Soil humic acids degrade CWD prions and reduce infectivity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Chronic wasting disease (CWD), an environmentally transmissible, fatal prion disease is endemic in North America, present in South Korea and has recently been confirmed in northern Europe.The expanding geographic range of this contagious disease of free-ranging deer, moose, elk and reindeer has resulted in increasing levels of prion infectivity in the environment.Soils are involved in CWD horizontal transmission, acting as an environmental reservoir, and soil mineral and organic compounds have the ability to bind prions.Upper horizons of soils are usually enriched with soil organic matter (SOM), however, the role of SOM in prion conservation and mobility remains unclear.In this study, we show that incubation of PrP CWD with humic acids (HA), a major SOM compound, affects both the molecular weight and recovery of PrP CWD .Detection of PrP CWD is reduced as HA concentration increases.Native HA extracted from pristine soils also reduces or entirely eliminates PrP CWD signal.Incubation of CWD prions with HA significantly increased incubation periods in tgElk mice demonstrating that HA can reduce CWD infectivity. Author summaryChronic wasting disease (CWD) is a contagious prion disease affecting several species of captive and wild cervids.Environmental prion contamination plays a major role in increasing incidence of CWD, with CWD infectivity being released into the environment by decaying carcasses, or shedding of biological fluids including urine, feces, and saliva.Horizontal transmission of CWD involves soils as an environmental reservoir of infectivity.Here, we tested the role of a soil organic matter compound, humic acid, for its ability to bind CWD prions and impact infectivity.A wide range of humic acid concentrations were examined representing the extensive spectrum of humic acid levels present in native soils.We found that incubation of CWD prions with high concentrations of humic acids (>2.5 g L -1 ) decreases the both CWD-prion signal and infectivity, whereas lower levels of humic acids did not significantly impact protein stability or infectivity.Our study provides new insights into soil-prion interactions, prions persistence in soil, and their bioavailability to grazing animals.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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 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".