Neuroscience

eLife assessment

This valuable study aims to understand the function of ProSAP-interacting protein 1 (Prosapip1) in the brain. Using a conditional Prosapip1 KO mouse (floxed prosapip1 crossed with Syn1-Cre line), the authors performed analysis including protein biochemistry, synaptic physiology, and behavioral learning. Solid evidence from this study supports a role of Prosapip 1 in synaptic protein composition, synaptic NMDA responses, LTP, and spatial memory. Addressing some of the technical and methodological weaknesses may further improve the significance of the study.

eLife assessment

This study presents a fundamental finding to the field interested in recurrent processing and its neuromodulatory underpinnings, finding unexpectedly that memantine (blocking NMDA-receptors) enhances the decoding of features thought to rely on NMDA-receptors. The evidence is solid and would be improved by further persuading the readership of the likely functional underpinnings of this direction of result and why there was no behavioural effect. These findings will be of interest to a wide community of researchers studying consciousness, sensory processing, attention, and neurotransmitters.

eLife assessment

This study explores the role of protein synthesis in spinal cord neurons in the regulation of chronic pain. Using innovative techniques, this valuable study outlines cell-type specific gene changes that occur in the spinal cord in the early and late phases of nerve injury. The presented evidence and methods used are, however, incomplete: there are several major technical and analysis issues that need to be addressed, and in addition, deeper gene expression analysis and additional controls would have strengthened the conclusions. This work will be of broad interest to biologists studying pathological plasticity in circuits.

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

In this manuscript, Griesius et al analyze the dendritic integration properties of NDNF and OLM interneurons, and the current dataset suggests that even though both cell types display supralinear NMDA receptor-dependent synaptic integration, this may be associated with dendritic calcium transients only in NDNF interneurons. These findings are important because they could shed light on the functional diversity of different classes of interneurons in the mouse neocortex and hippocampus, which in turn can have major implications for understanding information flow in complex neural circuits. They are considered as being currently incomplete, however, due to: (i) the large variability and small sample size of multiple datasets, which prevents a finer evaluation of cellular and molecular mechanisms accounting for the difference in the integrative properties of different interneuron types; (ii) lack of control experiments to rule out that the effect of the NMDA antagonist AP5 on synaptic integration is not confounded by potential phototoxicity damage; (iii) lack of a precise control of the uncaging location.

eLife assessment

This study used electrophysiology and imaging to show that the majority of excitatory cells in the dentate gyrus of adult mice have very slow oscillations during non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep. The oscillations were influenced by serotonin when it was released during NREM sleep. Moreover, the serotonin receptor type 1a mediated the effect, and reducing these receptors impaired a type of memory. The significance of the study is important and the strength of the evidence is solid, but revisions to the figures and making conclusions more consistent with the data could improve the significance and strength of evidence.

eLife assessment

This important study by Wong et al. addresses a longstanding question in the field of associative learning regarding how a motivationally relevant event can be inferred from prior learning based on neutral stimulus-stimulus associations. The research provides convincing behavioral and neurophysiological evidence to address this important question. The manuscript will be interesting for researchers in behavioral and cognitive neuroscience.