High-Throughput Sequencing to Investigate Phytopathogenic Fungal Propagules Caught in Baited Insect Traps
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Studying the means of dispersal of plant pathogens is crucial to better understand the dynamic interactions involved in plant infections. On one hand, entomologists rely mostly on both traditional molecular methods and morphological characteristics, to identify pests. On the other hand, high-throughput sequencing (HTS) is becoming the go-to avenue for scientists studying phytopathogens. These organisms sometimes infect plants, together with insects. Considering the growing number of exotic insect introductions in Canada, forest pest-management efforts would benefit from the development of a high-throughput strategy to investigate the phytopathogenic fungal and oomycete species interacting with wood-boring insects. We recycled formerly discarded preservative fluids from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency annual survey using insect traps and analysed more than one hundred samples originating from across Canada. Using the Ion Torrent Personal Genome Machine (PGM) HTS technology and fusion primers, we performed metabarcoding to screen unwanted fungi and oomycetes species, including Phytophthora spp. Community profiling was conducted on the four different wood-boring, insect-attracting semiochemicals; although the preservative (contained ethanol) also attracted other insects. Phytopathogenic fungi (e.g., Leptographium spp. and Meria laricis in the pine sawyer semiochemical) and oomycetes (mainly Peronospora spp. and Pythium aff. hypogynum in the General Longhorn semiochemical), solely associated with one of the four types of semiochemicals, were detected. This project demonstrated that the insect traps’ semiochemical microbiome represents a new and powerful matrix for screening phytopathogens. Compared to traditional diagnostic techniques, the fluids allowed for a faster and higher throughput assessment of the biodiversity contained within. Additionally, minimal modifications to this approach would allow it to be used in other phytopathology fields.
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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 | 0.000 |
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".