Neuroscience

Cortex-wide response mode of VIP-expressing inhibitory neurons by reward and punishment

1. Zoltán Szadai
2. Hyun-Jae Pi
3. Quentin Chevy
4. Katalin Ócsai
5. Dinu F Albeanu
6. Balázs Chiovini
7. Gergely Szalay
8. Gergely Katona
9. Adam Kepecs
10. Balázs Rózsa

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This paper is of potential interest to neuroscientists expert in cortical circuitry and behavioral role of neuron types. The imaging technique used permitted to detect a specific group of cortical neurons known as vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP)-expressing interneurons from several cortical regions with high temporal resolution. The main message conveyed by this manuscript is that many VIP-expressing interneurons respond to reward and punishment but also show regional differences. The conclusions drawn are generally supported by the data, but some claims and interpretations require further attention and clarification.

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Active immunotherapy reduces NOTCH3 deposition in brain capillaries in a CADASIL mouse model

1. Daniel V Oliveira
2. Kirsten G Coupland
3. Wenchao Shao
4. Shaobo Jin
5. Francesca Del Gaudio
6. Sailan Wang
7. Rhys Fox
8. Julie W Rutten
9. Johan Sandin
10. Henrik Zetterberg
11. Johan Lundkvist
12. Saskia AJ Lesnik Oberstein
13. Urban Lendahl
14. Helena Karlström

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Mice and primates use distinct strategies for visual segmentation

1. Francisco J Luongo
2. Lu Liu
3. Chun Lum Andy Ho
4. Janis K Hesse
5. Joseph B Wekselblatt
6. Frank F Lanfranchi
7. Daniel Huber
8. Doris Y Tsao

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  Primates perceive and detect stimuli differently depending on the stimulus context in which they are embedded, and have a remarkable ability to understand the way in which objects and parts of objects are embedded in natural scenes (scene segmentation). An example of this is figure-ground segmentation, a well documented phenomenon resulting in a "pop-out" of a figure region and corresponding enhanced neural firing rates in visual areas. It is unknown whether mice show similar behavioral and neural signatures as primates. The present study suggests that mice show different segmentation behavior than primates, lacking texture-invariant segmentation of figures and corresponding neural correlates. This reveals a fundamental difference between primates and mice important for researchers working on these species and researchers studying scene segmentation. The findings are further interpreted in terms of neural network architectures (feedforward networks) and are relevant for this field too.

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Fast rule switching and slow rule updating in a perceptual categorization task

1. Flora Bouchacourt
2. Sina Tafazoli
3. Marcelo G Mattar
4. Timothy J Buschman
5. Nathaniel D Daw

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This study modeled monkeys' behavior in a stimulus-response rule-learning task to show that animals can adopt mixed strategies involving inference for learning latent states and incremental updating for learning action-outcome associations. The task is cleverly designed, the modeling is rigorous, and importantly there are clear distinctions in the behavior generated by different models, which makes the authors' conclusions convincing. The study makes a strong contribution overall, however, there were aspects of the design that were unclear and some alternative accounts that were not considered.

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Olfactory receptor neurons generate multiple response motifs, increasing coding space dimensionality

1. Brian Kim
2. Seth Haney
3. Ana P Milan
4. Shruti Joshi
5. Zane Aldworth
6. Nikolai Rulkov
7. Alexander T Kim
8. Maxim Bazhenov
9. Mark A Stopfer

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  The study by Kim et al. combines extracellular recordings from olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) in locusts with computational modelling approaches to investigate the dynamics of odour responses. The authors demonstrate that OSN responses can be grouped into four distinct response motifs, with OSNs showing different motifs in an odour-dependent manner. Using computational modelling the authors provide some evidence that these diverse response motifs expand the coding space and could facilitate odour discrimination and navigation. This study can be of high relevance to both experimental and theoretical neuroscientists investigating odour coding and odour-driven behaviours such as navigation. In its present form, while the experimental data and analysis are of the highest quality, the modelling part needs to be expanded to fully support the experimental measurements.

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GluA3 subunits are required for appropriate assembly of AMPAR GluA2 and GluA4 subunits on cochlear afferent synapses and for presynaptic ribbon modiolar–pillar morphology

1. Mark A Rutherford
2. Atri Bhattacharyya
3. Maolei Xiao
4. Hou-Ming Cai
5. Indra Pal
6. Maria Eulalia Rubio

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  Hearing is mediated by hair cells in the cochlea, which synapse onto the primary dendrites of the auditory nerve. This study shows how deletion of a postsynaptic glutamate receptor subtype strongly influences inner hair cell-spiral ganglion cell synapse formation. Thus pre- and post-synaptic changes are dynamically intertwined, providing insights into how pathological outcomes arise from synaptic perturbations.

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Human endogenous oxytocin and its neural correlates show adaptive responses to social touch based on recent social context

1. Linda Handlin
2. Giovanni Novembre
3. Helene Lindholm
4. Robin Kämpe
5. Elisabeth Paul
6. India Morrison

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This manuscript contains fundamental work on hormonal and neurobiological processing of social experience in humans. It sheds compelling new light on potential mechanisms underlying how humans place social experiences in context, demonstrating how oxytocin and cortisol might interact to modulate higher-level processing and contextualizing of familiar vs. stranger encounters.

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The aperiodic exponent of subthalamic field potentials reflects excitation/inhibition balance in Parkinsonism

1. Christoph Wiest
2. Flavie Torrecillos
3. Alek Pogosyan
4. Manuel Bange
5. Muthuraman Muthuraman
6. Sergiu Groppa
7. Natasha Hulse
8. Harutomo Hasegawa
9. Keyoumars Ashkan
10. Fahd Baig
11. Francesca Morgante
12. Erlick A Pereira
13. Nicolas Mallet
14. Peter J Magill
15. Peter Brown
16. Andrew Sharott
17. Huiling Tan

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  In this important manuscript the authors use a powerful cross-specifies approach and cutting-edge experimental methods to examine possible shifts in the excitatory and inhibitory balance in both an animal model of Parkinsonism and in human patients with Parkinson's disease. Their solid findings support such a shift, wherein untreated Parkinson's disease is characterized by excessive activity in the subthalamic nucleus. While a strong paper, there are concerns with some of the methodological choices and their implications.

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Huntingtin recruits KIF1A to transport synaptic vesicle precursors along the mouse axon to support synaptic transmission and motor skill learning

1. Hélène Vitet
2. Julie Bruyère
3. Hao Xu
4. Claire Séris
5. Jacques Brocard
6. Yah-Sé Abada
7. Benoît Delatour
8. Chiara Scaramuzzino
9. Laurent Venance
10. Frédéric Saudou

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  In this important study, the authors examine transport and synaptic activity in the corticostriatal circuit in both microfluidic devices and in mice. They convincingly show that the Huntingtin protein regulates the anterograde transport of synaptic vesicle precursors in coordination with the molecular motor KIF1A. Activated Huntingtin recruits KIF1A, accelerates synaptic vesicle precursor's transport, modifies synaptic transmission and motor skill learning in mice. This work sheds new light on the role of axonal transport in synaptic function under physiological and pathological conditions related to Huntington's disease.

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A Drosophila glial cell atlas reveals a mismatch between detectable transcriptional diversity and morphological diversity

1. Inês Lago-Baldaia
2. Maia Cooper
3. Austin Seroka
4. Chintan Trivedi
5. Gareth T. Powell
6. Stephen Wilson
7. Sarah D. Ackerman
8. Vilaiwan M. Fernandes

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This study presents an atlas of glial cell morphology in Drosophila, from distinct locations at different periods of life. The authors integrate morphological information with the transcriptomic signatures of those cells and find that morphological diversity among glial cells of a given class is not a strong predictor of transcriptional identity. The study is of great value as connecting morphology with scRNA sequencing analysis is rarely done and is a necessary step for understanding the underlying biology of these cells. While the weak morphotype-transcriptomic link in many cases may be due to low sequencing resolution, nonetheless, the data are of very high quality and the study will be a very useful resource for the glial biology field.

Reviewed by eLife