Bacterial β-Kdo glycosyltransferases represent a new glycosyltransferase family (GT99)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Kdo (3-deoxy-d-manno-oct-2-ulosonic acid) is an eight-carbon sugar mostly confined to Gram-negative bacteria. It is often involved in attaching surface polysaccharides to their lipid anchors. α-Kdo provides a bridge between lipid A and the core oligosaccharide in all bacterial LPSs, whereas an oligosaccharide of β-Kdo residues links "group 2" capsular polysaccharides to (lyso)phosphatidylglycerol. β-Kdo is also found in a small number of other bacterial polysaccharides. The structure and function of the prototypical cytidine monophosphate-Kdo-dependent α-Kdo glycosyltransferase from LPS assembly is well characterized. In contrast, the β-Kdo counterparts were not identified as glycosyltransferase enzymes by bioinformatics tools and were not represented among the 98 currently recognized glycosyltransferase families in the Carbohydrate-Active Enzymes database. We report the crystallographic structure and function of a prototype β-Kdo GT from WbbB, a modular protein participating in LPS O-antigen synthesis in Raoultella terrigena The β-Kdo GT has dual Rossmann-fold motifs typical of GT-B enzymes, but extensive deletions, insertions, and rearrangements result in a unique architecture that makes it a prototype for a new GT family (GT99). The cytidine monophosphate-binding site in the C-terminal α/β domain closely resembles the corresponding site in bacterial sialyltransferases, suggesting an evolutionary connection that is not immediately evident from the overall fold or sequence similarities.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".