Conserved leucine-rich repeat proteins in the adhesive projectile slime of velvet worms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The slime of velvet worms (Onychophora) is a protein-based bioadhesive that undergoes rapid, yet reversible transition from a fluid into stiff fibers used for prey capture and defense, but the mechanism by which this phase transition functions is largely unknown. Here, integrating transcriptomic and proteomic approaches with AI-guided structure predictions, we discover a group of evolutionarily conserved leucine-rich repeat (LRR) proteins in velvet worm slime that readily adopt a receptor-like, protein-binding "horseshoe" structure. Our structural predictions suggest dimerization of LRR proteins and support their interactions with conserved β-sheet-rich domains of high-molecular-weight proteins, the primary building blocks of velvet worm slime fibers. This suggests that LRR proteins might be involved in reversible, receptor-based supramolecular interactions in these biofibers, providing potential avenues for fabricating fully recyclable (bio)polymeric materials.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".