Studying Inherited Immunity in a <em>Caenorhabditis elegans</em> Model of Microsporidia Infection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Inherited immunity describes how some animals can pass on the "memory" of a previous infection to their offspring. This can boost pathogen resistance in their progeny and promote survival. While inherited immunity has been reported in many invertebrates, the mechanisms underlying this epigenetic phenomenon are largely unknown. The infection of Caenorhabditis elegans by the natural microsporidian pathogen Nematocida parisii results in the worms producing offspring that are robustly resistant to microsporidia. The present protocol describes the study of intergenerational immunity in the simple and genetically tractable N. parisii -C. elegans infection model. The current article describes methods for infecting C. elegans and generating immune-primed offspring. Methods are also given for assaying resistance to microsporidia infection by staining for microsporidia and visualizing infection by microscopy. In particular, inherited immunity prevents host cell invasion by microsporidia, and fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) can be used to quantify invasion events. The relative amount of microsporidia spores produced in the immune-primed offspring can be quantified by staining the spores with a chitin-binding dye. To date, these methods have shed light on the kinetics and pathogen specificity of inherited immunity, as well as the molecular mechanisms underlying it. These techniques, alongside the extensive tools available for C. elegans research, will enable important discoveries in the field of inherited immunity.
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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 | 0.001 | 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".