Diversity and distribution of extracellular microcrystals in holothuroid echinoderms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Biomineralization research in echinoderms has been focused on skeletal structures, which provide strength and protection. Other minerals, specifically extracellular microcrystals, are described here for the first time in echinoderms. Six morphotypes were isolated from a holothuroid and classified into three chemical compounds. Uric acid crystals were associated with fluids from the hydrovascular system, perivisceral coelom and respiratory tree, while calcium carbonate crystals were detected in the epithelium of the respiratory tree and calcium oxalate dihydrate crystals were found in tissues of the cloaca, integument, Polian vesicle and tentacle. Uric acid crystals were mostly non-encapsulated in tissues, whereas, in fluids, they were often encapsulated by phagocytes, alone or in groups, suggesting that they are waste products. Calcium carbonate crystals in the respiratory tree and calcium oxalate dihydrate crystals in the cloaca suggest that they are being expelled from the body. Insofar as calcium oxalate dihydrate crystals could be involved in calcium regulation, we speculate that they might be crystallized and retained in ossicle-associated integumentary tissues and tentacles, which are susceptible to damage and could use them as a calcium reserve to synthesize and repair ossicles. Observations of microcrystals in different holothuroid species examined suggest their ubiquity in the class Holothuroidea and more generally, deuterostomes.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| 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".