Neuroscience

Microglial TNFα controls synaptic GABAARs, sleep slow waves and memory consolidation

1. Maria Joana Pinto
2. Lucy Bizien
3. Julie M.J. Fabre
4. Nina Ðukanović
5. Valentin Lepetz
6. Fiona Henderson
7. Marine Pujol
8. Romain W. Sala
9. Thibault Tarpin
10. Daniela Popa
11. Antoine Triller
12. Clément Léna
13. Véronique Fabre
14. Alain Bessis

Reviewed by Review Commons

A comprehensive neuroanatomical survey of the Drosophila Lobula Plate Tangential Neurons with predictions for their optic flow sensitivity

1. Arthur Zhao
2. Aljoscha Nern
3. Sanna Koskela
4. Marisa Dreher
5. Mert Erginkaya
6. Connor W. Laughland
7. Henrique Ludwigh
8. Alex Thomson
9. Judith Hoeller
10. Ruchi Parekh
11. Sandro Romani
12. Davi D. Bock
13. Eugenia Chiappe
14. Michael B. Reiser

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This important study presents the first comprehensive catalog of the large neurons that compute optic flow in any insect. The morphological reconstructions from volume electron microscopy of the large arbors of these neurons, the Lobula Plate Tangential Neurons, were followed by the examination of their spatial arrangement to estimate their individual receptive fields and predict their optimal motion sensitivity. This compelling, rigorous data set, which includes the synaptic connectivity of the neurons under study with major target neurons in the fly brain, establishes a foundation for future studies on visual processing on the basis of a known connectome plus genetic driver lines to manipulate its constituent neurons. It will be of interest beyond insect vision to those studying sensory processing and neural circuit function.

Reviewed by eLife

A chromatic feature detector in the retina signals visual context changes

1. Larissa Höfling
2. Klaudia P Szatko
3. Christian Behrens
4. Yuyao Deng
5. Yongrong Qiu
6. David Alexander Klindt
7. Zachary Jessen
8. Gregory W Schwartz
9. Matthias Bethge
10. Philipp Berens
11. Katrin Franke
12. Alexander S Ecker
13. Thomas Euler

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This paper makes a valuable contribution to approaches to studying the stimulus selectivity of sensory neurons. The imaging data that forms the core of the paper is compelling, but the evidence for some of the conclusions reached is limited. A central issue is a reliance on linear measures of stimulus selectivity, which may miss key aspects of retinal coding.

Reviewed by eLife

Inhibition of Cpeb3 ribozyme elevates CPEB3 protein expression and polyadenylation of its target mRNAs and enhances object location memory

1. Claire C Chen
2. Joseph Han
3. Carlene A Chinn
4. Jacob S Rounds
5. Xiang Li
6. Mehran Nikan
7. Marie Myszka
8. Liqi Tong
9. Luiz FM Passalacqua
10. Timothy Bredy
11. Marcelo A Wood
12. Andrej Luptak

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  In this manuscript the authors describe the expression and regulatory function of a self-cleaving ribozyme in the Cpeb3 gene. This is an important study because although many self-cleaving ribozymes have been identified in the genome, the functions of these RNA enzymes even for molecular control of their target genes is mostly unknown. The manuscript provides solid data for the molecular function of the ribosome in gene regulation and its role in hippocampal learning. The study will be of interest to neurobiologists who study gene regulatory mechanisms in learning.

Reviewed by eLife

RatInABox, a toolkit for modelling locomotion and neuronal activity in continuous environments

1. Tom M George
2. Mehul Rastogi
3. William de Cothi
4. Claudia Clopath
5. Kimberly Stachenfeld
6. Caswell Barry

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  George et al. present a convincing new Python toolbox ("RatInABox") that allows researchers to generate synthetic behavior and neural data specifically focusing on hippocampal functional cell types (place cells, grid cells, boundary vector cells, head direction cells).

  This is valuable for theory-driven research where synthetic benchmarks should be used. Beyond just navigation, it can be highly useful for novel tool development that requires jointly modeling behavior and neural data. The authors provide convincing evidence of its utility with well documented and easy to use code and the corresponding manuscript.

Reviewed by eLife

Tracking subjects’ strategies in behavioural choice experiments at trial resolution

1. Silvia Maggi
2. Rebecca M Hock
3. Martin O'Neill
4. Mark Buckley
5. Paula M Moran
6. Tobias Bast
7. Musa Sami
8. Mark D Humphries

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  The authors introduce a potentially valuable novel method that provides trial-by-trial probabilistic estimates of learning and decision-making strategies inferred from choice behavior across species. This approach could prove more useful over traditional techniques for arbitrating between strategies and detecting when learning happens, and because it is computationally lightweight. Reviewers identified several concerns that limit the strength of the evidence provided, rendering the findings incomplete.

Reviewed by eLife

A dynamical computational model of theta generation in hippocampal circuits to study theta-gamma oscillations during neurostimulation

1. Nikolaos Vardalakis
2. Amélie Aussel
3. Nicolas P Rougier
4. Fabien B Wagner

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This study presents a computational model to explore how neurostimulation could impact hippocampal theta oscillations. The computational model combines a detailed physiologically realistic hippocampus model and an abstract theta oscillator. The study could provide valuable predictions on pathological changes in this network. The modelling is based on convincing approaches that could be improved with experimental validation in future experiments.

Reviewed by eLife

Neuroendocrine gene expression coupling of interoceptive bacterial food cues to foraging behavior of C. elegans

1. Sonia A Boor
2. Joshua D Meisel
3. Dennis H Kim

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This important manuscript focuses on the mechanisms by which food signals and food ingestion modulate animal foraging. The authors provide convincing support for the interesting idea that chemosensory and interoceptive signals converge on transcriptional regulation of the TGF-beta ligand DAF-7 in a single pair of C. elegans chemosensory neurons (ASJ) to regulate behavior. Their studies implicate a conserved signaling molecule, ALK, in this regulation, suggesting a conserved link between food cues and the neuroendocrine control of foraging behavior.

Reviewed by eLife

What happens to the inhibitory control functions of the right inferior frontal cortex when this area is dominant for language?

1. Esteban Villar-Rodríguez
2. Cristina Cano-Melle
3. Lidón Marin-Marin
4. Maria Antònia Parcet
5. César Avila

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This study has important implications for theoretical proposals concerning how language lateralization affects the lateralization of other cognitive functions. The methods are solid, with an appropriate selection of cognitive control tasks that share homotopic regions of the brain with language, comparing participants with typical and atypical organization of language. The participants included in the study were mainly bilinguals, a population previously reported to have a more bilateral organization of cognitive control regions than monolinguals, limiting the generalizability of the results to the general population. Despite this limitation, the results will be of interest to researchers working of brain plasticity and development, in addition to those interested in language and cognitive control.

Reviewed by eLife

Orai-mediated calcium entry determines activity of central dopaminergic neurons by regulation of gene expression

1. Rishav Mitra
2. Shlesha Richhariya
3. Gaiti Hasan

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  In Drosophila melanogaster, the SOCE channel Orai is required for the development of flight promoting dopaminergic neurons. The Hasan laboratory has previously shown that disabling Orai function impairs Drosophila flight due to aberrant neuronal development at the pupal stage. In this fundamental study, Mitra et al show that SOCE drives a transcriptional feedback loop via the homeobox transcription factor, 'Trithorax-like' (Trl), and histone modifiers, Set2 and E(z), to regulate the expression of key genes required for the function of dopaminergic flight neurons, including the muscarinic acetylcholine receptor and the inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate receptor. This solid study is carefully performed with validated methodology and most of the analyses are rigorous.

Reviewed by eLife