Pilin antigenic variants impact gonococcal lifestyle and antibiotic tolerance by modulating interbacterial forces
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Type 4 pili (T4P) are multifunctional filaments involved in adhesion, surface motility, biofilm formation, and horizontal gene transfer. These extracellular polymers are surface-exposed and, therefore, act as antigens. The human pathogen Neisseria gonorrhoeae uses pilin antigenic variation to escape immune surveillance, yet it is unclear how antigenic variation impacts most other functions of T4P. Here, we addressed this question by replacing the major pilin of a laboratory strain with pilins from clinical isolates. We reveal that the resulting strains vary substantially in their attractive forces. Strongly interacting bacteria form microcolonies while weakly interacting bacteria retain a planktonic lifestyle. In mixed microcolonies, different variant strains segregate in agreement with the differential strength of adhesion hypothesis. By combining structural predictions and laser tweezers experiments, we show that the C-terminal region of the pilin is crucial for attraction. Lifestyle affects growth kinetics and antibiotic tolerance. In the presence of ceftriaxone or ciprofloxacin, the killing kinetics indicate strongly increased tolerance of aggregating strains. We propose that pilin antigenic variation produces a mixed population containing variants optimized for growth, colonization, or survivability under external stress. Different environments select different variants, ensuring the survival and reproduction of the population as a whole.
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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 it