The Correlation of Francisella tularensis on Size and Supercooling of Dermacentor variabilis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Overwintering tick survival is essential for the continuation of a tick’s lifecycle. Recent studies have found that infections with particular microorganisms can alter the physiology of ticks and, in some cases, increase their cold hardiness. To date, the influence of Francisella tularensis on Dermacentor variabilis (Say) has not been studied and thus the symbiosis between the two has been unknown. This study determined the infection rate of F. tularensis as well as examined the relationship between F. tularensis and the supercooling point (SCP) and size of D. variabilis of ticks from Nova Scotia, Canada. Local veterinarians provided adult ticks. The SCP of each tick was recorded using Logger Pro and infection status was found using Polymerase Chain Reaction. Of the 203 ticks tested, 9.8% were infected with F. tularensis. When the sexes were considered separately, 4% of males, 11.7% engorged females and 17.3% of non-engorged females were infected. Upon further analysis, a statistically significant difference was found between infected ticks and changes in thier SCPs, but there was no statistically significant difference between infected ticks and changes in size. This suggests that F. tularensis benefits D. variabilis by decreasing their SCPs, and thereby enhancing their overwintering capabilities. While other physiological influences of F. tularensis on D. variabilis remain unknown, the results from this study support previous research that bacterium species such as F. tularensis is able to influence the survivability of its tick host in the form of altering their freezing tolerance but does not affect the physical size of D. variabilis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| 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 | 0.000 |
| 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".