Helminth‐associated changes in host immune phenotype connect top‐down and bottom‐up interactions during co‐infection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Within‐host parasite interactions can be mediated by the host and changes in host phenotypes often serve as indicators of the presence or intensity of parasite interactions. Parasites like helminths induce a range of physiological, morphological and immunological changes in hosts that can drive bottom‐up (resource‐mediated) or top‐down (immune‐mediated) interactions with co‐infecting parasites. Although top‐down and bottom‐up interactions are typically studied in isolation, the diverse phenotypic changes induced by parasite infection may serve as a useful tool for understanding if, and when, these processes act in concert. Using an anthelmintic treatment study of African buffalo, Syncerus caffer , we tracked changes in host immunological and morphological phenotypes during helminth‐coccidia co‐infection to investigate their role in driving independent and combinatorial bottom‐up and top‐down parasite interactions. We also examined repercussions for host fitness. Clearance of a blood‐sucking helminth, Haemonchus , from the host gastrointestinal tract induced a systemic Th2 immune phenotype, while clearance of a tissue‐feeding helminth, Cooperia , induced a systemic Th1 phenotype. Furthermore, the Haemonchus ‐associated systemic Th2 immune phenotype drove simultaneous top‐down and bottom‐up effects that increased coccidia shedding by changing the immunological and morphological landscapes of the intestine. Higher coccidia shedding was associated with lower host body condition, a lower chance of pregnancy and older age at first pregnancy, suggesting that coccidia infection imposed significant condition and reproductive costs on the host. Our findings suggest that top‐down and bottom‐up interactions may commonly co‐occur and that tracking key host phenotypes that change in response to infection can help uncover complex pathways by which parasites interact. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
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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 | 0.001 | 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) | 0.012 | 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".