Animal Behavior and Cognition

The olfactory receptor SNIF-1 mediates foraging for leucine-rich diets in C. elegans

1. Ritika Siddiqui
2. Nikita Mehta
3. Gopika Ranjith
4. Marie-Anne Felix
5. Changchun Chen
6. Varsha Singh

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This important work is the first to suggest a model that the nematode C. elegans prefers specific bacteria (its major food source) that release high amounts of the known attractant isoamyl alcohol when supplemented with exogenous leucine and has also identified a likely receptor for the odorant isoamyl alcohol. The evidence supporting the claims of the authors is solid, and the manuscript would be improved by changes to the text that clarify and address the distinction between "supplemented" versus "enriched". The renaming of srd-12 to snif-1 should also be addressed.

Reviewed by eLife

Sex-Dependent Vulnerability to PTSD-Like Behaviors in iNOS Knockout Mice

1. Bruna F. Ferreira
2. Isabela Pavan-Silva
3. Sabrina F. Lisboa

Reviewed by PREreview

Information, certainty, and learning

1. Justin A Harris
2. Charles Randy Gallistel

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This paper presents fundamental research showing that the acquisition and expression of Pavlovian conditioned responding are lawfully related to temporal characteristics of an animal's conditioning experience. It showcases a rigorous experimental design, several different approaches to data analysis, careful consideration of prior literature, and a thorough introduction. The evidence supporting the conclusions is compelling. The paper will have a general appeal to those interested in the behavioral and neural analysis of Pavlovian conditioning.

Reviewed by eLife

Colony demographics shape nest construction in Camponotus fellah ants

1. Harikrishnan Rajendran
2. Roi Weinberger
3. Ehud Fonio
4. Ofer Feinerman

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study presents an important finding that ant nest structure and digging behavior depend on ant age demographics for a ground-dwelling ant species (Camponotus fellah). By asking whether ants employ age-polyethism in excavation, the authors address a long-standing question about how individuals in collectives determine the overall state of the task they must perform. The experimental evidence that the age of the ants and the group composition affect the digging of tunnels is convincing, and their model is able to replicate the colony's excavation dynamics qualitatively, results that may prove to be a key consideration for interpreting results from other studies in the field of social insect behavior.

Reviewed by eLife

Overcoming distortion in multidimensional predictive representation

1. Euan Prentis
2. Akram Bakkour

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This manuscript makes a valuable contribution to understanding learning in multidimensional environments with spurious associations, which is critical for understanding learning in the real world. The evidence is based on model simulations and a preregistered human behavioral study, but remains incomplete because of inconclusive empirical results and insufficiencies in the modeling. Moreover, there are open questions about the nature and extent to which the behavioral task induced semantic congruency.

Reviewed by eLife

WNKs regulate mouse behavior and alter central nervous system glucose uptake and insulin signaling

1. Ankita B Jaykumar
2. Derk Binns
3. Clinton A Taylor
4. Anthony Anselmo
5. Sachith Gallolu Kankanamalage
6. Shari G Birnbaum
7. Kimberly M Huber
8. Melanie H Cobb

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study seeks to expand the understanding of insulin and glucose responses in the brain, specifically by implicating a family of protein kinases responsive to insulin. The significance of the study to the field is valuable, given this study is very emblematic of the new field of interoception (Brain-Body physiology). The evidence supporting the conclusions about brain glucose utilization is convincing and is relevant to many age-related diseases, such as Alzheimer's disorder.

Reviewed by eLife

JAX Animal Behavior System (JABS): A genetics informed, end-to-end advanced behavioral phenotyping platform for the laboratory mouse

1. Anshul Choudhary
2. Brian Q Geuther
3. Thomas J Sproule
4. Glen Beane
5. Vivek Kohar
6. Jarek Trapszo
7. Vivek Kumar

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study presents JABS, an open-source platform that integrates hardware and user-friendly software for standardized mouse behavioral phenotyping. The work has practical implications for improving reproducibility and accessibility in behavioral neuroscience, especially for linking behavior to genetics across diverse mouse strains. The strength of evidence is convincing, with comprehensive validation of the platform's components and enthusiastic reviewer support.

Reviewed by eLife

vassi – verifiable, automated scoring of social interactions in animal groups

1. Paul Nührenberg
2. Aneesh PH Bose
3. Alex Jordan

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study presents vassi, a Python package that streamlines the preparation of training data for machine-learning-based classification of social behaviors in animal groups. This package is a valuable resource for researchers with computational expertise, implementing a framework for the detection of directed social interactions within a group and an interactive tool for reviewing and correcting behavior detections. However, the strength of evidence that the method is widely applicable remains incomplete, performance on benchmark dyadic datasets is comparable to existing approaches, and performance scores on collective behavioral datasets are low. While the package can analyze behavior in large groups of animals, it only outputs dyadic interactions within these groups and does not account for behaviors where more than two animals may be interacting.

Reviewed by eLife

Avoidance of hydrogen sulfide is modulated by external and internal states in Caenorhabditis elegans

1. Longjun Pu
2. Lina Zhao
3. Jing Wang
4. Clementine Deleuze
5. Lars Nilsson
6. Johan Henriksson
7. Patrick Laurent
8. Changchun Chen

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  These valuable studies explore the consequences of exposure to the toxin hydrogen sulfide (H2S) on the behavior and physiology of C. elegans. The work finds that behavioral changes evoked by H2S exposure are modulated by several regulatory pathways known to influence chemosensory-evoked locomotor behavior, but there is incomplete data to support the authors' claim of comprehensive mechanistic insight into the consequences of H2S exposure. Nevertheless, the findings may be informative for those studying organismal stress responses and the effects of mitochondrial ROS on behavior and physiology.

Reviewed by eLife

Megabouts: a flexible pipeline for zebrafish locomotion analysis

1. Adrien Jouary
2. Pedro TM Silva
3. Alexandre Laborde
4. J Miguel Mata
5. João C Marques
6. Elena MD Collins
7. Randall T Peterson
8. Christian K Machens
9. Michael B Orger

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study introduces Megabouts, a transformer-based classifier for larval zebrafish movement bouts. This useful tool is thoughtfully implemented and has clear potential to unify analyses across labs. However, the evidence supporting its robustness is incomplete. How the method generalizes across datasets, how sensitive it is to noise, and the specific sources of misclassification are unclear. The method would also be strengthened by providing options for users to fine-tune the clusters under different experimental conditions, which would further enhance reliability and flexibility.

Reviewed by eLife