Immunomodulatory functions of fungal melanins in respiratory infections
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The rate of invasive fungal infections has risen drastically over the last decade and continues to carry devastatingly high mortality rates. Currently, there are no licensed vaccines and limited antifungal agents in clinical trials for fungal-mediated diseases. The limited effectiveness of FDA-approved antifungal medications against invasive fungal infections and the lack of mechanistic understanding of how these infections manifest pose a significant burden on healthcare systems worldwide. Therefore, understanding the molecular details of the host-fungal interactions has never been more urgent. Here, we examine the role of fungal melanin as a virulence factor through its immunomodulatory effects during respiratory infections. Although previous literature on fungal pathogenicity has touched briefly on fungal pigments, they are incomplete in discussing how melanin dysregulates essential functions of the innate immune system. To provide a contemporary perspective, literature on melanized fungal species commonly associated with infections via the respiratory tract has been reviewed to detail holistic mechanisms by which melanin subverts the immune system and manipulates the respiratory epithelium.
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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) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".