Neuroscience

eLife Assessment

This valuable study examined the geometry of visual object representations across hierarchically organized stages of the mouse visual cortex. The use of large-scale training and recording techniques provides solid evidence for changes along the hierarchy that may contribute to invariant object recognition. These findings, particularly if they could be supported by further analyses and clarifications to rule out alternative explanations, including influences of low-level features on behavior and neural activity, help establish the potential usefulness of the mouse to understand the neural basis of object recognition.

eLife Assessment

This paper presents a collection of analyses relating structure and function in the whole-brain Drosophila EM connectome and whole-brain calcium imaging data. The linkage of detailed anatomical structure with population activity is of broad interest in circuit neuroscience in light of increasingly detailed brain maps, but the methods used made the evidence inadequate due to a lack of consideration of neurotransmitter identity and technical issues with the network analysis. The conclusions are useful for specific network observations, but a more thorough analysis of the anatomical and functional data is needed to support the overall claims.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study characterises the activity of motor units from two of the three anatomical subdivisions ("heads") of the triceps muscle while mice walked on a treadmill at various speeds. Altogether, this is the most thorough characterisation of motor unit activity in walking mice to date, providing convincing evidence for probabilistic recruitment of motor units that differed between the two heads.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study contributes to the field of neuro-glial biology by establishing a direct causal link between astrocytic metabolism (glycolysis) and the structural wiring of neural circuits. Connecting the metabolic-synaptic mechanism to locomotor reorientation in the dopaminergic circuit offers new insights into how energy metabolism shapes circuit assembly and function. The evidence offers a solid foundation, moving logically from molecular mechanisms to circuit-level anatomy and finally to behavior; however, several central conclusions currently exceed the direct evidence presented. With appropriate calibration of claims and interpretations and/or additional clarifying experiments, the manuscript has the potential to make a significant contribution to our understanding of glial regulation of circuit assembly.

eLife Assessment

This important cross-species study tests whether the corpus callosum contains parallel, segregated pathways for ipsilateral and contralateral visual-field information, rather than mixed inputs from the two hemispheres. A major strength is its use of a combination of high-field functional magnetic resonance inaging and Bayesian population receptive field (pRF) modelling in humans with viral tracing in mice to offer complementary evidence for pathway segregation. At present, the evidence supporting the authors' claims is incomplete and would benefit from ruling out potential confounds that could mimic tract segregation in the human white-matter pRF data and the mouse anatomical tracing results, and from sharpening claims about laminar specificity.

eLife Assessment

This study presents valuable findings regarding cardiac and autonomic effects of seizures and epilepsy, with relevance to sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP). They present solid evidence that genetic deletion of the potassium-chloride co-transporter in hypothalamic corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) neurons exacerbates bradycardia and enhances autonomic disturbances in a mouse model of temporal lobe epilepsy. However, the evidence that this deletion produces chronic hyperexcitability of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis was incomplete, leaving a mechanistic gap. This work will be of interest to neuroscientists working on epilepsy, the HPA axis, and autonomic control.