Host transcriptional signatures associated with disease tolerance and environmental persistence in a mosquito-microsporidian system
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Despite strong theory linking parasite life history to virulence and transmission, how parasite strategies affect host responses remains poorly understood. Here, experimental evolution and RNA sequencing were combined in the mosquito–microsporidian system Anopheles gambiae–Vavraia culicis to test whether parasite lineages selected for early or late transmission differ in the host responses they elicit. Early lineages were selected from hosts that died early in infection, whereas late lineages were selected from hosts that died later, generating parasite populations that differ in growth, virulence and environmental persistence. Mosquitoes were infected with evolved parasite lineages and sampled at a common sporulating stage. A reference infection response was defined relative to uninfected controls. Early - and late -selected parasites showed consistent, yet partly distinct, changes in host gene expression. Co-expression network analysis identified gene modules whose activity covaried with parasite traits, including virulence and environmental persistence. One module enriched for tissue maintenance and metabolic functions was negatively associated with virulence, consistent with reduced damage. Another module enriched for membrane and signalling functions was positively associated with environmental persistence, suggesting that host state at transmission may influence the environment in which transmission stages develop. Together, these results identify distinct host states linked to parasite life-history variation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".