Neuroscience

Transcriptional cartography integrates multiscale biology of the human cortex

1. Konrad Wagstyl
2. Sophie Adler
3. Jakob Seidlitz
4. Simon Vandekar
5. Travis T Mallard
6. Richard Dear
7. Alex R DeCasien
8. Theodore D Satterthwaite
9. Siyuan Liu
10. Petra E Vértes
11. Russell T Shinohara
12. Aaron Alexander-Bloch
13. Daniel H Geschwind
14. Armin Raznahan

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This study provides continuous maps of human brain gene expression and explores their relationship with a large variety of microscopic and macroscopic aspects of brain organisation. The authors provide convincing evidence for a relationship between gene expression maps with various aspects of the anatomy of adult brains, during development, and in the case of mental disorders. The data and methods introduced can be an important tool for neuroimaging research.

Reviewed by eLife

Coupling of Slack and NaV1.6 sensitizes Slack to quinidine blockade and guides anti-seizure strategy development

1. Tian Yuan
2. Yifan Wang
3. Yuchen Jin
4. Hui Yang
5. Shuai Xu
6. Heng Zhang
7. Qian Chen
8. Na Li
9. Xinyue Ma
10. Huifang Song
11. Chao Peng
12. Ze Geng
13. Jie Dong
14. Guifang Duan
15. Qi Sun
16. Yang Yang
17. Fan Yang
18. Zhuo Huang

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  The authors report that an interaction between the sodium-activated potassium channel Slack and Nav1.6 sensitizes Slack to inhibition by quinidine. This is an important finding because it contributes to our understanding of how the antiseizure drug quinidine affects epilepsy syndromes arising from mutations in the Slack-encoding gene KCNT1. The results are largely compelling and the work will likely spark interest in further examining the proposed channel-channel interaction in neuronal cell membranes.

Reviewed by eLife

Rabies virus-based barcoded neuroanatomy resolved by single-cell RNA and in situ sequencing

1. Aixin Zhang
2. Lei Jin
3. Shenqin Yao
4. Makoto Matsuyama
5. Cindy TJ van Velthoven
6. Heather Anne Sullivan
7. Na Sun
8. Manolis Kellis
9. Bosiljka Tasic
10. Ian Wickersham
11. Xiaoyin Chen

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This study presents an important tool for tracking the connectivity of neurons in mouse and potentially other mammals using a combined approach of barcoded rabies virus libraries and spatial transcriptomics. The data supporting the technique are convincing, the validation against known anatomical knowledge is rigorous, and the authors advance the techniques by combing them in vivo. Overall, this is a very good paper describing a technique for tracking neural circuits.

Reviewed by eLife

A system of feed-forward cerebellar circuits that extend and diversify sensory signaling

1. Harsh N Hariani
2. A Brynn Algstam
3. Christian T Candler
4. Isabelle F Witteveen
5. Jasmeen K Sidhu
6. Timothy S Balmer

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This study presents important findings about synaptic connectivity among subsets of unipolar brush cells (UBCs), a specialized interneuron primarily located in the vestibular lobules of the cerebellar cortex. The evidence supporting the claims are interesting and solid. The work will be of interest to cerebellar neuroscientists as well as those focussed on synaptic properties and mechanisms. Although several compelling pieces of data were presented, some in vivo work remains to be conducted in order to test if the hypothesis and predictions translate into the behaving animal and how it would impact the processing of feedback or feedforward activity that would be required to promote behavior.

Reviewed by eLife

Chemo- and optogenetic activation of hypothalamic Foxb1-expressing neurons and their terminal endings in the rostral-dorsolateral PAG leads to tachypnea, bradycardia, and immobility

1. Reto B Cola
2. Diana M Roccaro-Waldmeyer
3. Samara Naim
4. Alexandre Babalian
5. Petra Seebeck
6. Gonzalo Alvarez-Bolado
7. Marco R Celio

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This paper describes valuable results from studies investigating circuits in the brain that underlie behavioral responses in fearful situations. The authors identified a role for a class of neurons that are sufficient to cause these stereotyped behaviors including freezing behaviors. These solid studies increase our understanding of brain pathways regulating these types of behaviors.

Reviewed by eLife

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