Starship giant transposons dominate plastic genomic regions in a fungal plant pathogen and drive virulence evolution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Starships form a recently discovered superfamily of giant transposons in Pezizomycotina fungi, implicated in mediating horizontal transfer of diverse cargo genes between fungal genomes. Their elusive nature has long obscured their significance, and their impact on genome evolution remains poorly understood. Here, we reveal a surprising abundance and diversity of Starships in the phytopathogenic fungus Verticillium dahliae. Remarkably, Starships dominate the plastic genomic compartments involved in host colonization, carry multiple virulence-associated genes, and exhibit genetic and epigenetic characteristics associated with adaptive genome evolution. Phylogenetic analyses suggest extensive horizontal transfer of Starships between Verticillium species and, strikingly, from distantly related Fusarium fungi. Finally, homology searches and phylogenetic analyses suggest that a Starship contributed to de novo virulence gene formation. Our findings illuminate the profound influence of Starship dynamics on fungal genome evolution and the development of virulence.
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 imitationNot 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.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".