Neuroscience

eLife Assessment

This manuscript details important findings that DNA polymerase kappa shows age-related changes in subcellular localization within different cell types in the brains of mice, from the nucleus in young cells to the cytoplasm in old cells. The authors' findings suggest that age-related alterations in POLK localization could drive mechanistic and functional changes in the aging brain. The authors provide solid evidence for their study, with data broadly supporting their claims with minor weaknesses.

eLife Assessment

Li et al. present an important and innovative study linking developmental changes in sleep to ecological context in Drosophila mojavensis, and propose that sleep at one stage of an animal's life might anticipate needs at a future stage. The results fit well with this model, but are correlative in nature. The work is convincing, scientifically rigorous, and effectively bridges sleep biology and evolutionary ecology, opening promising new directions for the field.

eLife Assessment

This important work employed a recent functional muscle network analysis to evaluate rehabilitation outcomes in post-stroke patients. While the research direction is relevant and suggests the need for further investigation, the strength of evidence supporting the claims is incomplete. Muscle interactions can serve as biomarkers, but improvements in function are not directly demonstrated, and the method's robustness is not benchmarked against existing approaches.

eLife Assessment

This important work introduces a splitGFP-based labeling tool with an analysis pipeline for the synaptic scaffold protein bruchpilot, with tests in the adult Drosophila mushroom bodies, a learning center in the Drosophila brain. The evidence supporting the conclusions is convincing.

eLife Assessment

This useful study uses creative scalp EEG decoding methods to attempt to demonstrate that two forms of learned associations in a Stroop task are dissociable, despite sharing similar temporal dynamics. However, the evidence supporting the conclusions is incomplete due to concerns with the experimental design and methodology. This paper would be of interest to researchers studying cognitive control and adaptive behavior, if the concerns raised in the reviews can be addressed satisfactorily.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study investigates the computational role of top-down feedback - a property found in biological circuits - in artificial neural network (ANN) models of the neocortex. Using hierarchical recurrent ANNs in an audiovisual integration task, the authors show that an anatomically inspired feedback motif induces a stable visual bias consistent with human perception and yields modest but meaningful benefits for learning dynamics and robustness. The strength of evidence is solid: the modeling, analyses, and controls mostly support the central claim that top-down feedback motifs impose persistent inductive biases that shape functional specialization and behavior. But the evidence for a broad, general framework that predicts behavior remains only partially supported, and the Methods would benefit from a compact, reproducible summary of hyperparameters and architectural details.

eLife Assessment

This manuscript investigates the extremely interesting and important claim that the human hippocampus represents interactions with multiple social interaction partners on two relatively abstract social dimensions - and that this ability correlates with the social network size of the participant. This research potentially demonstrates the intricate role of the hippocampus in navigating our social world. While most of the results are solid, the paper requires some further clarification.

eLife Assessment

This study presents a potentially valuable exploration of the role of thalamic nuclei in language processing. The results will be of interest to researchers interested in the neurobiology of language. However, the evidence is incomplete to support robust conclusions at this point.

eLife Assessment

This study provides a useful contribution to understanding how wearable augmentation devices interact with human proprioception, using a longitudinal design over a single session. Results demonstrate that the perceptual representation of the biological finger and augmentation device changes across different phases of device exposure and use. The evidence supporting a representational change over time is solid, although it is still not clear whether these changes reflect three distinct phases of sensorimotor plasticity, as argued, versus 'washout' or adaptation effects. This work will be of interest to researchers studying body representation, sensorimotor learning, and human-technology interaction.

eLife Assessment

This fundamental manuscript describes how the posterolateral cortical amygdala (plCoA) generates appetitive or aversive behaviors in response to odors. By combining optogenetic stimulation, single-cell RNA sequencing, and spatial analysis, the authors identify a topographically organized circuit within plCoA that governs these behaviors. The manuscript shows convincingly that multiple features (spatial, genetic, and projection) contribute to overall population encoding of valence. Overall, the authors conduct many challenging experiments, each of which contains the relevant controls, and the results are interpreted within the framework of their experiments.