Editorial: Genetically mobile elements repurposed by nature and biotechnologists
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mobile genetic elements (MGEs), including introns, retroelements, and inteins are present in many microbes. These elements, traditionally considered molecular parasites, reshape genomes and drive evolution. However, non-random distributions within host genomes and response to environmental cues force the rethinking of MGEs as simple parasites, raising questions about the possible importance of these elements to the host organisms they invade (Belfort 2017). Indeed, compelling evidence indicates that nature has repurposed these MGEs with spectacular results, leading to such evolutionary marvels as CRISPR immune systems to protect bacteria from phage, spliceosomal introns and hedgehog signaling. These mobile elements have also proven exceptionally useful to biotechnologists, leading to the development of ground-breaking technologies in genome manipulation, next-generation sequencing, protein engineering, and synthetic biology This Research Topic, which includes one opinion, three original research, and five review articles, provides a contemporary perspective on the numerous areas of interest regarding the biological importance of MGEs to the hosts they invade and also highlights new and exciting applications of these elements by biotechnologists (Figure
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| 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".