Author response: Glycolytic flux controls retinal progenitor cell differentiation via regulating Wnt signaling
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Metabolic pathways are remodeled in response to energy and other homeostatic demands and are dynamically regulated during embryonic development, suggestive of a role in guiding cellular differentiation. Here, we show that glycolytic flux is required and sufficient to bias multipotent retinal progenitor cells (RPCs) to acquire a rod photoreceptor fate in the murine retina. In an RPC-specific conditional knock-out of Phosphatase and tensin homolog (Pten-cKO) and in an RPC-specific conditional gain-of-function of dominant active PFKB3 (cytoPFKB3), glycolytic gene expression and activity are elevated, correlating with precocious rod photoreceptor differentiation and outer segment maturation. Conversely, glycolytic inhibition in retinal explants, achieved either with 2-deoxy-d-glucose, a competitive inhibitor of glucose metabolism, by lowering media pH, which disables PKM2, a rate-limiting enzyme, or by inhibiting lactate/H+ symporters, which lowers intracellular pH, suppresses RPC proliferation and photoreceptor differentiation. Mechanistically, we show that Wnt signaling, the top-upregulated pathway in Pten-cKO retinas, is a glycolysis-dependent pathway. Pharmacological and genetic perturbation of Wnt signaling using a Ctnnb1-cKO phenocopies glycolytic inhibition, suppressing RPC proliferation, photoreceptor differentiation and outer segment maturation. Thus, developmental rewiring of glycolytic flux modulates Wnt signaling to drive rod photoreceptor differentiation and maturation, an instructive role that may be exploited therapeutically for cell replacement strategies.Transgenic and pharmacological approaches reveal developmental elevations in glycolytic flux have an instructive role in promoting rod photoreceptor differentiation and maturation via activation of Wnt signaling.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
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".