torchcell.datamodels.schema.ResponseCategory

class ResponseCategory(*values)[source]

Bases: StrEnum

The controlled vocabulary a qualitative environment-response call resolves to.

Every categorical screen invents its own words for the same small set of outcomes (“sensitive”, “tolerant”, “++”, “wild type”, “defective”), so a free-text category joins nothing: two screens reporting the same biology land in different buckets and a single screen’s vocabulary is unknowable without reading its loader. This enum is the shared axis; the source’s own word is kept verbatim in EnvironmentResponsePhenotype.category_label, so nothing is lost by mapping.

The axis is the strain’s growth/readout RELATIVE TO the record’s declared reference, in the perturbed environment. Five members form an ORDER (enhanced > no_change > mildly_reduced > reduced > severely_reduced); the remaining three are deliberately unordered, because a source that reports only a binary hit call has not measured a severity and a mapping must not invent one.

  • enhanced: measurably better than the reference (Smith 2006 clear-zone 4, “larger than wild type”; a biosensor signal above control).

  • no_change: indistinguishable from the reference (Smith 2006 score 3 “wild type”; Mota 2024’s unlisted strains, “no detectable susceptibility”).

  • mildly_reduced: a slight deficit short of a clear one (Smith 2006 growth 2.5, the released table’s undocumented intermediate grade).

  • reduced: a clear but partial deficit (Smith 2006 score 2, “less than wild type” / “moderate”; Mota 2024 +, minor-to-moderate growth inhibition).

  • severely_reduced: growth or signal essentially abolished (Smith 2006 score 1, “small or not detectable” / “little/no growth”; Mota 2024 ++, total growth inhibition).

  • sensitive: an UNGRADED hit call under stress, where the source reports only that the strain is affected (Auesukaree 2009’s listed stress-sensitive mutants). Not a synonym for reduced: mapping it there would assert a severity the source never scored.

  • resistant: the ungraded opposite, a strain called tolerant of a stress that affects the reference.

  • not_determined: the strain was screened but no call could be made (a failed or excluded well), which is distinct both from no_change and from absence.