Neuroscience

Ingestible pills reveal gastric correlates of emotions

1. Giuseppina Porciello
2. Alessandro Monti
3. Maria Serena Panasiti
4. Salvatore Maria Aglioti

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This important study used a novel method to relate gastric acidity to subjective ratings of emotions induced by video clips. The findings are solid but could be strengthened by additional analyses and/or visualization. The findings have broad implications for the field of emotion research and opens new avenues of research for understanding psychosomatic disorders.

Reviewed by eLife

Disruption of awake sharp-wave ripples does not affect memorization of locations in repeated-acquisition spatial memory tasks

1. Lies Deceuninck
2. Fabian Kloosterman

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This manuscript presents the lack of effect of closed-loop SWR disruption in guiding behavior and remembering the recent past in short-term memory tasks in rats. These negative results may have important theoretical and practical implications in the field of memory and learning. However, while SWR detection methods are carefully validated, the strength of evidence is incomplete and some additional controls are required.

Reviewed by eLife

The ion channel TRPM8 is a direct target of the immunosuppressant rapamycin in primary sensory neurons

1. José Miguel Arcas
2. Khalid Oudaha
3. Alejandro González
4. Jorge Fernández‐Trillo
5. Francisco Andrés Peralta
6. Júlia Castro‐Marsal
7. Seyma Poyraz
8. Francisco Taberner
9. Salvador Sala
10. Elvira de la Peña
11. Ana Gomis
12. Félix Viana

Reviewed by Arcadia Science

Synapsin E-domain is essential for α-synuclein function

1. Alexandra Stavsky
2. Leonardo A Parra-Rivas
3. Shani Tal
4. Jen Riba
5. Kayalvizhi Madhivanan
6. Subhojit Roy
7. Daniel Gitler

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  Alpha-synuclein is a synaptic vesicle associated protein that is linked to a number of neurodegenerative disorders. In this manuscript, the authors provide compelling evidence of alpha-synuclein's interaction with E-domain synapsins as the main culprit mediating the suppression of neurotransmitter release and synaptic vesicle recycling by alpha-synuclein. This important work provides molecular mechanisms underlying alpha-synuclein functions.

Reviewed by eLife

Distinctive whole-brain cell types predict tissue damage patterns in thirteen neurodegenerative conditions

1. Veronika Pak
2. Quadri Adewale
3. Danilo Bzdok
4. Mahsa Dadar
5. Yashar Zeighami
6. Yasser Iturria-Medina

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  Pak et al. examined the relationship between the most common spatial patterns of neurodegeneration and transcriptional markers of the density of different cell types in the cerebral cortex. This valuable study uses innovative methods to provide convincing evidence that patterns of grey matter loss in various forms of dementia are correlated with the anatomical distribution of non-neuronal cell types.

Reviewed by eLife

Dysfunctional hippocampal-prefrontal network underlies a multidimensional neuropsychiatric phenotype following early-life seizure

1. Rafael Naime Ruggiero
2. Danilo Benette Marques
3. Matheus Teixeira Rossignoli
4. Jana Batista De Ross
5. Tamiris Prizon
6. Ikaro Jesus Silva Beraldo
7. Lezio Soares Bueno-Junior
8. Ludmyla Kandratavicius
9. Jose Eduardo Peixoto-Santos
10. Cleiton Lopes-Aguiar
11. Joao Pereira Leite

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This important study assesses anatomical, behavioral, physiological, and neurochemical effects of early-life seizures in rats, describing a striking astrogliosis and deficits in cognition and electrophysiological parameters. The solid results come from a wide range of convergent techniques that were used to understand the effects of early-life seizures on behavior as well as hippocampal prefrontal cortical dynamics. This paper will be of interest to neurobiologists, epileptologists, and behavioral scientists.

Reviewed by eLife

Phasic locus coeruleus activity enhances trace fear conditioning by increasing dopamine release in the hippocampus

1. Jacob H Wilmot
2. Cassiano RAF Diniz
3. Ana P Crestani
4. Kyle R Puhger
5. Jacob Roshgadol
6. Lin Tian
7. Brian Joseph Wiltgen

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This is an important study examining the neural profile of weak and strong fear memories using a variety of imagining and interrogation neural techniques. The data are convincing in detailing the neural profile of neutral, aversive and fear conditioned stimuli in the LC and its input to the dorsal hippocampus and support the conclusion that dopaminergic input from the LC is the key instigator of trace fear conditioning in hippocampus. This paper is of interest to behavioural and neuroscience researchers studying learning, memory and neural networks.

Reviewed by eLife

A neurocomputational account of the link between social perception and social action

1. Lisa M Bas
2. Ian D Roberts
3. Cendri A Hutcherson
4. Anita Tusche

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  These important findings stand out from other similar studies via some convincing demonstration of behavioural and neural relationships between two helping tasks – one focusing more on social perception, one more on its influence on social behaviour – that were performed more than 300 days apart. The claims however would be stronger with a larger sample size.

Reviewed by eLife

Multi-day neuron tracking in high-density electrophysiology recordings using earth mover’s distance

1. Augustine Xiaoran Yuan
2. Jennifer Colonell
3. Anna Lebedeva
4. Michael Okun
5. Adam S Charles
6. Timothy D Harris

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This important study proposes a new method for tracking neurons recorded with Neuropixel electrodes across days. The methods and the strength of the evidence are convincing, but the authors do not address whether their approach can be generalized to other brain areas, species, behaviors, or tools. Overall, this method will be potentially of interest to many neuroscientists who want to study long-term activity changes of individual neurons in the brain.

Reviewed by eLife

Molecular identification of wide-field amacrine cells in mouse retina that encode stimulus orientation

1. Silvia J. Park
2. Wanyu Lei
3. John Pisano
4. Andrea Orpia
5. Jacqueline Minehart
6. Joseph Pottackal
7. Christin Hanke-Gogokhia
8. Thomas E. Zapadka
9. Cheryl Clarkson-Paredes
10. Anastas Popratiloff
11. Sarah E. Ross
12. Joshua H. Singer
13. Jonathan B. Demb

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  Amacrine cells are a heterogeneous and understudied set of retinal interneurons. This study presents valuable new insights into the structure, function, and circuit connectivity of a particular subset of wide field amacrine cells (WACs). The authors use an impressive set of techniques to study structural and functional properties of these cells and to establish their postsynaptic circuit partners. Evidence for the central conclusions is solid, although some of the most interesting results could be pursued more completely.

Reviewed by eLife