Rhodoquinone biosynthesis in C. elegans requires precursors generated by the kynurenine pathway
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Parasitic helminths infect over a billion humans. To survive in the low oxygen environment of their hosts, these parasites use unusual anaerobic metabolism — this requires rhodoquinone (RQ), an electron carrier that is made by very few animal species. Crucially RQ is not made or used by any parasitic hosts and RQ synthesis is thus an ideal target for anthelmintics. However, little is known about how RQ is made and no drugs are known to block RQ synthesis. C. elegans makes RQ and can use RQ-dependent metabolic pathways — here, we use C. elegans genetics to show that tryptophan degradation via the kynurenine pathway is required to generate the key amine-containing precursors for RQ synthesis. We show that C. elegans requires RQ for survival in hypoxic conditions and, finally, we establish a high throughput assay for drugs that block RQ-dependent metabolism. This may drive the development of a new class of anthelmintic drugs. This study is a key first step in understanding how RQ is made in parasitic helminths.
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.
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 it