Molecular Differentiation of Four Species of Oropsylla (Siphonaptera: Ceratophyllidae) Using PCR-Based Single Strand Conformation Polymorphism Analyses and DNA Sequencing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is often difficult to distinguish morphologically between closely related species of fleas (Siphonaptera). Morphological identification of fleas often requires microscopic examination of internal structures in specimens cleared using caustic solutions. This process degrades DNA and/or inhibits DNA extraction from specimens, which limits molecular-based studies on individual fleas and their microbiomes. Our objective was to distinguish between Oropsylla rupestris (Jordan), Oropsylla tuberculata (Baker), Oropsylla bruneri (Baker), and Oropsylla labis (Jordan & Rothschild) (Ceratophyllidae) using PCR-based single strand conformation polymorphism (SSCP) analyses and DNA sequencing. A 446 bp region of the nuclear 28S ribosomal RNA (rRNA) gene was used as the genetic marker. The results obtained for 36 reference specimens (i.e., fleas that were morphologically identified to species) revealed no intraspecific variation in DNA sequence, whereas the DNA sequences of the four species of Oropsylla differed from one another at two to six nucleotide positions. Each flea species also had a unique SSCP banding pattern. SSCP analyses were then used to identify another 84 fleas that had not been identified morphologically. DNA sequencing data confirmed the species identity of fleas subjected to SSCP. This demonstrates that PCR-SSCP combined with DNA sequencing of the 28S rRNA gene is a very effective approach for the delineation of four closely related species of flea.
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.
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".