Successful Transmission and Isolation of a Fungal Pathogen From Wild Frogs to a Captive Amphibian Model Species: Fine Scale Pathogen Genetic Diversity and Infection‐Induced Changes in Skin Bacteria
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Amphibian populations worldwide are severely threatened, in part, by the pathogenic fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd). While Bd has driven many amphibian declines and extinctions, its impact varies, with some populations exhibiting resistance or tolerance. Understanding the mechanisms behind this variation, together with Bd genetic diversity, is crucial for conservation. We used the model organism Hymenochirus boettgeri in a lab-based transmission experiment designed to isolate Bd derived from wild amphibian hosts with low pathogen loads. Through successful transmission and subsequent isolation and genotyping, we identified multiple Bd genotypes from a single population, including a potential sexual recombinant, all belonging to the Global Panzootic Lineage (Bd-GPL). This finding contributes to evidence of ongoing genetic mixing of Bd in natural environments. Additionally, we leveraged this experiment to assess Bd-induced changes in amphibian skin bacteria. Our results showed significant changes in the skin bacterial communities of H. boettgeri after acquiring Bd infection, including reductions in bacterial diversity, and shifts in community composition, as observed in others susceptible species. These findings highlight the value of transmission experiments in isolating Bd from wild hosts and underscore the potential of H. boettgeri as a model to investigate Bd genetic diversity and host-associated microbiome responses to infection.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".