Data from: Trade-offs and mixed infections in an obligate-killing insect pathogen
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Natural populations of pathogens are frequently composed of numerous interacting strains. Understanding what maintains this diversity remains a key focus of research in disease ecology. In addition, within-host pathogen dynamics can have a strong impact on both infection outcome and the evolution of pathogen virulence and thus understanding the impact of pathogen diversity is important for disease management. We compared eight genetically distinguishable variants from Spodoptera exempta nucleopolyhedrovirus (SpexNPV) isolated from the African armyworm, Spodoptera exempta. NPVs are obligate killers and the vast majority of transmission-stages are not released until after the host has died. The NPV variants differed significantly in their virulence and could be clustered into two groups based on their dose-response curves. They also differed in their speed of kill and productivity (transmission potential) for S. exempta. The mixed-genotype wild-type SpexNPV, from which each variant was isolated, was significantly more virulent than any individual variant and its mean mortality rate was within the fastest group of individual variants. However, the wild-type virus produced fewer new infectious stages than any single variant, which might reflect competition among the variants. A survival analysis, combining the mortality and speed of kill data, confirmed the superiority of the genetically-mixed wild-type virus over any single variant. S. exempta larvae infected with wild-type SpexNPV were predicted to die 2.7 and 1.9 times faster than insects infected with isolates from either of the two clusters of genotypes. Theory suggests that there are likely to be trade-offs between pathogen fitness traits. Across all larvae, there was a negative linear relationship between virus yield and speed of kill, such that more rapid host death carried the cost of producing fewer transmission stages. We also found a near-significant relationship for the same trend at the inter-variant level. However, there was no evidence for a significant relationship between the induced level of mortality and transmission potential (virus yield) or speed of kill.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".