Neuroscience

eLife assessment

This study presents useful findings for how sevoflurane anesthesia modulates the activity of corticotropin-releasing hormone neurons in the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus and how manipulation of such PVHCRH neurons influences anesthesia and post-anesthesia responses. The technical approaches are solid and the data presented is largely clear. Whether PVHCRH neurons are critical for the mechanisms of sevoflurane anesthesia is a direction for the future.

eLife assessment

This study presents a useful finding on the interplay of CCL5 and miR-324-5p during ischemic stroke injury. Despite its importance, the evidence supporting the claims of the authors is incomplete. In particular, the lack of methodological information, inappropriate statistical testing, a flawed culture system, and the temporal mismatch in the expression of CCL5 and miR-324-5p following stroke have hindered further evaluation of the claims. The work will be of interest to neuroscientists working on brain injury such as stroke.

eLife assessment

The present study provides valuable evidence on the neurochemical mechanisms underlying working memory in obesity. The authors' approach considering specific working memory operations (maintenance, updating) and putative dopaminergic genes is solid, though the inclusion of a more direct measure of dopamine signaling would have strengthened the work.

eLife assessment

This valuable work discusses the phylogenetic conservation of the hippocampal region and primary sensory cortical regions in mammalian species. The authors propose that species-specific differences in behavior and mnemonic functions may be due to differences in cortico-hippocampal connectivity patterns. However, the manuscript, in its present form, is speculative, and the strength of evidence for this proposition is incomplete.

eLife assessment

Kewenig et al. present a timely and valuable study that extends prior research investigating the neural basis of abstract and concrete concepts by examining how these concepts are processed in a naturalistic stimulus: during movie watching. The authors provide convincing evidence that the varying strength of the relationship between a word and a particular visual scene is associated with a change in the similarity between the brain regions active for concrete and abstract words. This work makes a contribution that will be of general interest within any field that faces the inherent challenge of quantifying context in a multimodal stimulus.

eLife assessment

The methods and findings of the current work are important and well-grounded. The strength of the evidence presented is convincing and backed up by rigorous methodology. The work, when elaborated on how to access the app, will have far-reaching implications for current clinical practice.

eLife assessment

This is an important paper that reports in vivo physiological abnormalities in the hippocampus of a rat model of traumatic brain injury (TBI). In this study, authors focused on changes in theta-gamma phase coupling and action potential entrainment to theta, phenomena hypothesized to be critical for cognition. While the authors provide solid evidence of deficits in both features post-TBI, the study would have been stronger with a more hypothesis-driven approach and consideration of alterations of the animal's behavioral state or sensorimotor deficits beyond memory processes.

eLife assessment

This valuable contribution follows past descriptions of ciliation defects, potentially linked to cholinergic neuronal dysfunction, associated with mutated G2019S Lrrk2 expression. The strength of evidence is considered solid and broadly supportive of the claims concerning well-characterized cilia changes in cholinergic neurons over time in the model; however, additional work may be required to define the specificity of the pRab12 antibody in the IHC technique, dependence on LRRK2, and clarification of the cilia phenotype in sporadic PD brains that exists (for the moment) only in a non-peer-reviewed pre-print, despite the prominence of these (preliminary) results highlighted in the abstract and text of the current manuscript. It is hoped that the authors will begin to address the feedback provided by the expert reviewers to help provide a more mechanistic basis for the audience interested in cholinergic defects associated with Parkinson's disease.

eLife assessment

This study presents an important finding on the spontaneous emergence of structured activity in artificial neural networks endowed with specific connectivity profiles. The evidence supporting the claims of the authors is convincing, providing direct comparison between the properties of the model and neural data although investigating more naturalistic inputs to the network would have strengthened the main claims. The work will be of interest to systems and computational neuroscientists studying the hippocampus and memory processes.

eLife assessment

This important computational study provides new insights into how neural dynamics may lead to time-evolving behavioral errors as observed in certain working-memory tasks. By combining ideas from efficient coding and attractor neural networks, the authors construct a two-module network model to capture the sensory-memory interactions and the distributed nature of working memory representations. They provide convincing evidence supporting that their two-module network, although none of the alternative circuit structures they considered can account for error patterns reported in orientation-estimation tasks with delays.