmentation. Conidia of the Deltaace2 mutant were larger and had accelerated germination. The resulting germlings were resistant to hydrogen peroxide, but not other stressors. Non-neutropenic mice that were immunosuppressed with cortisone acetate and infected with the Deltaace2 mutant had accelerated mortality, greater pulmonary fungal burden, and increased pulmonary inflammatory responses compared with mice infected with the wild-type or Deltaace2::ace2-complemented strains. The Deltaace2 mutant had reduced ppoC, ecm33 and ags3 mRNA expression. It is known that A. fumigatus mutants with absent or reduced expression of these genes have increased virulence in mice, as well as other phenotypic similarities to the Deltaace2 mutant. Therefore, reduced expression of these genes likely contributes to the increased virulence of the Deltaace2 mutant.
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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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".