Neuroscience

Individuality across environmental context in Drosophila melanogaster

1. Thomas F Mathejczyk
2. Cara Knief
3. Muhammad A Haidar
4. Florian Freitag
5. Tydings McClary
6. Mathias F Wernet
7. Gerit A Linneweber

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  There is a growing interest in understanding the individuality of animal behaviours. In this important article, the authors build and use an impressive array of high throughput phenotyping paradigms to examine the 'stability' (consistency) of behavioural characteristics in a range of contexts and over time. The results show that certain behaviours are individualistic and persist robustly across external stimuli while others are less robust to these changing parameters. The data supporting their findings is extensive and convincing. At the same time, the main analyses focus on a selected subset of the many behavioural metrics recorded, so a large fraction of the acquired data remains only lightly explored; by making these additional data available, the authors provide an invaluable resource for future work to apply alternative analytical frameworks and further mine this rich dataset.

Reviewed by eLife

Boosting Hyperalignment Performance with Age-specific Templates

1. Yuqi Zhang
2. Maria Ida Gobbini
3. James V. Haxby
4. Ma Feilong

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This valuable study advances our understanding of best practices for analyzing population-level data using advanced functional alignment methods. It provides convincing evidence that demographic-specific functional templates improve functional neuroimaging studies that use hyperalignment. This study will be of interest to cognitive neuroscientists, neuroimaging methodologists, and computational researchers with an interest in the human brain.

Reviewed by eLife

Butyrate rescues chlorpyrifos-induced social deficits through inhibition of class I histone deacetylases

1. Leonardo Diaz
2. Ally Xinyi Kong
3. Ping Zhang
4. Jinhua Chi
5. Khoa Pham
6. Maja Johnson
7. Aiden Eno
8. Isabelle Douglas
9. Yuxuan Mao
10. James W. MacDonald
11. Julia Yue Cui
12. Theo Bammler
13. Haiwei Gu
14. Yijie Geng

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This valuable manuscript demonstrates that embryonic exposure to the pesticide chlorpyrifos (CPF) impairs juvenile zebrafish social behavior and sets out to define the underlying mechanism. The authors provide solid evidence that butyrate and class I histone deacetylases are involved, as their modulation rescues the phenotype. However, claims that CPF acts through the microbiome and nitric oxide signaling remain correlative and incomplete. Additional validation would strengthen the intriguing hypotheses raised by this work.

Reviewed by eLife

Computational mechanisms for temporal integration in the anterior claustrum

1. Kuenbae Sohn
2. Donghyeon Yoon
3. Junghwa Lee
4. Sukwoo Choi

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This work provides an important modeling-based framework for understanding the processes of temporal integration in the claustrum. These mechanisms could support a broader range of integrative brain function. However, at present, the evidence remains at least in part incomplete, primarily because of over-interpretation of the results and their connection to neurophysiology.

Reviewed by eLife

Prior cocaine use disrupts identification of hidden states by single units and neural ensembles in orbitofrontal cortex

1. Wenhui Zong
2. Lauren E Mueller
3. Zhewei Zhang
4. Jingfeng Zhou
5. Geoffrey Schoenbaum

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This fundamental work shows that a history of cocaine self-administration disrupts the orbitofrontal cortex's ability to encode similarities between distinct sensory stimuli that possess identical task information - hidden states. The evidence supporting these conclusions is compelling, with methods and analyses spanning self-administration, a novel 'figure 8' sequential odor task, recordings from 3,881 single units, and sophisticated firing analyses revealing complex orbitofrontal representations of task structure. These results will be of broad interest to psychologists, neuroscientists, and clinicians.

Reviewed by eLife

Designing optimal perturbation inputs for system identification in neuroscience

1. Mikito Ogino
2. Daiki Sekizawa
3. Jun Kitazono
4. Masafumi Oizumi

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  The authors establish solid theoretical principles for designing brain perturbations under the assumption that brain activity evolves under a linear model. By prioritizing low-variance components, resonant frequencies, and hub nodes, this framework provides an important foundation for optimizing information gain, neural state classification, and the control of neural dynamics. However, the lack of investigation of model mismatch makes the study incomplete.

Reviewed by eLife

Chemogenetic Manipulation of the Subthalamic Nucleus-Substantia Nigra Pars Reticulata Pathway Promotes Recovery in HemiParkinsonian Rat Models

1. Nassim Stegamat
2. Rupert Smit
3. Jacquelynn Rajavong
4. Thomas Campion
5. Sraavya Pinjala
6. George Smith

Reviewed by PREreview

Drift in Individual Behavioral Phenotype as a Strategy for Unpredictable Worlds

1. Ryan Maloney
2. Athena Ye
3. Sam-Keny Saint-Pre
4. Tom Alisch
5. David Zimmerman
6. Nicole Pittoors
7. Benjamin L de Bivort

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  Maloney et al. offer an important contribution to understanding the potential ecological mechanisms behind individual behavioral variation. By providing compelling theoretical and experimental data, the study bridges the gap between individual, apparently stochastic behavior with its evolutionary purpose and consequences. The work further provides a testable and generalizable model framework to explore behavioral drift in other behaviors.

Reviewed by eLife

Anesthesia Lowers Spatial Frequency Preference in the Primary Visual Cortex

1. Jiahao Wu
2. Taisuke Yoneda
3. Kallum Robinson
4. Naotsugu Tsuchiya
5. Yumiko Yoshimura

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This paper describes useful findings on the effects of isoflurane anesthesia on the visual cortical circuitry of the mouse. It provides solid evidence that the visual spatial frequency sensitivity becomes coarser (lower resolution) during anesthesia, with distinct effects described in excitatory neurons, and parvalbumin (PV) and somatostatin (SOM) positive interneurons. This study should be of interest to neuroscientists studying the mouse visual cortex and the effects of anesthesia on cortical circuitry.

Reviewed by eLife

Pupil size reveals the perceptual quality and effortless nature of synesthesia

1. Christoph Strauch
2. Casper Leenaars
3. Romke Rouw

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study used pupillometry to provide an objective assessment of a form of synesthesia in which people see additional color when reading numbers. It provides convincing evidence that subjective color ratings are matched by changes in pupil size that recapitulate brightness-mediated changes when exposed to the real color. The work provides a valuable contribution to the literature on both synesthetic perception and the use of pupillometry to probe perception and related psychological processes.

Reviewed by eLife