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Record W4409947586 · doi:10.1101/2025.04.25.650682

Single nucleotide polymorphisms and structural variants reveal complex and variable ploidy in the amoebozoan <i>Acanthamoeba castellanii</i>

2025· preprint· en· W4409947586 on OpenAlexafffund
Morgan J. Colp, John M. Archibald

Bibliographic record

VenuebioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2025
Typepreprint
Languageen
FieldBiochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
TopicLegionella and Acanthamoeba research
Canadian institutionsDalhousie University
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaDalhousie UniversityGordon and Betty Moore Foundation
KeywordsAcanthamoebaSingle-nucleotide polymorphismPloidyGeneticsBiologyEvolutionary biologyComputational biologyGenotypeGene

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract Acanthamoeba castellanii is a free-living amoeba that is emerging as a model organism for the study of eukaryotic microbiology. It is one of the most widely studied members of the Amoebozoa, and is both an important grazer in soil communities and an opportunistic human pathogen; A. castellanii is thus of evolutionary, ecological, and biomedical significance. Despite its potential as a lab workhorse, the genome biology of A. castellanii is complex and poorly understood. Polyploidy is a common feature of many amoebozoan genomes, and members of the genus Acanthamoeba are no exception; they appear to be not only polyploid, where genome copy number is inflated beyond the conventional haploid and diploid states, but also aneuploid, i.e., with inter-chromosomal copy number variation. To better understand aneuploidy in A. castellanii and how it may vary over time and between closely related strains, we analyzed nanopore and Illumina sequence datasets from several wild-type and mutant A. castellanii lines, with a focus on quantifying single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) and structural variant allele frequencies across chromosome-scale scaffolds. Our findings suggest that intragenomic chromosome copy number is highly variable in Acanthamoeba and can change dynamically even over laboratory time scales. Significance Statement Acanthamoeba castellanii is becoming an important model organism for basic and applied research. However, its apparent polyploidy and aneuploidy has the potential to complicate the interpretation of results that depend on knowledge of gene copy number. In this study, we reveal the complex nature of ploidy in this organism by analyzing long- and short-read sequence data. Our results provide a reference point against which genomic and experimental data from A. castellanii can be interpreted, and guide future efforts aimed at more precisely characterizing how the organism regulates its genome and chromosome copy number.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.004
Threshold uncertainty score0.007

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.017
GPT teacher head0.237
Teacher spread0.220 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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