Neuroscience

eLife Assessment

This important submission from Ambler and colleagues brings new insights into how torpor conditions may confer resilience in cases of cardioprotection. It has novelty, which can be enhanced by additional in vivo support. The study is backed by solid evidence, and represents a unique interoceptive mechanism of interest.

eLife Assessment

This important study establishes a robust live-imaging toolkit to characterize excitatory and inhibitory synaptic dynamics during neuronal development, advancing our mechanistic understanding of synaptic homeostasis and neural circuit maturation. The core findings clarify how stable E/I balance is maintained despite persistent synaptic turnover, with broad implications for developmental neurobiology and neurodevelopmental disorders. The methodology and quantitative data are convincing and well validated, and this work represents a significant advance that will be of significant interest to researchers in synaptic biology, cell imaging and neuroscience.

eLife Assessment

This important study shows that regions of the human auditory cortex that respond strongly to human voices are also sensitive to vocalizations from closely related primate species. The evidence is convincing and methodologically strong. The work offers significant insight into the evolutionary continuity of voice processing and would be of interest to researchers studying auditory processing and evolutionary neuroscience in general.

eLife Assessment

Argunşah et al. investigate the mechanisms underlying the differential response dynamics of barrel vs septa domains in shaping the responses to single vs multiple whiskers. Based on the observation of a higher density of SST+ interneurons in the septa, the authors investigate the hypothesis that Elfn1-dependent short-term plasticity shapes these responses. This important study is, however, supported by incomplete evidence; factors restricting the strength of evidence are the limited spatial resolution of the multi-unit activity, as well as the lack of a mechanistic explanation. This provocative and intellectually stimulating hypothesis provides a contribution to work on how different cell types shape cortical representation.

eLife Assessment

This useful study investigates noise-robust and energy-efficient circuit mechanisms for working memory by optimizing connectivity and reports that the resulting networks exhibit rotational dynamics and better match aspects of PFC population recording. However, the supporting evidence remains incomplete, given the restricted linear, task-specific training and analysis, and limited comparisons with other prominent models. The manuscript would be strengthened by extending the analysis to nonlinear dynamics, providing more rigorous comparisons with alternative models, and establishing a stronger link to prior theoretical and experimental work.

eLife Assessment

This paper addresses a valuable research question on the modest heritability of the brain's response to movie watching, and how heritability varies under different parameters such as regional spatial hyperalignment and BOLD frequency bands. The topic of this paper is of interest to fMRI methodological experts, and potentially to a broader cognitive neuroscience audience, and those with an interest in understanding the heritable sources of individual differences in brain function. Although some of the conclusions could be strengthened by future cross validation studies in independent and larger family-based samples, and through complementary twin/family and SNP-based models, taken altogether, the analyses and results provide convincing evidence for the overall conclusions.

eLife Assessment

This paper reports the findings of a neuroimaging experiment that tested the hypothesis that the cortex, specifically early visual areas, reinstates certain content from past episodic events. This is a useful study that highlights the role of early sensory cortices in supporting rapid, one-shot learning of location information for long-term memory. The strength of the evidence is solid, with the methods, data, and analyses broadly supporting the claims.

eLife Assessment

This study presents a valuable and well-documented computational pipeline for the scalable analysis and spike sorting of large extracellular electrophysiology datasets, with particular relevance for high-density recordings such as Neuropixels. The authors demonstrate the pipeline's utility for benchmarking spike sorter performance and evaluating the effects of data compression, supported by thorough testing, clear figures, and openly available code. The workflow is reproducible, portable, and practical, providing concrete guidance on computational cost and runtime. Overall, the evidence supporting the pipeline's performance and output quality is compelling, and this work will be of broad interest to the systems neuroscience community.

eLife Assessment

This important study shows that long-range somatostatin-expressing neurons in the ventrolateral periaqueductal grey that project to the rostral ventromedial medulla selectively suppress pain responses during conditioned fear. The evidence supporting these conclusions is exceptional, with methods spanning a novel cued fear-conditioned analgesia paradigm, cell-type-specific optogenetic activation and inhibition, anatomical circuit tracing, and in vivo spinal cord electrophysiology. These results will be of broad interest to systems and behavioral neuroscientists studying fear, pain, and descending pain-control circuitry.

eLife Assessment

This study provides fundamental insights into the mechanisms of visual object categorization in primates through a scalable behavioral framework for assessing category learning and generalization in macaque monkeys. The evidence is compelling, based on extensive behavioral characterization, rigorous control experiments, and comprehensive comparisons with humans and computational models, although extending the model analyses to the secondary monkey experiments would further strengthen the conclusions.