Genomic and Virulence Profiling of Erysipelothrix rhusiopathiae Isolated from Widespread Muskox Mortalities in Arctic Archipelago
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Muskoxen are an important food and economic resource for the indigenous people in the Canadian Arctic; however, in recent years this species has experienced substantial disease-related population declines. A single strain (‘Arctic clone’) of Erysipelothrix rhusiopathiae was associated with mass mortalities of muskoxen on Banks and Victoria Islands in 2010-2013, and various wild species on Prince Patrick Island in 2017. In 2021, an outbreak of E. rhusiopathiae was reported for the first time in muskoxen on Ellesmere Island. The predominance of the Arctic clone in the Arctic raises the question of virulence of this lineage. Objectives of this study were to characterize E. rhusiopathiae isolates from Ellesmere Island and identify amino acid sequence variations among 17 virulence genes, pathogenicity islands and prophages among 28 Arctic clone and 31 other closely related E. rhusiopathiae genomes. In addition, unique genetic contents of the Arctic clone that may encode virulence traits were determined via pan-genome wide association studies. Comparison of virulence gene sequences among 59 E. rhusiopathiae genomes offered insights into amino acid variations unique to the Arctic clone. I found that 16 of 17 virulence genes investigated were present and 4 of 17 were highly conserved among all the genomes. Putative virulence gene sequences of adhesin, rhusiopathiae surface protein-A, choline binding protein-B and leucine rich repeat protein had amino acid sequence variants unique to the Arctic clone. These genes encoded proteins that help E. rhusiopathiae to attach to the host endothelial cells and form biofilms. Characterizing pathogenicity islands revealed a novel finding of 12/28 Arctic clone isolates harbouring toxin-B. Toxin-B is an exotoxin produced by Clostridiodes difficile and causes pathogenesis via cytolysis. None of the prophages harboured virulence genes. The core genome alignment of 59 E. rhusiopathiae whole genomes provided evidence that the Arctic clone might be associated with the mortality on Ellesmere Island. The newly isolated E. rhusiopathiae belong to the Arctic clone, which was found to contain unique amino acid sequences for known virulence genes. The Arctic clone may have gained new virulence traits via mobile genetic elements mediated.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".