The Dynamics of Genetic Interactions between<i>Vibrio metoecus</i>and<i>Vibrio cholerae</i>, Two Close Relatives Co-Occurring in the Environment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Vibrio metoecus is the closest relative of Vibrio cholerae, the causative agent of the potent diarrheal disease cholera. Although the pathogenic potential of this new species is yet to be studied in depth, it has been co-isolated with V. cholerae in coastal waters and found in clinical specimens in the United States. We used these two organisms to investigate the genetic interaction between closely related species in their natural environment. The genomes of 20 V. cholerae and 4 V. metoecus strains isolated from a brackish coastal pond on the US east coast, as well as 4 clinical V. metoecus strains were sequenced and compared with reference strains. Whole genome comparison shows 86-87% average nucleotide identity (ANI) in their core genes between the two species. On the other hand, the chromosomal integron, which occupies approximately 3% of their genomes, shows higher conservation in ANI between species than any other region of their genomes. The ANI of 93-94% observed in this region is not significantly greater within than between species, meaning that it does not follow species boundaries. Vibrio metoecus does not encode toxigenic V. cholerae major virulence factors, the cholera toxin and toxin-coregulated pilus. However, some of the pathogenicity islands found in pandemic V. cholerae were either present in the common ancestor it shares with V. metoecus, or acquired by clinical and environmental V. metoecus in partial fragments. The virulence factors of V. cholerae are therefore both more ancient and more widespread than previously believed. There is high interspecies recombination in the core genome, which has been detected in 24% of the single-copy core genes, including genes involved in pathogenicity. Vibrio metoecus was six times more often the recipient of DNA from V. cholerae as it was the donor, indicating a strong bias in the direction of gene transfer in the environment.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".