Surveillance of Amoebic Keratitis-Causing Acanthamoebae for Potential Bacterial Endosymbionts in Ontario, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Acanthamoeba spp. are the causative pathogens of several infections, including amoebic keratitis (AK), a vision-threatening infection. Acanthamoebae from corneal specimens of patients with AK harbor bacterial endosymbionts, which may increase virulence. We sought to understand the spectrum of bacterial endosymbionts present in clinical isolates of Acanthamoeba spp. identified in our reference parasitology laboratory. Isolates of Acanthamoeba spp. obtained from our biobank of anonymized corneal scrapings were screened for potential endosymbionts by PCR using primer pairs detecting bacteria belonging to orders Chlamydiales, Rickettsiales, or Legionellales and pan16S primers. Three primer pairs specific to the 18s rRNA gene of Acanthamoeba spp. were used for the amplification of Acanthamoeba DNA used for sequencing. Sanger sequencing of all PCR products was performed, followed by BLAST analysis for species identification. We screened 26 clinical isolates of Acanthamoeba spp. for potential endosymbionts. Five isolates (19%) were found to contain bacterial DNA belonging to Legionellales. Three (11%) contained members of the Rickettsiales and Pseudomonas genticulata was detected in a Rickettsia-positive sample. One strain (4%) contained Neochlamydia hartmannellae, a member of the Chlamydiales order. Bacterial endosymbionts are prevalent in clinical strains of Acanthamoeba causing AK isolated from corneal scrapings. The demonstration of these organisms in clinical Acanthamoeba isolates supports a potential exploration of anti-endosymbiont therapeutics as an adjuvant therapy in the treatment of AK.
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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".