Cell Biology

Wound-Induced Syncytia Outpace Mononucleate Neighbors during Drosophila Wound Repair

1. James S White
2. Junmin Hua
3. Jasmine J Su
4. Kaden J Tro
5. Elizabeth M Ruark
6. M Shane Hutson
7. Andrea Page-McCaw

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important work addresses a very relevant biological question: what is the cellular basis of wound healing? Using the Drosophila pupal notum as a model, the paper provides an elegant, thorough, descriptive characterization of syncytia-driven wound closure using state-of-the-art confocal live imaging of the pupal notum. The authors meticulously characterize the cell-cell fusion events during wound healing and inhibit cell fusion to show to that it is necessary to speed wound closure. In addition, the study provides convincing evidence that cell fusion allows actin resources at be partitioned to the leading edge.

Reviewed by eLife

Detecting Nuclear Pore Complex assembly in living cells

1. Annemiek C Veldsink
2. Jonas S Fischer
3. Hanna M Terpstra
4. Philip J Mannino
5. Eline MF de Lange
6. Sophie Hell
7. Koen J van Benthem
8. Leila J Saba
9. Anton Steen
10. Rifka Vlijm
11. Matthias Heinemann
12. Karsten Weis
13. C Patrick Lusk
14. Liesbeth M Veenhoff

Reviewed by Review Commons

Linking Germline Telomere Removal to Global Programmed DNA Elimination in Tetrahymena Genome Differentiation

1. Kohei Nagao
2. Alix Lemoine
3. Tomoko Noto
4. Kazufumi Mochizuki

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study reveals intriguing connections between chromosome breakage and DNA elimination during programmed genome rearrangement in the ciliate Tetrahymena thermophila. By developing a novel FISH approach that distinguishes germline and somatic telomeres, the authors provide compelling evidence that chromosome breakage removes germline telomeres along with hundreds of kilobases of germline-limited sequences. By disrupting a single chromosome breakage site, they further showed that DNA elimination was globally affected, which opens up a new direction for mechanistic studies. Thus, this work reveals additional similarity between the programmed DNA elimination in ciliates and nematodes that underlies the transition from germline to somatic telomeres.

Reviewed by eLife

Intracellular growth of Chlamydia trachomatis leads to global histone hypermethylation by impairing demethylation

1. Chloé I. Charendoff
2. Félix V. Louchez
3. Yongzheng Wu
4. Lee Dolat
5. Guillaume Velasco
6. Stéphanie Perrinet
7. Adrian Gabriel Torres
8. Laure Blanchet
9. Magalie Duchateau
10. Quentin Giai Gianetto
11. Mariette Matondo
12. Laurence Del Maestro
13. Slimane Ait-Si-Ali
14. Frédéric Bonhomme
15. Gaël A. Millot
16. Vannary Meas-Yedid
17. Lluís Ribas de Pouplana
18. Elisabeth D. Martinez
19. Raphael H. Valdivia
20. Agathe Subtil

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This is a valuable study of changes in host genome histone methylation and transcription changes associated with Chlamydia infection. The data presented are solid but further analysis would strengthen the authors overall conclusions.

Reviewed by eLife

Lipid packing contributes to the confinement of caveolae to the plasma membrane

1. Elin Larsson
2. Aleksei Kabedev
3. Hudson Pace
4. Jakob Lindwall
5. Fouzia Bano
6. James Rae
7. Robert G Parton
8. Christel AS Bergström
9. Ingela Parmryd
10. Marta Bally
11. Richard Lundmark

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  On the basis of convincing computational, biophysical, and cell-based evidence, this study reports the important finding that the dynamin inhibitor Dyngo-4a broadly affects lipid packing and plasma membrane dynamics, independently of its action on dynamin. The evidence, obtained by a wide range of methods including a newly developed assay visualizing internalized caveolae, provides solid support for the authors' main claim on the role of lipid packing in caveolae internalization. This work will be of significant interest to cell biologists, biophysicists, and chemists interested in membrane remodeling and drug-membrane interactions.

  [Editors' note: this paper was reviewed by Review Commons.]

Reviewed by eLife, Review Commons

Transcriptomic profile of embryoid bodies under hypoxia at single cell level

1. Bárbara Acosta-Iborra
2. Yosra Berrouayel
3. Laura Puente-Santamaría
4. Luis del Peso
5. Benilde Jiménez

• Curated by GigaByte

  Editors Assessment:

  This is a Data Release paper describing a mouse embryoid body single-cell RNA-seq dataset generated to study how oxygen availability shapes early cell differentiation. Acosta-Iborra et al. differentiated R1 mouse embryonic stem cells into embryoid bodies for 8 or 10 days, exposing them to hypoxia or normoxia for the final 16 or 48 hours of differentiation, then profiled thousands of cells per condition using droplet-based scRNA-seq from 10X. This yielding eight raw/filtered HDF5 count matrices across the four conditions. This was validated with flow cytometry, immunofluorescence, and EdU assays, confirming that hypoxia increased endothelial marker expression and vascular network complexity while inducing cell cycle arrest. This pattern mirrored transcriptionally, with hypoxic samples showing markedly higher proportions of cells in G0/G1 phase and elevated hypoxia gene-signature scores. QC analysis (and peer review in GigaByte) confirmed high data quality across samples, and conservative low-resolution clustering revealed a largely homogeneous progenitor population with a smaller, more differentiated subset. While there are limitations (mature endothelial cells were too sparse to robustly test the original hypothesis) the authors present this as an open, well-validated resource for comparative studies of hypoxia responses, benchmarking single-cell computational tools, and investigating early lineage specification and oxygen signaling more broadly.

  This evaluation refers to version 1 of the preprint

Reviewed by GigaByte

Identification of nuclear pore proteins at plasmodesmata: potential role in intercellular transport?

1. T Moritz Schladt
2. Manuel Miras
3. Jona Obinna Ejike
4. Mathieu Pottier
5. Lin Xi
6. Andrea Restrepo-Escobar
7. Masayoshi Nakamura
8. Niklas Pütz
9. Sebastian Hänsch
10. Chen Gao
11. Julia Engelhorn
12. Marcel Dickmanns
13. Gwendolyn V Davis
14. Ahan Dalal
15. Sven Gombos
16. Ronja Lange
17. Rüdiger Simon
18. Waltraud X Schulze
19. Wolf B Frommer

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  Plasmodesmata are channels that allow cell-cell communication in plants; based on the functional similarities between facilitated transport at plasmodesmata and into the nucleus, the authors present the bold and potentially transformational hypothesis that nuclear pore complex proteins (NUPs) might be involved in plasmodesmata function. Here, the authors localize a subset of NUPs to plasmodesmata using proteomics and fluorescent imaging. They acknowledge many limitations to their work, including potential artifacts and the lack of functional validation of multiple NUPs, which may complicate the interpretation of their mostly solid results. Further experiments will be necessary to fully test this fundamental hypothesis about the function of NUPs at plasmodesmata.

Reviewed by eLife

The insulin / IGF axis is critically important for controlling gene transcription in the podocyte

1. Jennifer A Hurcombe
2. Lusyan Dayalan
3. Fern Barrington
4. Frédéric Burdet
5. Lan Ni
6. Joseph T Coward
7. Mark Ibberson
8. Paul T Brinkkoetter
9. Martin Holzenberger
10. Aaron Jeffries
11. Sebastian Oltean
12. Gavin I Welsh
13. Richard JM Coward

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This valuable study used genetic and pharmacological manipulations of insulin/IGF signaling to address the role of insulin/IGF axis in the function of renal glomerular podocyte. Solid data are presented to demonstrate that co-inhibition of insulin/IGF signaling in podocytes led to aberrant splicing of mRNAs, which could contribute to the loss of podocytes in vitro and in vivo in mice. In light of the fact that IR/IGF-1R signaling are critically required for normal development and growth in multiple cells and organs, the lack of the assessment of developmental phenotype of podocytes in the mouse model limits the interpretation of the data.

  [Editors' note: this paper was reviewed by Review Commons.]

Reviewed by eLife

Canonical and phosphoribosyl ubiquitination coordinate to stabilize a proteinaceous structure surrounding the Legionella-containing vacuole

1. Adriana Steinbach
2. Chetan Mokkapati
3. Puspangana Singh
4. Shaeri Mukherjee

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  The authors describe the important finding that the Legionella-containing vacuole is surrounded by a dense ubiquitin "cloud" that is highly resistant to detergent extraction. The study provides compelling evidence that this structure is generated through a combination of canonical ubiquitination mediated by the SidC Legionella ligase and phosphoribosyl-ubiquitination mediated by the SidE family of Legionella ligases. These findings provide insight into how Legionella remodels the host vacuolar environment through complex ubiquitin modifications.

Reviewed by eLife

Enteropathogenic E. coli-mediated Fast and Coordinated Ca2+ responses regulate NF-κB activation

1. Fangrui Guo
2. Roberto Ornelas Guevara
3. Linda Oussaedine
4. Geneviève Dupont
5. Laurent Combettes
6. Guy Tran Van Nhieu

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study reports important advances in our understanding of how enteropathogenic E. coli (EPEC) interacts at the intestinal interface. Compelling data describe a novel model of spatially coordinated calcium signaling to modulate NF-kB activation. These findings, which integrate imaging, genetics, and computational modeling, provide a new way to consider host-pathogen interactions in EPEC infections that may lead to improved therapies.

Reviewed by eLife