Interaction of Treponema pallidum, the syphilis spirochete, with human platelets
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Extracellular bacteria that spread via the vasculature employ invasive mechanisms that mirror those of metastatic tumor cells, including intravasation into the bloodstream and survival during hematogenous dissemination, arrestation despite blood flow, and extravasation into distant tissue sites. Several invasive bacteria have been shown to exploit normal platelet function during infection. Due to their inherent ability to interact with and influence other cell types, platelets play a critical role in alteration of endothelial barrier permeability, and their role in cancer metastasis has been well established. The highly invasive bacterium and causative agent of syphilis, Treponema pallidum subspecies pallidum, readily crosses the endothelial, blood-brain and placental barriers. However, the mechanisms underlying this unusual and important aspect of T. pallidum pathogenesis are incompletely understood. In this study we use darkfield microscopy in combination with flow cytometry to establish that T. pallidum interacts with platelets. We also investigate the dynamics of this interaction and show T. pallidum is able to activate platelets and preferentially interacts with activated platelets. Platelet-interacting treponemes consistently exhibit altered kinematic (movement) parameters compared to free treponemes, and T. pallidum-platelet interactions are reversible. This study provides insight into host cell interactions at play during T. pallidum infection and suggests that T. pallidum may exploit platelet function to aid in establishment of disseminated infection.
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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".