Neuroscience

Interrogating basal ganglia circuit function in people with Parkinson’s disease and dystonia

1. Srdjan Sumarac
2. Kiah A Spencer
3. Leon A Steiner
4. Conor Fearon
5. Emily A Haniff
6. Andrea A Kühn
7. Mojgan Hodaie
8. Suneil K Kalia
9. Andres Lozano
10. Alfonso Fasano
11. William Duncan Hutchison
12. Luka Milosevic

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This manuscript is a valuable study of the responses of GPi neurons to deep brain stimulation (DBS) in human Parkinson disease and dystonia patients and it finds convincing evidence for altered short-term and long-term plasticity in response to DBS between the two patient populations. This dataset is of interest to both basic and clinical researchers working in the field of DBS and movement disorders.

Reviewed by eLife

Difficulty in artificial word learning impacts targeted memory reactivation and its underlying neural signatures

1. Arndt-Lukas Klaassen
2. Björn Rasch

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This study provides useful findings on how phonetic properties of words, i.e., their difficulty and prior knowledge, influence the outcome of targeted memory reactivation (TMR) during sleep. While these findings are supported by solid evidence, they are based on a small sample size warranting future work to shed further light on the impact of TMR in language learning.

Reviewed by eLife

Mechanical force of uterine occupation enables large vesicle extrusion from proteostressed maternal neurons

1. Guoqiang Wang
2. Ryan J Guasp
3. Sangeena Salam
4. Edward Chuang
5. Andrés Morera
6. Anna J Smart
7. David Jimenez
8. Sahana Shekhar
9. Emily Friedman
10. Ilija Melentijevic
11. Ken C Nguyen
12. David H Hall
13. Barth D Grant
14. Monica Driscoll

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This important study explores the potential influence of physiologically relevant mechanical forces on the extrusion of vesicles from C. elegans neurons. The authors provide compelling evidence to support the idea that uterine distension per se can induce vesicular extrusion from adjacent neurons. Overall, this work will be of interest to neuroscientists and investigators in the extracellular vesicle and proteostasis fields.

Reviewed by eLife

Analysis of fast calcium dynamics of honey bee olfactory coding

1. Marco Paoli
2. Antoine Wystrach
3. Brice Ronsin
4. Martin Giurfa

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  How neural circuits represent sensory signals during and after stimulus presentation is a central question in neuroscience. Here, a model of the insect mushroom body, constructed from simple, known synaptic connectivity rules, is shown to convincingly explain stimulus discrimination and associative memory, even in the presence of variability in the input signals as experimentally measured from the antennal lobe of the honeybee. This important study makes testable predictions for the role of specific neurons in a neural circuit for associative memory, of relevance to any study of neural network design and operation.

Reviewed by eLife

Speech-induced suppression and vocal feedback sensitivity in human cortex

1. Muge Ozker
2. Leyao Yu
3. Patricia Dugan
4. Werner Doyle
5. Daniel Friedman
6. Orrin Devinsky
7. Adeen Flinker

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  The manuscript describes human intracranial neural recordings in the auditory cortex during speech production, showing that the effects of delayed auditory feedback correlate with the degree of underlying speech-induced suppression. This is an important finding, as previous work has suggested that speech suppression and feedback sensitivity often do not co-localize and may be distinct processes, in contrast with findings in non-human primates where there is a strong correlation. The strength of the evidence is convincing, with appropriate experimental methods, data, and analysis.

Reviewed by eLife

A toolbox for genetic targeting of the claustrum

1. Joël Tuberosa
2. Madlaina Boillat
3. Julien Dal Col
4. Leonardo Marconi
5. Julien Codourey
6. Loris Mannino
7. Elena Georgiou
8. Marc Menoud
9. Alan Carleton
10. Ivan Rodriguez

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This valuable research identifies Smim32 as a new genetic marker for the claustrum and generates transgenic mouse lines aimed at enhancing specificity when studying this brain region. However, the evidence supporting the increased specificity of this marker and its associated transgenic lines is inadequate, as Smim32's specificity to the claustrum is limited. Nevertheless, this work will be of interest to researchers studying the molecular organization of the claustrum.

Reviewed by eLife

Direct observation of the neural computations underlying a single decision

1. Natalie Steinemann
2. Gabriel M Stine
3. Eric Trautmann
4. Ariel Zylberberg
5. Daniel M Wolpert
6. Michael N Shadlen

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This fundamental work quantifies the stochastic dynamics of neural population activity in the lateral intraparietal area (LIP) of the macaque monkey brain during single perceptual decisions. These single-trial dynamics have been subject to intense debate in neuroscience, and they have significant implications for modelling decision-making in various fields including neuroscience and psychology. Through a combination of state-of-the-art recordings from many LIP neurons and theory-driven data analyses, the authors provide convincing evidence for the notion that single-trial neural population dynamics in LIP encode the decision variable postulated by the drift-diffusion model of decision-making.

Reviewed by eLife

Sequential temporal anticipation characterized by neural power modulation and in recurrent neural networks

1. Xiangbin Teng
2. Ru-Yuan Zhang

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This valuable study provides insights into how the brain learns to better detect a target by predicting when the target may appear. Overall, solid evidence is provided that the power fluctuations of alpha- and beta-band oscillations can reflect the predicted occurrence time of the target, but some conclusions, especially ones related to the neural-network model and temporal gain control account, need further consideration. The study highlights an advanced EEG analysis approach as well as a close combination of human EEG analysis and computational modeling using recurrent neural networks.

Reviewed by eLife

Sexually dimorphic role of diet and stress on behavior, energy metabolism, and the ventromedial hypothalamus

1. Sanutha Shetty
2. Samuel J. Duesman
3. Sanil Patel
4. Pacific Huyhn
5. Sanjana Shroff
6. Anika Das
7. Disha Chowhan
8. Robert Sebra
9. Kristin Beaumont
10. Cameron S. McAlpine
11. Prashant Rajbhandari
12. Abha K. Rajbhandari

Reviewed by preLights

Probing PAC1 receptor activation across species with an engineered sensor

1. Reto B Cola
2. Salome N Niethammer
3. Preethi Rajamannar
4. Andrea Gresch
5. Musadiq A Bhat
6. Kevin Assoumou
7. Elyse T Williams
8. Patrick Hauck
9. Nina Hartrampf
10. Dietmar Benke
11. Miriam Stoeber
12. Gil Levkowitz
13. Sarah Melzer
14. Tommaso Patriarchi

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This fundamental paper reports a new biosensor to study G protein-coupled receptor activation by the pituitary adenylyl cyclase-activating polypeptide (PACAP) in cell culture, ex vivo (mouse brain slices), and in vivo (zebrafish, mouse). Convincing data are presented that show the new sensor works with high affinity in vitro, while requiring very high (non-physiological) concentrations of exogenous PACAP when applied to intact tissues. The sensor has not yet been used to detect endogenously released PACAP, raising questions about whether the sensor can be used for its intended purpose. While further work must be pursued to achieve broad in vivo applications under physiological conditions, the new tool will be of interest to cell biologists, especially those studying the large and significant GPCR family.

Reviewed by eLife