Neuroscience

Combining array tomography with electron tomography provides insights into leakiness of the blood-brain barrier in mouse cortex

1. Georg Kislinger
2. Gunar Fabig
3. Antonia Wehn
4. Lucia Rodriguez
5. Hanyi Jiang
6. Cornelia Niemann
7. Andrey S Klymchenko
8. Nikolaus Plesnila
9. Thomas Misgeld
10. Thomas Müller-Reichert
11. Igor Khalin
12. Martina Schifferer

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  The present paper describes an important methodological development that combines light (confocal) microscopy with scanning and transmission EM and EM tomography. The method expands the level of structural detail accessible to large-volume EM studies and thus represents an approach to integrate analyses of cellular and sub-cellular structures in biological samples. The study, which provides a compelling proof-of-principle, will be of particular value to cell biologists interested in the in-depth interpretation of high-resolution ultrastructural information from sparsely distributed targets - at multiple scales and in diverse biological structures.

Reviewed by eLife

Systematic annotation of a complete adult male Drosophila nerve cord connectome reveals principles of functional organisation

1. Elizabeth C Marin
2. Billy J Morris
3. Tomke Stürner
4. Andrew S Champion
5. Dominik Krzeminski
6. Griffin Badalamente
7. Marina Gkantia
8. Christopher R Dunne
9. Katharina Eichler
10. Shin-ya Takemura
11. Imaan FM Tamimi
12. Siqi Fang
13. Sung Soo Moon
14. Han SJ Cheong
15. Feng Li
16. Philipp Schlegel
17. Sebastian E Ahnert
18. Stuart Berg
19. Janelia FlyEM Project Team
20. Gwyneth M Card
21. Marta Costa
22. David Shepherd
23. Gregory SXE Jefferis

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This fundamental study provides a near-comprehensive anatomical description and annotation of neurons in a male Drosophila ventral nerve cord, based on large-scale circuit reconstruction from electron microscopy. This connectome resource will be of substantial interest to neuroscientists interested in sensorimotor control, neural development, and analysis of brain connectivity. However, although the evidence is extensive and compelling, the presentation of results in this very large manuscript lacks clarity and concision.

Reviewed by eLife

Revealing unexpected complex encoding but simple decoding mechanisms in motor cortex via separating behaviorally relevant neural signals

1. Yangang Li
2. Xinyun Zhu
3. Yu Qi
4. Yueming Wang

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This study presents a useful method for the extraction of behaviour-related activity from neural population recordings based on a specific deep learning architecture, a variational autoencoder. Although the authors performed thorough benchmarking of their method in the context of decoding behavioural variables, the evidence supporting claims about encoding is incomplete as the results may stem, in part, from the properties of the method itself.

Reviewed by eLife

Ca2+ channel and active zone protein abundance intersects with input-specific synapse organization to shape functional synaptic diversity

1. Audrey T Medeiros
2. Scott J Gratz
3. Ambar Delgado
4. Jason T Ritt
5. Kate M O'Connor-Giles

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  Calcium channels are key regulators of synaptic strength and plasticity. The authors generate new endogenous tags of the Drosophila channel Cac as well as auxiliary subunits to investigate distinct calcium channel functions at the fly NMJ, Is and Ib. They demonstrate functions for voltage-gated calcium channel subunits in promoting synaptic strength, diversity, and plasticity with a series of convincing analyses. The work is important and has broad implications. In addition, the newly developed tools should be quite beneficial for fly biologists.

Reviewed by eLife

A robust brain network for sustained attention from adolescence to adulthood that predicts later substance use

1. Yihe Weng
2. Johann Kruschwitz
3. Laura M Rueda-Delgado
4. Kathy L Ruddy
5. Rory Boyle
6. Luisa Franzen
7. Emin Serin
8. Tochukwu Nweze
9. Jamie Hanson
10. Alannah Smyth
11. Tom Farnan
12. Tobias Banaschewski
13. Arun LW Bokde
14. Sylvane Desrivières
15. Herta Flor
16. Antoine Grigis
17. Hugh Garavan
18. Penny A Gowland
19. Andreas Heinz
20. Rüdiger Brühl
21. Jean-Luc Martinot
22. Marie-Laure Paillère Martinot
23. Eric Artiges
24. Jane McGrath
25. Frauke Nees
26. Dimitri Papadopoulos Orfanos
27. Tomas Paus
28. Luise Poustka
29. Nathalie Holz
30. Juliane Fröhner
31. Michael N Smolka
32. Nilakshi Vaidya
33. Gunter Schumann
34. Henrik Walter
35. Robert Whelan
36. IMAGEN Consortium

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This study presents an important finding on the relationship between brain activity related to sustained attention and substance use in adolescence/early adulthood with a large longitudinal dataset. The evidence supporting the claims of the authors is convincing. The work will be of interest to cognitive neuroscientists, psychologists, and clinicians working on substance use or addiction.

Reviewed by eLife

Bidirectional dysregulation of synaptic glutamate signaling after transient metabolic failure

1. Stefan Passlick
2. Ghanim Ullah
3. Christian Henneberger

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  The authors show that short bouts of chemical ischemia lead to presynaptic changes in glutamate release and long-term potentiation, whereas longer bouts of chemical ischemia lead to synaptic failure and presumably cell death. This convincing work relies on rigorous electrophysiology/imaging experiments and data analysis. It is important as it provides new mechanistic details on chemical ischemia, which could offer potential insights into ischemic stroke in vivo.

Reviewed by eLife

Effects of early life adversity and adolescent basolateral amygdala activity on corticolimbic connectivity and anxiety behaviors

1. Caitlyn R. Cody
2. Emilce Artur de la Villarmois
3. Anabel Miguelez Fernandez
4. Janelle Lardizabal
5. Chaney McKnight
6. Kuei Tseng
7. Heather C. Brenhouse

Reviewed by preLights

MotorNet, a Python toolbox for controlling differentiable biomechanical effectors with artificial neural networks

1. Olivier Codol
2. Jonathan A Michaels
3. Mehrdad Kashefi
4. J Andrew Pruszynski
5. Paul L Gribble

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This work will be of interest to the motor control community as well as neuroAI researchers interested in how bodies constrain neural circuit function. The authors present "MotorNet", a useful software package to train artificial neural networks to control a biomechanical model of an effector. The manuscript provides solid evidence that MotorNet is easy to use and can reproduce past results in the field, both at the neural and behavioural levels. Validation is limited to planar arm-like plants or point-masses, so future work exploring three-dimensional movements and other types of plants would strengthen the impact of the tool.

Reviewed by eLife

Bidirectional fear modulation by discrete anterior insular circuits in male mice

1. Sanggeon Park
2. Yeowool Huh
3. Jeansok J Kim
4. Jeiwon Cho

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This work provides a valuable characterization of neural activity in the anterior insular cortex during fear. Using behavior, single unit recording, and optogenetic control of neural activity, the paper provides convincing data on the role of anterior insular circuits in bidirectionally controlling fear. The study is a great starting point on the path to testing hypotheses about bidirectional control of behavior via neural activity in anatomically defined output populations.

Reviewed by eLife

Nonlinear sensitivity to acoustic context is a stable feature of neuronal responses to complex sounds in auditory cortex of awake mice

1. Marios Akritas
2. Alex G Armstrong
3. Jules M Lebert
4. Arne F Meyer
5. Maneesh Sahani
6. Jennifer F Linden

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This study provides important findings regarding the stability over time of the response properties of neurons in the auditory cortex, including their nonlinear sensitivity to sound context. The data obtained from chronic recordings combined with nonlinear stimulus-response estimation provide convincing evidence that auditory cortical representations are stable over a period of days to weeks. While this study should be of widespread interest to sensory neuroscientists, the paper would be strengthened by a more thorough assessment and discussion of the effects of context and of the stability of the responses, as well as by the inclusion of more information about the location and types of neurons that were sampled.

Reviewed by eLife