Hidden genetic diversity among <i>Blochmanniella</i> endosymbionts of closely related carpenter ant populations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Carpenter ants (Family Formicidae; Genus Camponotus) are a globally distributed, arboreal clade. They harbor an intracellular obligate bacterial endosymbiont known as "Candidatus Blochmanniella spp." (hereafter Blochmanniella). The host ant species, C. vicinus, is geographically dispersed across the western United States of America and western Canada. To investigate how Blochmanniella have differentially evolved from related host-endosymbiont lineages, we sampled a C. vicinus population from California's Sierra Nevada mountains, California, U.S.A., at an elevation of 2,300 m. Using morphological characters and Cytochrome Oxidase I markers, we determined that this population is genetically distinct from geographically distributed lineages of C. vicinus from Central California and Western North America (Arizona, U.S.A. to British Columbia, Canada). Thus, we sequenced the genome of the Blochmanniella endosymbiont from this host to understand how closely related symbiont lineages evolve. While our newly sequenced lineage is syntenic with other Blochmanniella, it has lost genes involved in membrane maintenance, bacterial cell information, and nutrition synthesis. Protein-coding genes across its genome are highly divergent as well (average sequence similarity = 93.6%). Therefore, we refer to our novel lineage as the B. vicinus Sequoia lineage (BSEQ). BSEQ can provide 7 of the 10 essential amino acids required by its insect host. It can also help break down toxic urea and repair UV radiation-induced DNA damage. Tests of selection reveal that most protein-coding genes BSEQ and related lineages are under strong or relaxed purifying selection. Taken together, our results demonstrate that while BSEQ and related Blochmanniella lineages have highly conserved content, there is considerable evolutionary diversity between them.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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".