Metal-specific genes remain core-enriched

Claim

Genes classified as metal-specific are not merely general stress genes, but they still remain strongly core-enriched relative to baseline genes.

Review Brief

What changed: this claim is now reused by critical-minerals, AMR co-selection, and metal ecology pages, so reviewers need a precise view of threshold and coverage caveats.

Why review matters: this is one of the most important premises for engineering target selection. If it is too broad, downstream pages may over-prioritize conserved stress genes.

Evidence to inspect:

• metal_specificity for non-metal sick-rate thresholds.
• metal_fitness_atlas for cross-organism metal fitness evidence.
• conservation_vs_fitness for conservation and measured consequence.
• Metal specificity versus general stress for unresolved controls.

Questions for reviewers:

• Is the 5% non-metal sick-rate threshold appropriate for claim reuse?
• Are core-enriched targets being separated from generic housekeeping stress?
• Which missing organisms or locus-ID gaps could change the claim?
• Should this claim require counter-ion evidence before promotion?

Evidence

metal_specificity reports that 54.9% of analyzable metal-important records are metal-specific under the 5% non-metal sick-rate threshold, and that metal-specific genes retain high core fractions.

Why It Matters

This keeps the core-genome robustness model alive while still identifying specialized gene targets. It changes engineering expectations: useful tolerance determinants may be conserved housekeeping-adjacent systems, not only accessory resistance islands.

Caveats

Coverage gaps, threshold choices, essential-gene invisibility, and counter-ion effects should travel with this claim.