Host behavior alteration by its parasite: from brain gene expression to functional test
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Many parasites with complex life cycles modify their intermediate hosts’ behaviour, presumably to increase transmission to their final host. The threespine stickleback ( Gasterosteus aculeatus ) is an intermediate host in the cestode Schistocephalus solidus life cycle, which ends in an avian host, and shows increased risky behaviours when infected. We studied brain gene expression profiles of sticklebacks infected with S . solidus to determine the proximal causes of these behavioural alterations. We show that infected fish have altered expression levels in genes involved in the inositol pathway. We thus tested the functional implication of this pathway and successfully rescued normal behaviours in infected sticklebacks using lithium exposure. We also show that exposed but uninfected fish have a distinct gene expression profile from both infected fish and control individuals, allowing us to separate gene activity related to parasite exposure from consequences of a successful infection. Finally, we find that Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI)-treated sticklebacks and infected fish do not have similarly altered gene expression, despite their comparable behaviours, suggesting that the serotonin pathway is probably not the main driver of phenotypic changes in infected sticklebacks. Taken together, our results allow us to predict that if S . solidus directly manipulates its host, it could target the inositol pathway.
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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) | 0.002 | 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".