Identification of a diphtheria toxin‐like gene family beyond the <i>Corynebacterium</i> genus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Diphtheria toxin (DT), produced by Corynebacterium diphtheria, is the causative agent of diphtheria and one of the most potent protein toxins known; however, it has an unclear evolutionary history. Here, we report the discovery of a DT-like gene family in several bacterial lineages outside of Corynebacterium, including Austwickia and Streptomyces. These DT-like genes form sister lineages in the DT phylogeny and conserve key DT features including catalytic and translocation motifs, but possess divergent receptor-binding domains. DT-like genes are not associated with corynephage, but have undergone lateral transfer through a separate mechanism. The discovery of the first non-Corynebacterium homologs of DT sheds light on its evolutionary origin and highlights novelties that may have resulted in the emergence of DT targeting humans.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
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".