Cell Biology

Cytosolic Carboxypeptidase 5 maintains mammalian ependymal multicilia to ensure proper homeostasis and functions of the brain

1. Rubina Dad
2. Yujuan Wang
3. Chuyu Fang
4. Yuncan Chen
5. Yi Zheng
6. Yuan Zhang
7. Xinwen Pan
8. Xinyue Zhang
9. Emily Swanekamp
10. Krish Patel
11. Matthias TF Wolf
12. Zhiguang Yuchi
13. Xueliang Zhu
14. Hui-Yuan Wu

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  The authors developed a new Agbl5 KO allele, extending the deletion to the N-terminus of CCP5 to explore its function in mouse ependymal cells and trachea. They show that the KO mice exhibit severe hydrocephalus due to mislocated basal bodies and impaired ciliary beating. The findings are valuable with implications in the subfield of cell biology. The evidence is solid in that the methods, data and analyses largely support the claims with only a few remaining weaknesses.

Reviewed by eLife

Apical actin filament turnover mediated by cyclase-associated protein is required for organization of non-centrosomal microtubules in epithelium

1. Arathi Preeth Babu
2. Sachin Muralidharan
3. Konstantin Kogan
4. Tommi Kotila
5. Ville Hietakangas
6. Jaakko Mattila
7. Minna Poukkula

Reviewed by Review Commons

CROP2, a Retriever–PROPPIN complex mediating protein export from endosomes to the plasma membrane in human cells

1. Maria Giovanna De Leo
2. Andreas Mayer

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  The authors present important evidence for a WIPI2-Retriever complex (termed CROP2) that couples cargo selection to carrier fission at endosomes. CROP2 appears to function analogously to the previously described CROP1 complex, formed by WIPI1 and Retromer, with which it shares structural similarities. They provide compelling evidence that CROP1 and CROP2 regulate the trafficking of distinct subsets of cargoes; however, the cellular evidence for the existence of these distinct complexes is mostly inferred from immunoprecipitation analysis and would benefit from further validation.

Reviewed by eLife

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 A 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