Neuroscience

eLife assessment

This manuscript reports important findings in the field of developmental neurobiology, particularly in our understanding of human cortical development. The methods, data, and analyses are solid yet, the lack of clonal resolution or timelapse imaging makes it hard to assess whether the inheritance of centrosomes occurs as the authors claim.

eLife assessment

This manuscript posits a novel role for the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in coding for sequential action strategies and the prevalence of each strategy. These findings provide important insight into ACC function and will therefore be of broad interest within the field of cognitive neuroscience. The evidence supporting the primary hypothesis is currently incomplete but could be rendered convincing with some further effort to rule out potential confounding factors.

eLife assessment

This paper presents an important contribution to the field of hippocampal registration by introducing a novel surface-based approach that utilizes the topological and morphological features of the hippocampus for anatomical registration across individuals, rather than volumetric-based methods commonly used in the literature. The study provides compelling evidence for the efficacy of this approach using histological samples from three different datasets and offers validation of the method through comparison with traditional volumetric registration. This is significant work given the large number of studies that examine hippocampal shape, thickness, and function in large cohorts, providing strong support for the use of hippocampal unfolding methods in future studies.

eLife assessment

This is valuable study on the mechanistic relationship between two prominent events in post-stimulus EEG: alpha desynchronization and P300 that are known for their slow/relatively late build up. The sample size is substantial. The data are compelling, showing that the P300 can be explained by desynchronization of a non-zero mean alpha oscillations over posterior sites through the baseline-shift model, at least partially. This makes a significant contribution to understanding and interpreting P300 generation (and possibly other ERP components) from concurrent changes in brain oscillations, with links to cognition.

eLife assessment

In uncertain conditions, decisions are not made in isolation but are rather biased by the recent past. This new work provides valuable insights into these history biases in human perceptual decision-making, by characterizing the neural correlates of stimulus history biases and their short-term dynamics. The study provides compelling behavioral and MEG evidence that humans adapt their history biases to the correlation structure of uncertain sensory environments.

eLife assessment

This paper provides valuable information regarding visuospatial working memory performance in patients with MS compared to healthy controls, using a relatively novel continuous measure of visual working memory. There are some weaknesses with the way the clinical groups were matched, but those limitations are acknowledged and the strength of evidence for the claims is otherwise convincing. The paper will be of interest to those working in the field of clinical neuroscience.

eLife assessment

This paper measures the neural activity in reach-to-grasp and reach-only tasks using intrinsic optical imaging. The paper describes these in the relationship to the Intra-cortical micro stimulation maps of the same animals. The dataset is unique and potentially highly important. However, the claim of "clustered neural activity" is not tested against any quantifiable alternative hypothesis of non-clustered activity, and support for this idea is therefore currently incomplete.

eLife assessment

This study presents a valuable finding on the function of the gene Cst7 in sex-divergent pathological changes in microglia in a mouse model of AB-driven Alzheimer's disease. The evidence supporting the claims of the authors is solid, although the study would be strengthened by validation of some of the key differentially expressed genes identified in RNA-sequencing experiments, and the inclusion of key controls and additional timepoints to address whether Cst7 drives disease progression or is simply upregulated as a result. The work will be of interest to neuroimmunologists and neuroscientists working on microglia and neurodegenerative disease.

eLife assessment

This important study examines the existence of a fear memory engram in acetylcholine neurons of the basal forebrain and seeks to link this to modulation of amygdala for fear expression. Using a combination of techniques including genetic access to cFos expressing neurons, in-vivo chemogenetics, and optical detection of acetylcholine (ACh), the authors present solid evidence that posteriorly-located amygdala projecting basal forebrain cholinergic neurons participate in cue-specific threat learning and memory. This paper will be of interest to those studying circuit-level mechanisms of learning and emotion regulation.

eLife assessment

Drosophila is a powerful model organism for understanding the molecular and neural regulation of sleep. However, methodological limitations exist that would appear to limit the relevance of work done in the fly to our understanding of mammalian sleep. In this important work, the authors provide physiological, behavioral, and molecular evidence for the existence of two potential sleep stages in Drosophila. The experiments are generally well conducted and the authors' interpretations of their results are solid overall. Although technically innovative and conceptually provocative, there are aspects of the approaches used and results obtained that leave the central conclusions open to interpretation.