Mechanical Control of Whole Body Shape by a Single Cuticular Protein Obstructor-E in Drosophila melanogaster
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Body shapes are much more variable than body plans. One way to alter body shapes independently of body plans would be to mechanically deform bodies. To what extent body shapes are regulated physically, or molecules involved in physical control of morphogenesis, remain elusive. During fly metamorphosis, the cuticle (exoskeleton) covering the larval body contracts longitudinally and expands laterally to become the ellipsoidal pupal case (puparium). Here we show that Drosophila melanogaster Obstructor-E (Obst-E) is a protein constituent of the larval cuticle that confers the oriented contractility/expandability. In the absence of obst-E function, the larval cuticle fails to undergo metamorphic shape change and finally becomes a twiggy puparium. We present results indicating that Obst-E regulates the arrangement of chitin, a long-chain polysaccharide and a central component of the insect cuticle, and directs the formation of supracellular ridges on the larval cuticle. We further show that Obst-E is locally required for the oriented shape change of the cuticle during metamorphosis, which is associated with changes in the morphology of those ridges. Thus, Obst-E dramatically affects the body shape in a direct, physical manner by controlling the mechanical property of the exoskeleton.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".