Mechanism of ammonia excretion in the freshwater leech<i>Nephelopsis obscura</i>: characterization of a primitive Rh protein and effects of high environmental ammonia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Remarkably little is known about nitrogenous excretion in freshwater invertebrates. In the current study, the nitrogen excretion mechanism in the carnivorous ribbon leech, Nephelopsis obscura, was investigated. Excretion experiments showed that the ribbon leech is ammonotelic, excreting 166.0 ± 8.6 nmol·grams fresh weight (gFW)(-1)·h(-1) ammonia and 14.7 ± 1.9 nmol·gFW(-1)·h(-1) urea. Exposure to high and low pH hampered and enhanced, respectively, ammonia excretion rates, indicating an acid-linked ammonia trapping mechanism across the skin epithelia. Accordingly, compared with body tissues, the skin exhibited elevated mRNA expression levels of a newly identified Rhesus protein and at least in tendency the Na(+)/K(+)-ATPase. Pharmacological experiments and enzyme assays suggested an ammonia excretion mechanism that involves the V-ATPase, Na(+)/K(+)-ATPase, and carbonic anhydrase, but not necessarily a functional microtubule system. Most importantly, functional expression studies of the identified Rh protein cloned from leech skin tissue revealed an ammonia transport capability of this protein when expressed in yeast. The leech Rh-ammonia transporter (NoRhp) is a member of the primitive Rh protein family, which is a sister group to the common ancestor of vertebrate ammonia-transporting Rh proteins. Exposure to high environmental ammonia (HEA) caused a new adjustment of body ammonia, accompanied with a decrease in NoRhp and Na(+)/K(+)-ATPase mRNA levels, but unaltered ammonia excretion rates. To our knowledge, this is only the second comprehensive study regarding the ammonia excretion mechanisms in a freshwater invertebrate, but our results show that basic processes of ammonia excretion appear to also be comparable to those found in freshwater fish, suggesting an early evolution of ionoregulatory mechanisms in freshwater organisms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".