Investigating cellular and molecular interactions between the hard clam (Mercenaria mercenaria) and its pathogen Quahog Parasite Unknown (QPX)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Quahogs, or hard clams (Mercenaria mercenaria) are an economically important species of clam. They are often used for human consumption, but can also be indicators of water quality because of the bioaccumulation of contaminants within filter feeders. They are found abundantly on the east coast of the United States and Canada, and actively aquacultured from Massachusetts to Florida. The hard clam is a robust species with few naturally-occurring diseases. The most well-known disease of the hard clam is Quahog Parasite Unknown (QPX), a unicellular parasite found on the east coast of North America from Virginia up into Canada, causing well-documented mortality events. Though the presence of QPX disease has been documented since the 1960s, little information is available on cellular and molecular interactions between the parasite and clams. This research project targets the interactions between the clam immune system and QPX cells. The clam immune response to QPX consists of an inflammatory response that often involves the encapsulation of the parasite by clam immune cells, or hemocytes. This research identified the clam plasma proteins involved in the initial immune response to QPX and evaluated the role of plasma proteins in initiating the encapsulation response. The effect of exposure of clams to QPX on encapsulation rate and on the expression of plasma proteins that bind parasite cells was also determined. Results allowed the identification of proteins that recognize and bind parasite cells, providing molecular targets for future investigations of factors involved in clam resistance to the disease, and ultimately for the selection of resistant clam stocks. | 52 pages
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".