Making Fungal-Photobiont Symbioses in the Lab: Past, Present, and Future of the Elusive In Vitro Lichen
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ability to synthesize lichen symbioses in vitro from pure cultures of transformable symbionts would be a game changer for experiments to identify the metabolic interplay that underpins the success of lichens. However, despite multiple reports of successful lichen resynthesis, no lichen lab model system exists today. We reviewed 150 years of in vitro lichen studies and found that the term resynthesis is applied to many types of fungal-photobiont cocultures that do not resemble lichens. Some of the most lichen-like results, for their part, were obtained from nonaxenic tissue culture. Only a few studies reported obtaining natural-looking lichens from axenic input cultures, but all appear to have been isolated successes obtained against the background of extensive contamination. We suggest revisiting resynthesis experiments in light of recent advances in our understanding of lichen microbial composition to test whether in vitro lichen morphogenesis requires microbial inputs beyond those of the canonical fungal and algal symbionts.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it