Chemical entrapment and killing of insects by bacteria
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Actinobacteria produce antibacterial and antifungal specialized metabolites. Many insects harbour actinobacteria on their bodies or in their nests and use these metabolites for protection. However, some actinobacteria produce metabolites that are toxic to insects and the evolutionary relevance of this toxicity is unknown. Here we explore chemical interactions between streptomycetes and the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. We find that many streptomycetes produce specialized metabolites that have potent larvicidal effects against the fly; larvae that ingest spores of these species die. The mechanism of toxicity is specific to the bacterium's chemical arsenal: cosmomycin D producing bacteria induce a cell death-like response in the larval digestive tract; avermectin producing bacteria induce paralysis. Furthermore, low concentrations of volatile terpenes like 2-methylisoborneol that are produced by streptomycetes attract fruit flies such that they preferentially deposit their eggs on contaminated food sources. The resulting larvae are killed during growth and development. The phenomenon of volatile-mediated attraction and specialized metabolite toxicity suggests that some streptomycetes pose an evolutionary risk to insects in nature.
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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".