Insights into the Role of Occluding Septate Junctions in the Maintenance of Salt and Water Balance in Mosquito ( <i>Aedes aegypti</i> ) Larvae
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Septate junctions (SJs) are specialized occluding junctions that function as paracellular diffusion barriers in the epithelia of invertebrates. SJs are composed of transmembrane and cytosolic proteins which are reported to be essential for epithelium integrity. This is of particular importance to aquatic animals because their habitat is often compositionally different from their internal body fluids. Furthermore, aquatic habitats are subjected to alterations in their solute composition by anthropogenic and climatic factors. In this regard, the contribution of SJ proteins to the regulation of paracellular solute movement across epithelia during and/or following changes in an aquatic invertebrate's environmental conditions is not known. It can however be hypothesized that epithelial SJ protein abundance is altered in response to environmental changes, reflecting their involvement in the regulated movement of solutes across the paracellular pathway. To begin testing this hypothesis, a role for SJ proteins in the maintenance of salt and water balance in larval mosquito Aedes aegypti was considered. These animals reside in freshwater (FW), a hypoosmotic environment, but are capable of tolerating saline environments that reflect isosmotic conditions. Genes encoding A. aegypti SJ proteins Megatrachea, Sinuous, Kune‐kune, Coracle, Scribble, Discs large, Neurexin IV, Lethal giant larva, Gliotactin, Mesh and Snakeskin were identified and their expression was examined in midgut, Malpighian tubules, hindgut and anal papillae, which are tissues that participate in osmoregulation. SJ proteins exhibited tissue specific differences in transcript abundance and immunolocalized to SJ domains between epithelial cells and in the apical membrane domain of the syncytial anal papillae epithelium. Upon rearing larvae in brackish water (30% seawater) tissue‐specific alterations in SJ transcript and protein abundance were observed. Furthermore, in the midgut, salinity‐induced differences in SJ protein abundance occurred in conjunction with differences in the paracellular permeability of this tissue. Taken together, data support the hypothesis that SJ protein abundance is altered in response to environmental change and that SJ proteins play an important tissue‐specific role in the maintenance of salt and water balance in the aquatic larvae of A. aegypti . Since A. aegypti is a vector of re‐emerging viral diseases, Dengue and Chikungunya, and has been shown to successfully breed in both salinated and freshwater in regions where these diseases are active, a complete understanding of the role of SJ proteins in larval mosquito salt and water balance is important. Support or Funding Information Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Discovery Grants to S.P.K and A.D., an Ontario Graduate Scholarship to S.J
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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 | 0.001 | 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".