Neuroscience

ENGRAILED ‐1 transcription factor has a paracrine neurotrophic activity on adult spinal α‐motoneurons

1. Mélanie Lebœuf
2. Stephanie E Vargas‐Abonce
3. Eugénie Pezé‐Hedsieck
4. Edmond Dupont
5. Lucia Jimenez‐Alonso
6. Kenneth L Moya
7. Alain Prochiantz

Reviewed by Review Commons

Signal denoising through topographic modularity of neural circuits

1. Barna Zajzon
2. David Dahmen
3. Abigail Morrison
4. Renato Duarte

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This manuscript puts forward a new idea that topography in neural networks helps to remove noise from inputs. The authors show that there is a critical level of topography that is needed for network to denoise inputs. At present, the analysis is limited to inputs that are constant in time.

Reviewed by eLife

Expansive linguistic representations to predict interpretable odor mixture discriminability

1. Amit Dhurandhar
2. Hongyang Li
3. Guillermo A Cecchi
4. Pablo Meyer

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  Dhurhandar and colleagues developed a computational method that predicts discriminability of odor mixtures based on chemical structures of component molecules. The model first transforms chemical structures into natural language descriptions of odor, and then perform Lasso regressions to obtain a compact transformation into discriminability. The results suggest that the model performs better compared to that without transformation to language descriptions, yet, there are some issues that need to be addressed to make strong conclusions.

Reviewed by eLife

Generating variability from motor primitives during infant locomotor development

1. Elodie Hinnekens
2. Marianne Barbu-Roth
3. Manh-Cuong Do
4. Bastien Berret
5. Caroline Teulier

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  In learning to walk, infants must balance the need to explore their movement repertoire with the need to establish regular movement patterns. Using a longitudinal approach, this paper suggests that while young infants generate high variability from a small number of regular patterns ('primitives'), older infants use a greater number of primitives with less variability. These interesting conclusions are not currently fully supported by the small and somewhat selective sample of data, and some alternative explanations need to be considered more thoroughly.

Reviewed by eLife

Right inferior frontal gyrus damage is associated with impaired initiation of inhibitory control, but not its implementation

1. Yoojeong Choo
2. Dora Matzke
3. Mark D Bowren
4. Daniel Tranel
5. Jan R Wessel

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This study takes a fresh view of the hypothesis that right inferior frontal gyrus is critical in inhibitory control in humans, as assessed by the widely-used stop signal task. It applies recent development in modeling and EEG measures in patients with focal brain damage, yielding causal insights. It will be of interest to neuroscientists and clinical researchers who study the brain basis of response control. Reviewers found this to be a strong, hypothesis-driven study that makes new progress on an important topic.

Reviewed by eLife

Altered basal ganglia output during self-restraint

1. Bon-Mi Gu
2. Joshua D Berke

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This study builds upon previous results of the authors to study the neural computations within the basal ganglia that support behavioral proactive inhibition. Here, the authors identify features of neural activity in the SNr that correlate with proactive inhibition, including changes in firing rate and neural variability, and how both of these variables are influenced by an animal's outcome history. The analyses are rigorous and provide important insights into the neural dynamics in the basal ganglia that support proactive inhibition.

Reviewed by eLife

Contrasting action and posture coding with hierarchical deep neural network models of proprioception

1. Kai J Sandbrink
2. Pranav Mamidanna
3. Claudio Michaelis
4. Matthias Bethge
5. Mackenzie Weygandt Mathis
6. Alexander Mathis

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This manuscript presents a valuable framework and blueprint for the study, in artificial systems, of the principles and mechanisms that underlie proprioception in biological systems. Using artificial neural networks trained on synthetic hand movement data, the authors present solid, albeit incomplete, evidence that action recognition can explain important features of the mechanisms that underlie proprioception in biological systems. Experiments with architectures trained using losses that, in addition to action, take into account velocity and/or other states, could strengthen the authors' findings.

Reviewed by eLife

The injured sciatic nerve atlas (iSNAT), insights into the cellular and molecular basis of neural tissue degeneration and regeneration

1. Xiao-Feng Zhao
2. Lucas D Huffman
3. Hannah Hafner
4. Mitre Athaiya
5. Matthew C Finneran
6. Ashley L Kalinski
7. Rafi Kohen
8. Corey Flynn
9. Ryan Passino
10. Craig N Johnson
11. David Kohrman
12. Riki Kawaguchi
13. Lynda JS Yang
14. Jeffery L Twiss
15. Daniel H Geschwind
16. Gabriel Corfas
17. Roman J Giger

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  In peripheral nerve injury, an immune response occurs to ensure debris clean-up and potential repair, however, there has not yet been a census of cell types and gene expression as these lesions undergo clearance and eventual repair. Zhao et al generate a transcriptional resource by performing scRNAseq on both the naive, injured, and repairing sciatic nerve. They identify the composition of different cell types, gene signatures, and cell-cell communication and contrast these with signatures from the blood, and compare the injured site with distal nerve segments after injury. To dissociate the immune response from injury versus Wallerian degeneration, they use SARM1 KO mice (which exhibits delayed neurodegeneration) and observe that there is still injury-induced immune influx. Overall, this is a convincing study and useful resource for the field of neuronal repair and neural-immune interactions with a clear presentation of the animals and time points, with some follow-up experiments and validation.

Reviewed by eLife

Recurrent network interactions explain tectal response variability and experience-dependent behavior

1. Asaph Zylbertal
2. Isaac H Bianco

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This manuscript uses large-scale neural imaging and network models to show how spontaneous dynamics emerge in such ensembles and how such activity influences behavior. It is a strong addition to the field for explaining many of the observed neural activity patterns and their heterogeneities.

Reviewed by eLife

Chloride-dependent mechanisms of multimodal sensory discrimination and nociceptive sensitization in Drosophila

1. Nathaniel J Himmel
2. Akira Sakurai
3. Atit A Patel
4. Shatabdi Bhattacharjee
5. Jamin M Letcher
6. Maggie N Benson
7. Thomas R Gray
8. Gennady S Cymbalyuk
9. Daniel N Cox

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This paper is of interest for somatosensory neurobiologists studying how polymodality is achieved in peripheral sensory neurons. The work identifies roles in cold nociception and not mechanosensation in chloride transport for a number of ion channels.

Reviewed by eLife