Neuroscience

eLife assessment

This important study describes transcriptomic profiles of sensory and non-sensory cells of the zebrafish inner ear at single-cell resolution in embryonic through adult stages. These solid results catalogue transcriptomic data and show evidence that distinct cell subtypes exist between cells of the ear and the lateral line as well as within subcellular compartments in the inner ear. These findings provide information toward comparison studies of inner ear hair cell function in zebrafish and mammals.

eLife assessment

This study refuted earlier work on the same subject. The two reviewers felt the manuscript was accurate, concise, and unbiased. The experimental evidence were thorough and supported the conclusions. The reviewers concurred the overall significance and quality of the experimental research were compelling and addressed previous work on this problem.

eLife assessment

Malis et al present a novel sequence attempting to non-invasively measure the outflow of cerebrospinal fluid, which is potentially an important contribution given the growing interest in the glymphatic system. Their reported findings are generally consistent with previous literature and prevailing theories, however, no robust validation of the sequence is supplied rendering the evidence base incomplete.

eLife assessment

This important paper describes the connectivity of V2a/V2b sibling neurons in the zebrafish spinal cord, where one sibling receives Notch signaling (Notch-ON) and the other does not (Notch-OFF). They find that V2a and V2b siblings have different morphology, inputs, outputs, and are not synaptically connected, unlike findings in the mouse cortex. This work provides new insight into the role of lineage in specifying neuronal connectivity; the experiments are convincing and the conclusions are supported by the data presented.

eLife assessment

This paper will be of importance to visual neuroscientists, in particular those interested in the functional organization of subcortical visual pathways. The work provides evidence for a much greater diversity of functional cell types in the mouse superior colliculus than previously suggested, and that the functional organization of cell types in the superior colliculus is distinct from that of the retina. These results are based on an impressive data set. However, the conclusions require additional support.

eLife assessment

This paper posits that higher uncertainty environments should lead to more reliance on episodic memory, finding compelling evidence for this idea across several analysis approaches and across two independent samples. This is an important paper that will be of interest to a broad group of learning, memory, and decision-making researchers.

eLife assessment

The authors use an elegant design to tackle a longstanding question about the extent to which learning social information relies on specialized computational and neural mechanism. They find that learning about ostensible others is more accurate than learning about non-social objects, despite identical statistical information, and that such effects are mediated by the dmPFC and pTPJ - regions previously implicated in social cognition. While likely of interest to a broad range of social, behavioral, and cognitive neuroscientists, the work is not sufficiently framed by relevant previous research. Moreover, the difference between social (faces) and non-social (fruits) stimuli raises concerns about attentional confounds.

eLife assessment

This interesting manuscript assesses calcium dynamics in the kisspeptin neurons of the arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus during the estrous cycle and during reproductive aging in female mice. In particular, the authors succeed in tracking arcuate kisspeptin calcium activity in the same mice over 10 months, which is quite impressive and provides novel findings that will be of interest to the field.

eLife assessment

This study provides convincing evidence supporting the important finding that acoustic and linguistic features contribute to brain responses as people listen to speech. However, the innovation of the methodological advance relative to other papers in the subfield is not entirely clear.

eLife assessment

Tan and colleagues studied synaptic transmission, presynaptic protein levels, and synaptic ultra-structure in hippocampal cultures of mice lacking the key active-zone proteins RIM (1, 2), ELKS (1, 2), and Munc13 (1, 2). Compared to cultures lacking only RIM and ELKS, additional deletion of Munc13 results in a further decrease of synaptic Munc13-1 levels, a similar reduction of the number of docked synaptic vesicles, and a more pronounced decrease of total synaptic vesicle number. At the physiological level, these RIM-ELKS-Munc13 hextuple knockout cultures display a further decrease in the pool of release-ready synaptic vesicles with largely unchanged release probability compared with RIM-ELKS quadruple KO cultures. The results support the conclusion of the nonredundant role of Munc13 in synaptic vesicle priming. On the other hand, while the genetic removal of all six genes involved clearly require the use of conditional KO mice, the resulting outcome of the experimental design is a hypomorphic phenotype, as neurotransmitter release is still detected and this complicates the interpretation of the findings. Overall, this study reinforces the notion that synapse formation is a remarkably resilient process that occurs even under strong perturbation of presynaptic function.