Detection of<i>Diplodia corticola</i>spores in Ontario and Québec based on High Throughput Sequencing (HTS) methods
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A total of 252 aerial spore samples from the provinces of Quebec and Ontario were obtained during an extensive research programme focusing on aerobiology of fungal spores. Samples were collected on 95 sticky rods from rotary arm spore collectors and 157 filters from passive rain collectors. DNA from samples was PCR-amplified for fungal ribosomal ITS and sequenced using High Throughput Sequencing (HTS) methods. After bioinformatics analysis of DNA sequences, the presence of Diplodia corticola, an emerging tree pathogen in North America, was observed. In total, 313 DNA sequence reads from aerial spores of D. corticola were found in the Illumina data set, and 199 DNA sequence reads were obtained from the Ion Torrent data set. DNA of D. corticola was found in 16 of the 32 sampled sites, always less than 10 reads per site, with the exception of three sites – Quebec City, Aylmer and Ottawa – where 287, 125 and 73 DNA reads, respectively, were detected. This is not a first report of the presence of D. corticola causing a tree disease in Canada as symptomatic trees have not been identified. Typically, like many other species of the Botryosphaeriaceae, this fungal pathogen is believed to be an opportunistic plant endophyte capable of living asymptomatically for several years before showing up as a pathogen when conducive conditions arise. Its presence as singletons in nearly half the sampled sites in Quebec and Ontario may be the result of long-distance spore dispersal originating from known infected sites in Massachusetts, Maine and other unknown sites in the north-eastern USA. However, its much higher read counts in three sites may indicate the possibility of a few trees being asymptomatically infected and spreading conidia locally.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".