The discovery of a <i>Legionella</i> phage explains a key determinant of human disease
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Host cells provide intracellular bacteria with protection from harsh environmental conditions and immune responses, but for many intracellular pathogens, this protection does not appear to be absolute as once thought. Bacteriophages that can kill bacteria inside host cells have been identified for pathogens including Salmonella , Mycobacterium , and Chlamydia species. Even in pathogens for which no stable phages have been isolated, such as Legionella pneumophila , the presence of phage defense systems suggests phage susceptibility. Here, we report the stable isolation of Legionella bacteriophage LME-1 ( Legionella mobile element–1) and its impact on bacterial virulence in humans. Cryo–electron microscopy of the capsid (2.1 angstroms) and portal-tail complex (1.9 angstroms) reveals an unambiguous phage particle with T7-like morphology. Characterizing the host range of this phage, we make a serendipitous finding that links the acquisition of a phage defense mechanism to the formation of a virulent clade of L. pneumophila responsible for 80% of all Legionnaires’ disease.
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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 | 0.002 |
| 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".