Transmission modes and the evolution of feminizing symbionts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Vertically transmitted symbionts can distort their host's reproduction to increase their own transmission. In Wolbachia and some other symbionts, a particular distortion of this sort is feminization, whereby genetic males, which cannot transmit symbionts, are converted during development into functional females, which do transmit symbionts when they reproduce. In this work, we propose a model to study how feminization intensity (i.e. penetrance) can evolve under different ecological constraints in WZ/ZZ hosts. More specifically, our model incorporates both imperfect vertical and horizontal transmission modes. The model shows that for most parameter values feminizing symbionts drive genetic females to extinction, which in turn favours the evolution of maximum feminization penetrance. Once genetic females are extinct, the actual value of feminization penetrance never depends on the efficiency of vertical transmission. Instead, the model shows that in conditions where the reproductive rate is high at demographic equilibrium, higher feminization levels are favoured. One consequence of this can be, for example, that evolutionarily stable feminization penetrance increases with the host's natural death rate, just as the virulence is predicted to do with the host's natural death rate in classic epidemiological models. Finally, we found that horizontal transmission had no impact on how feminization penetrance evolved when genetic females were extinct. However, horizontal transmission can permit genetic females to coexist with symbionts and, in this case, we demonstrate that the presence of genetic females selects symbionts for lower feminization penetrance.
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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".