Common bed bugs can biosynthesize pheromone components from amino acid precursors in human blood
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We have recently shown that the aggregation pheromone of the common bed bug, Cimex lectularius, comprises a six-component blend of dimethyl disulfide (DMDS), dimethyl trisulfide (DMTS), (E)-2-hexenal, (E)-2-octenal, 2-hexanone, and histamine. Here, we tested the hypothesis that bed bugs biosynthesize some pheromone components from amino acid precursors in human blood, namely DMDS and DMTS from L-methionine and histamine from histidine. We tested this hypothesis by (i) allowing bed bugs to feed on and metabolize sheep blood enriched with 13 C-labelled histidine or 2 H-labelled methionine, (ii) extracting bed bug feces (a source of the aggregation pheromone), and (iii) analyzing feces extracts by GC-MS, HPLC-MS and NMR spectroscopy. The analyses revealed that bed bugs converted 2 H-methionine to 2 H-DMDS and 2 H-DMTS, and 13 C-histidine to 13 C-histamine. There is not enough histidine in human blood to account for the amount of histamine that bed bugs produce and excrete with their feces, and only a small proportion of the available 13 C-histidine was converted to 13 C-histamine in our study. Therefore, it is likely that bed bugs biosynthesize histamine, and possibly also DMDS and DMTS, primarily de novo.
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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) | 0.001 | 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 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".