Evidence for a core set of microbial lichen symbionts from a global survey of metagenomes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Lichens are the archetypal symbiosis and the one for which the term was coined. Although application of shotgun sequencing techniques has shown that many lichen symbioses can harbour more symbionts than the canonically recognized fungus and photobiont, no global census of lichen organismal composition has been undertaken. Here, we analyze the genome content of 437 lichen metagenomes from six continents, and show that four bacterial lineages occur in the majority of lichen symbioses, at a frequency on par with algal photobionts. A single bacterial genus, Lichenihabitans , occurs in nearly one-third of all lichens sampled. Genome annotations from the most common lichen bacterial symbionts suggest they are aerobic anoxygenic photoheterotrophs and produce essential vitamins, but do not fix nitrogen. We also detected secondary basidiomycete symbionts in about two-thirds of analyzed metagenomes. Our survey suggests a core set of four to seven microbial symbionts are involved in forming and maintaining lichen symbioses.
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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".