Neuroscience

eLife Assessment

This important study examines the effects of diet and exercise on brain structure and behaviour in the 3xTg mouse model of Alzheimer's disease. They show that combined access to a low-fat diet and exercise improves regional brain volume and behaviour in transgenic and wild-type control mice in a sex-specific manner, with analyses linking functional improvements to glucose homeostasis. Although some claims are well supported, the overall strength of the evidence is incomplete and hampered by a lack of clarity regarding the statistical analyses chosen. The work may be of interest to researchers studying neurodegenerative disease, particularly in preclinical contexts.

eLife Assessment

The paper presents a valuable finding that the human brain and models that incorporate sentence structures can capture sentence-level semantics beyond word meaning, while large language models behave differently. The evidence supporting the authors' claims is solid, though the stimuli are highly controlled and some analyses could be more thorough. This work will be of interest to researchers in language neuroscience and those developing language models.

eLife Assessment

This manuscript presents a useful mean-field model for a network of Hodgkin-Huxley neurons retaining the equations for ion exchange between the intracellular and extracellular space. The mean-field model derived in this work relies on approximations and heuristic arguments that, on the one hand, allow a closed-form derivation of the mean-field equations, but also raise questions about their justifications and the degree to which the results agree with experiments as well as direct numerical simulations. While the revised manuscript is much improved, reviewers continue to question the methodology for reducing model dimensionality and therefore the evidence for the utility of this approach remains incomplete at present.

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.

eLife Assessment

This study offers an important contribution to our understanding of the role of layer 6b cortical neurons in sleep-wake regulation, providing new insight into how this understudied neural population may regulate cortical arousal via orexin signaling. The evidence supporting these findings is solid, although somewhat constrained by limitations in the specificity of the genetic targeting strategy. Nonetheless, the work introduces new avenues for uncovering how the classical wake-promoting peptide, orexin, exerts its effects on the cortex.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study uses large-scale 7T naturalistic fMRI data and nonlinear pRF modeling to map the tonotopic organization of the human auditory cortex, linking spectral tuning to speech selectivity and cortical hierarchy. The evidence is solid, demonstrating that movie-based stimuli can recover robust population-level auditory maps and offering tools for leveraging existing datasets, although there is room for improvement in relating static tonotopy to dynamic speech processing and in presentation clarity. The study will be of interest to a broad audience working on auditory cortex organization and mapping.

eLife Assessment

This study provides solid evidence that odor fear conditioning biases olfactory sensory neuron receptor choice in mice and that this bias is detectable in the next generation. The authors use rigorous histological and behavioral analyses, including unsupervised behavioral quantification, to support the conclusion that odor-specific sensory representations can be shaped by experience and partially transmitted across generations. While the behavioral effects in offspring are modest and the mechanistic basis of inheritance remains unresolved, the study offers an important and carefully executed contribution to understanding experience-dependent sensory plasticity and its intergenerational consequences.

eLife Assessment

This important study identifies a physiologically relevant interaction between LRRK2 and drebrin, an actin-binding protein crucial for neuronal structure. A solid body of evidence, including multiple cell models, highlights the complexities of how modifiers like BDNF intersect with LRRK2-kinase dependent function, and that many modifiers between AKT and LRRK2 in different cellular pathways are yet to be identified and understood.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study examines the cleavage of motor neuron nucleoporins by proteases of enterovirus D68, a pathogen associated with acute flaccid myelitis. The evidence supporting the effects of EV-D68 proteases on nuclear import and export is generally solid, as is the independent examination of EV-D68 protease on spinal cord neuron toxicity. The specific conclusions related to RNA export were considered overstated relative to the data presented.

eLife Assessment

This study offers an important advance by extending an intuitive visualization tool that enables assessment of how dendritic and synaptic currents potentially shape neuronal output. The evidence supporting the tool's capabilities is convincing, with well-documented code, algorithmic innovation, and application to hippocampal pyramidal neurons. The work will be of interest to computational and systems neuroscientists seeking accessible methods to examine dendritic computations.