An Empirical Study of the Evolution of L-Type BSE Virulence Under Both Horizontal and Vertical Transmission
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Prion diseases are fatal neurodegenerative disorders caused by the misfolding of the cellular prion protein PrPC into pathogenic conformers PrPSc. Recent experimentation with the transgenic mice and the discovery of prion strains’ self-replicability opens an avenue to compare the virulence of prions transmitted horizontally with prions transmitted vertically in BSE models. The task of this review and proposal is to delineate the evolutionary relationship between prion vector and virulence. Similar to conventional wisdom, the hypothesis is that horizontally-transmitted prion strains will evolve to higher virulence whereas vertically-transmitted prion strains will evolve lower virulence. To corroborate this hypothesis, in vivo experimentation will take place; bovine transgenic mice infected with L-type BSE PrPSc strains will be tested under horizontal and vertical transmission. In the study, vector evolution will be shown through serial passage of these infected mice over four generations. The results should demonstrate the ability to specialize in either horizontal or vertical transmission and the subsequent inability to transmit in the opposite vector. The virulence associated with vector specialization will be characterized by mortality percentage and net Aβ plaque density percentage. The results should demonstrate increasing mortality and Aβ plaque density percentages in the horizontal model and decreasing mortality and Aβ plaque density percentages in the vertical model. The findings of this investigation will be significant because they will aid in formulating predictive models for treating zoonotic prion diseases, thus paving the way for human public health strategies.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".