Winter‐active spiders ( <i>Clubiona</i> ) have a hyperactive antifreeze protein with a unique beta‐solenoid fold
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Spiders are among the most important natural enemies of pests in orchards. Clubiona spp. are active even during winter, when other pest predators are dormant. Such activity is possible because these spiders produce antifreeze proteins (AFPs) that bind to the surface of ice crystals to prevent their growth at subzero temperatures. To investigate their AFPs, we collected Clubiona spiders from a pome fruit orchard in the Czech Republic on subzero days in December and February. The AFPs were isolated through five successive rounds of ice-affinity purification as a family of ~30-kDa isoforms. Tryptic fragments from these AFPs were sequenced using tandem mass spectrometry and corresponding transcripts were obtained from an Illumina metatranscriptome. Homologs were absent from the GenBank protein database. Protein modelling with AlphaFold2 shows that these spider AFPs form a previously unseen β-solenoid with a flat surface populated by arrays of threonine (Thr) residues. Although these features are like those of the β-solenoid AFPs from beetles and moths, the proteins are not homologous. This is a remarkable example of convergent evolution of proteins at both the structural and sequence levels for the task of binding ice.
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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) | 0.001 | 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".