The Virulence Gene <i>ToxB</i> Is Both Amplified and Disrupted by Transposons in the Wheat Pathogen <i>Pyrenophora tritici-repentis</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary Mechanisms that drive virulence gene duplication in plant pathogenic fungi remain poorly understood. In Pyrenophora tritici-repentis ( Ptr ), responsible for tan spot of wheat, ToxB is a multicopy virulence gene encoding a proteinaceous necrotrophic effector. ToxB exhibits a virulence dosage effect, where higher copy numbers are associated with increased disease severity. In this work, we sought to resolve a 25-year old question as to what drove the proliferation of ToxB within Ptr . To investigate this, 23 long-read assemblies were generated and analyzed from a collection of globally distributed isolates with various ToxB copy numbers, with a specific focus on regions containing ToxB . Extensive comparative alignments identified a Helitron-like element, ToxB-HLE , that appears to be driving the duplication of ToxB in an accessory region of chromosome 4. This region is entirely absent in isolates lacking ToxB or its nonfunctional homolog toxb . In addition to gene amplification by transposons, multiple independent transposon insertion events were identified in several isolates that disrupted the ToxB open reading frame creating inactive toxb haplotypes. This study provides strong evidence supporting the hypothesis that transposons play dual roles in the rapid evolution of fungal pathogenicity by both amplifying and disrupting a key virulence gene in a globally distributed plant pathogen.
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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 | 0.001 | 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".