Neuroscience

eLife assessment

This paper will be of broad interest to anyone aiming to understand the neural basis of human touch perception. This is an important paper that provides compelling evidence for peripheral tactile encoding of orientation that reflects perceptual capabilities, by using a wide range of stimulus conditions. The results will be valuable to inform both future experiments and computational investigations into the neural representation and processing of small tactile spatial features at the edge of perceptual resolvability and on the emergence of invariant representations in touch more generally.

eLife assessment

When sensory inputs, such as vision or sound, are chronically disabled, the loss of input activity is counterbalanced by the upregulation of synaptic activity. In this study, the authors provide evidence that instead of synapses that directly represent the sensory information, synapses that show correlated intrinsic network activity are the ones that undergo the change upon sensory deprivation. This fundamental and important paper will be useful to readers in the fields of experience-dependent plasticity, sensory cortical coding, and homeostatic plasticity. While the key claims of the manuscript are well supported by the data, minor changes are suggested for clarification, including the fact that the present study has addressed homeostatic responses in adult animals rather than in juvenile animals with which homeostatic plasticity has been actively studied to date.

eLife assessment

This article is a valuable contribution to the field of neuroimaging. The paper proposes a deep neural network for brain extraction that generalises across domains, including species, scanners, and MRI sequences. Although in some sense brain extraction is not a challenging problem for deep learning, domain generalisation can be. The authors provide solid evidence that their approach works though it may need to be precisely matched to the training data.

eLife assessment

Canetta et al. explored the time-dependent effects of inhibition of parvalbumin-positive interneurons in the mouse prefrontal cortex on task learning and cognition. Overall, the study shows that prefrontal cortex PV cell activity during a sensitive period strongly modulates cognitive flexibility and network activity in the adult mouse. This study could progress our understanding of cell behavior in mouse prefrontal cortex.

eLife assessment

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) yields a notoriously noisy and autocorrelated signal, and the GLMsingle method presented here by Prince and colleagues demonstrably improves the estimation of responses evoked by single trials. This open source toolbox is implemented in a user-friendly manner and will be of interest to researchers using human neuroimaging to study neural responses in condition-rich designs, as is increasingly common in cognitive neuroscience experiments.

eLife assessment

The authors provide a new method to target mouse CSF-cNs via intracerebroventricular injection of adeno-associated virus (AAV) with a neuron-specific promoter, which enabled them to introduce any genes into CSF-cNs. By doing so, they established the structure, connectivity, and function of mouse CSF-cNs in locomotion, recapitulating the findings obtained in zebrafish and lamprey, and extending the recent observations in mice. This study is very conclusive and important for the sensorimotor field.

eLife assessment

This paper is of potential interest to any neuroscientist, given it asks how the brain compensates for its own neural transmission delays. This is a problem that runs across neuroscientific disciplines. The authors use a clever and simple design where they study this question in the context of decoding from EEG signals during visual motion processing. They robustly show evidence that the brain can indeed compensate for these delays, although all compensation appears to be afforded by early processing. The manuscript is well-written but can be strengthened by outlining its significance for the broader community as well as some further analyses.

eLife assessment

Harkin and colleagues explore functional properties of dorsal raphe serotonin neurons using the approach called a generalized integrate-and-fire [aGIF] model, which incorporates a relatively small number of salient biophysical properties of a specific neuron type, and whose parameters are optimized based on voltage dynamics obtained experimentally. The authors make an interesting finding that after-hyperpolarization and A-type potassium currents, in combination with heterogeneous feedforward inhibition from local GABA neurons, give rise to a derivative-like input-output relationship in serotonin neurons.

eLife Assessment:

This manuscript uses a genetically-encoded calcium indicator to assess neural activity across a population of axons connecting the fly's brain to its ventral nerve cord while the tethered fly behaves on a floating ball. Changes in fluorescence signal correlate better with states such as walking, resting, and grooming than with particular limb movements or joint angles, suggesting that specific descending neurons represent the larger behavioral subdivisions. The preparation and large-scale analysis represent a significant step forward in determining how the brain compresses sensory and state information to convey commands to the ventral nervous system for behavior execution by motor circuits.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. The reviewers remained anonymous to the authors.)

eLife Assessment

This report describes evidence that the main driving force for stimulation of glycolysis in dentate granule cell neurons in acute hippocampal slices from mouse by electrical activity comes from influx of Na+ including Na+ exchanging into the cell for Ca2+. The findings are presented very clearly and the authors' interpretations seem reasonable. This is important and impactful because it identifies the major energy demand in excited neurons that stimulates glycolysis to supply more ATP.