Transcriptional patterns of sexual dimorphism and in host developmental programs in the model parasitic nematode Heligmosomoides bakeri
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Heligmosomoides bakeri (often mistaken for Heligmosomoides polygyrus) is a promising model for parasitic nematodes with the key advantage of being amenable to study and manipulation within a controlled laboratory environment. While draft genome sequences are available for this worm, which allow for comparative genomic analyses between nematodes, there is a notable lack of information on its gene expression. METHODS: We generated biologically replicated RNA-seq datasets from samples taken throughout the parasitic life of H. bakeri. RNA from tissue-dwelling and lumen-dwelling worms, collected under a dissection microscope, was sequenced on an Illumina platform. RESULTS: We find extensive transcriptional sexual dimorphism throughout the fourth larval and adult stages of this parasite and identify alternative splicing, glycosylation, and ubiquitination as particularly important processes for establishing and/or maintaining sex-specific gene expression in this species. We find sex-linked differences in transcription related to aging and oxidative and osmotic stress responses. We observe a starvation-like signature among transcripts whose expression is consistently upregulated in males, which may reflect a higher energy expenditure by male worms. We detect evidence of increased importance for anaerobic respiration among the adult worms, which coincides with the parasite's migration into the physiologically hypoxic environment of the intestinal lumen. Furthermore, we hypothesize that oxygen concentration may be an important driver of the worms encysting in the intestinal mucosa as larvae, which not only fully exposes the worms to their host's immune system but also shapes many of the interactions between the host and parasite. We find stage- and sex-specific variation in the expression of immunomodulatory genes and in anthelmintic targets. CONCLUSIONS: We examine how different the male and female worms are at the molecular level and describe major developmental events that occur in the worm, which extend our understanding of the interactions between this parasite and its host. In addition to generating new hypotheses for follow-up experiments into the worm's behavior, physiology, and metabolism, our datasets enable future more in-depth comparisons between nematodes to better define the utility of H. bakeri as a model for parasitic nematodes in general.
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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".