Selenoneine and ergothioneine in beluga skin and tissues as key antioxidants in the Inuit diet
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As a result of their unique traditional diet, Inuit living in Nunavik (northern Quebec) exhibit among the highest blood concentrations of antioxidants selenoneine and ergothioneine worldwide. While beluga skin consumption has been identified as the main dietary source of selenoneine, potentially affording protection against methylmercury toxicity, little is known regarding the presence of ergothioneine, its sulphur isologue, in wild foods consumed by Inuit. We used isotope-dilution liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry to quantify concentrations of selenoneine, ergothioneine and their metabolites in various organs and tissues obtained from 14 adult beluga whales (Delphinapterus leucas) harvested by Quaqtaq hunters in 2018-2019. We found the highest concentrations in the skin, with an average of 17.2 µg/g selenoneine and 78.6 µg/g ergothioneine - the highest ergothioneine concentration reported to date in the marine biome. We also obtained evidence of transplacental transfer of both antioxidants. Selenoneine and ergothioneine displayed outwardly increasing concentrations across skin layers and immunofluorescence staining revealed the primary location of the ergothioneine transporter in the basal epidermal layer. The combined accumulation of these antioxidants in the skin epidermis may suggest a protective role against UV photodamage and may help protect both belugas and Inuit against physical and chemical stressors of the northern environment.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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".