Neuroscience

Excitatory cholecystokinin neurons in CA3 area regulate the navigation learning and neuroplasticity

1. Fengwen Huang
2. Abdul Baset
3. Stephen Temitayo Bello

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study shows that excitatory cholecystokinin (CCK)-expressing neurons in hippocampal area CA3 influence hippocampal-dependent memory using multiple methods to manipulate excitatory CCK-expressing CA3 neurons selectively. The work is valuable because most past studies of CCK-expressing neurons have focused on those neurons that co-express CCK and GABA. Currently, the strength of evidence is incomplete; however, if additional evidence were to be presented that the methods were selective, the evaluation would potentially be higher.

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Hypothalamic deiodinase type-3 establishes the period of circannual interval timing in mammals

1. Calum Stewart
2. T Adam Liddle
3. Elisabetta Tolla
4. Jo Edward Lewis
5. Christopher Marshall
6. Neil P Evans
7. Peter J Morgan
8. Fran JP Ebling
9. Tyler J Stevenson

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study provides important findings on the understanding of circannual timing in mammals, for which iodothyronine deiodinases (DIOs) have been suggested to be of critical importance, yet functional genetic evidence has been missing. The authors convincingly implicate dio3, the major inactivator of the biologically active thyroid hormone T3, in circannual timing in Djungarian hamsters, using a combination of correlative and gene knock-out experiments; thus this provides key insights into the evolution and function of animal annual timing mechanisms.

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Prefoldin 5 is a microtubule-associated protein that suppresses Tau-aggregation and neurotoxicity

1. Anjali Bisht
2. Srikanth Pippadpally
3. Snehasis Majumder
4. Athulya T Gopi
5. Abhijit Das
6. Chandan Sahi
7. Mani Ramaswami
8. Vimlesh Kumar

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This work details the finding that in at least one of the subunits of the heterohexameric chaperone complex Pfdn5 has additional functions beyond its contribution to cytoskeletal protein folding in Drosophila. The authors provide convincing evidence that it is a hitherto unknown microtubule associated protein in addition to regulating microtubule organization and levels of tubulin monomers. The important findings show that Pfdn5 loss exaggerates pathological manifestations of mutant human Tau bearing FTDP-17 linked mutations in Drosophila, while its overexpression suppresses them, suggesting that the latter may constitute a future therapeutic approach.

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Hugin-AstA circuitry is a novel central energy sensor that directly regulates sweet sensation in Drosophila and mouse

1. Wusa Qin
2. Tingting Song
3. Zeliang Lai
4. Daihan Li
5. Liming Wang
6. Rui Huang

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important work characterizes layers of neuropeptidergic modulations that collectively regulate the intake of sugar in a hunger state-dependent manner. Combinations of genetic, physiological, and behavioral approaches present convincing evidence that neurons that release Hugin and Allatostatin A are in an active state in sated flies, leading to suppression of sugar feeding behavior by reducing the sensitivity of sugar-sensitive gustatory neurons that express Gr5a. They also demonstrate that neurons that release Neuromedin U, a vertebrate homolog of Hugin, have common physiological properties as the fly Hugin neurons, revealing a similar function of evolutionarily conserved peptides across animal phyla.

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Separating the control of moving and holding in post-stroke arm paresis

1. Alkis M Hadjiosif
2. Kahori Kita
3. Scott T Albert
4. Robert A Scheidt
5. Reza Shadmehr
6. John W Krakauer

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study extends the previous interesting work of this group to address the potentially different control of movement and posture. Through experiments in which stroke participants used a robotic manipulandum, the authors provide solid evidence supporting a lack of a relation between the resting force postural bias they measure (closely related to the flexor synergy in stroke) and kinematic deficits during movement. Based on these results, the authors propose a conceptual framework that differentially weights the two main descending pathways (corticospinal tract and reticulospinal tract) for neurologically intact and stroke patients.

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Regulation of sensorimotor serial learning in speech production by motor compensation rather than sensory error

1. Yuhan Lu
2. Xiaowei Tang
3. Zhenyan Xiao
4. Anqi Xu
5. Junxi Chen
6. Xing Tian

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study investigates how people adapt their speech when auditory feedback is altered. The analyses are rigorous and the work makes a valuable contribution by extending methods from limb motor control to speech. However, because the paradigm does not directly measure sensory error, the evidence for the proposed mechanism of sensorimotor learning is incomplete. The findings are best viewed as evidence for how prior motor adjustments influence subsequent behaviour, highlighting the need for future studies to more precisely separate sensory and motor contributions to adaptation.

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A comprehensive mechanosensory connectome reveals a somatotopically organized neural circuit architecture controlling stimulus-aimed grooming of the Drosophila head

1. Steven A Calle-Schuler
2. Alexis E Santana-Cruz
3. Lucia Kmecová
4. Stefanie Hampel
5. Andrew M Seeds

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study extends prior work on head bristle mechanosensation by delivering a synaptic-resolution map of second-order partners that preserves somatotopy and highlights a cholinergic pathway linking sensory input to grooming circuits, providing a valuable resource for the field. The reconstructions and quantitative connectivity analyses provide solid support the main anatomical claims, while causal sufficiency for the behavioral sequence remains inferential and could be strengthened by a simple rank-order test relating wiring to the known grooming hierarchy.

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Long-range inhibitory axons from medial entorhinal cortex target lateral entorhinal neurons projecting to the hippocampal formation

1. Eirik S Nilssen
2. Bente Jacobsen
3. Thanh P Doan
4. Paulo JB Girão
5. Menno P Witter

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study provides a valuable insight into how the medial and lateral entorhinal cortices interact through distinct excitatory and inhibitory pathways. Using anatomical tracing, optogenetics, and electrophysiology, the authors show that glutamatergic medial entorhinal neurons provide broad excitatory input to lateral entorhinal, while long-range SST+ interneurons deliver selective inhibition to layer I. These findings reveal a novel layer- and cell-type-specific organization of medial to lateral entorhinal connectivity with implications for spatial and episodic memory. The work is solid, but validation of injection specificity and viral spread is needed to fully confirm the anatomical interpretations; with these clarifications, this will be a significant contribution to understanding entorhinal-hippocampal circuit organization.

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Heat-off responses of epidermal cells sensitize Drosophila larvae to noxious inputs

1. Jiro Yoshino
2. Avery Chiu
3. Takeshi Morita
4. Chang Yin
5. Federico M. Tenedini
6. Takaaki Sokabe
7. Kazuo Emoto
8. Jay Z. Parrish

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A Scene with an Invisible Wall—Navigational Experience Shapes Visual Scene Representation

1. Shi Pui Donald Li
2. Jiayu Shao
3. Zhengang Lu
4. Michael McCloskey
5. Soojin Park

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This important study provides novel evidence that navigational experiences can shape perceptual scene representations. The evidence presented is incomplete and would benefit from clearer explanations of the experiment design and careful discussion of alternative interpretations such as contextual associations or familiarity. The work will be of interest to cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists working on perception and navigation.

  [Editors’ note: A revised version of this work has been published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/JOCN.a.2409).]

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