Neuroscience

eLife Assessment

This important study asks whether motor neurons within the vestibulo-ocular circuit of zebrafish are required to determine the identity, connectivity, and function of upstream premotor neurons. They provide compelling and comprehensive genetic, anatomical and behavioral evidence that the answer is, "No!". This work will be of general interest to developmental neurobiologists and will motivate future studies of whether motor neurons are dispensable for assembly of other sensorimotor neural circuits.

eLife Assessment

This study provides a useful set of experiments showing the relative contribution of the Noradrenergic system in reversing the sedation induced by midazolam. The evidence supporting the claims of the authors is solid, although specificity issues in the pharmacology and neural-circuit investigations narrow down the strengths of the conclusions. Dealing with these limitations will make the paper attractive to medical biologists working on the neurobiology of anesthesia.

eLife Assessment

In this compelling study, the authors examine the interactions between stellate cells and PV+ interneurons in the medial entorhinal cortex. Huang et al. focus on the spatial distribution of synaptic inputs and demonstrate that closely located neuron pairs receive common inputs, suggesting a structured functional organization in the entorhinal cortex. Advanced dual whole-cell patch recordings further reveal patterns of postsynaptic activation, indicating intensive interactions within clusters of these neurons, with weaker interactions between clusters. These findings offer significant insights into the functional dynamics of the entorhinal cortex and the circuit mechanisms that shape grid cell activity. This study is important not only for the field of MEC and grid cells, but also for broader fields of continuous attractor networks and neural circuits.

eLife Assessment

This manuscript tackles a significant problem in addiction science: how interdependent are measures of "addiction-like" behavioral phenotypes? The manuscript provides compelling evidence that, under these experimental conditions, escalation of intake, punishment-resistant responding, and progressive ratio break points reflect a single underlying construct rather than reflect distinct unrelated measures. The exceptionally large sample size and incorporation of multiple behavioral endpoints add strength to this paper, and make it an important resource for the field.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study investigated the appearance of ultrasonic vocalizations around 44 kHz that occurs in response to prolonged fear conditioning in male rats. Evidence in support of the conclusions is solid and may be of interest to some researchers also investigating distress-related ultrasonic vocalizations.

eLife Assessment

This is a valuable manuscript analyzing single-cell RNA-sequencing data from the mouse vomeronasal organ. Convincing evidence in this manuscript allows the authors to identify and verify the differential expression of genes that distinguish apical and basal vomeronasal neurons. The authors also show that Gnao1 neurons exhibit enriched expression of ER-related genes, which they verify with in situ hybridizations and immunostaining and also explore via electron microscopy.

eLife Assessment

This important work compares the strain properties of a-synuclein fibrils isolated from LBD and MSA patient samples with the resulting amplified fibrils following SAA. Using orthogonal biochemical and structural approaches to strengthen their analyses, the authors provide solid evidence that the SAA-amplified fibrils do not recapitulate the disease-relevant strains present in the patient samples. CryoEM would further strengthen this data but it is outside the scope of the work. This work should be considered in the widespread applications of SAA in synucleopathies and its potential limitations.

eLife Assessment

This is a fundamental research study which identifies some of the molecular mechanisms underlying the energy costly process of memory consolidation. The strength of evidence is exceptional. The paper should be of broad interest because it establishes a clear mechanistic link between long-term memory processes and the energy-producing machinery in neurons.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study describes an apparatus, workflow, and proof-of-concept data for a system to study social cooperation in marmosets, an increasingly popular primate model for neuroscience. The apparatus and methodology have clear and convincing advantages over conventional methods based on manual approaches. However, claims of faster social learning or of finer-grained behavioural analysis in this setup will require further corroboration.

eLife Assessment

This study introduces a useful extension to a recently proposed model of neural assembly activity. The extension was to add recurrent connections to the hidden units of the Restricted Boltzmann Machine. The authors show solid evidence that the new model outperforms their earlier model on both a simulated dataset and on whole-brain neural activity from zebrafish.