New Taxon-Specific Heterobasidion PCR Primers Detect and Differentiate North American Heterobasidion spp. in Various Substrates and Led to the Discovery of Heterobasidion irregulare in British Columbia, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Heterobasidion annosum sensu lato is a species complex of pathogenic white-rot wood decay fungi which cause root and butt rot in conifer and hardwood species across the Northern hemisphere. Annual losses to forest managers are valued in the billions of dollars, due to tree mortality, reduction in timber yield, and wood decay. In North America, H. irregulare and H. occidentale have a partially overlapping host and geographic range, cause similar disease symptoms and produce similar fruiting bodies, making discrimination between the two of them often difficult. We developed two sets of primers that bind specifically to conserved, but species-specific portions of glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase and elongation factor 1α alleles. The method is sensitive enough to detect either species from infected wood. Analysis of North American isolates has further clarified the distribution of both species on this continent, including the detection of H. irregulare for the first time on ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) and eastern white pine (Pinus strobus) in British Columbia. This method has the potential to be a valuable tool for the detection of the pathogen in exported/imported wood products, as well as for the further identification and assessment of the distribution of North American Heterobasidion species.
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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".