Neuroscience

eLife Assessment

This important manuscript presents the Crunchometer, an open-source and low-cost acoustic system for high-resolution quantification of biting and chewing in mice. The work addresses a need for reliable measures of food consumption and feeding microstructure, and the tool has broad relevance for studies of ingestive behavior, appetite circuits, hypothalamic function, and pharmacological interventions. The evidence supporting the methodological advance is convincing, and the Crunchometer outputs were carefully validated against human observer scoring, reliably distinguished biting and chewing events, and captured changes in feeding behavior across different foods, physiological states, and semaglutide treatment. The study also demonstrates that the system can reveal biologically meaningful features of feeding, including meal structure, bite and chew dynamics, and altered consumption patterns after pharmacological manipulation. A significant additional contribution is the identification of previously unrecognized meal-related neurons in the lateral hypothalamus, providing novel circuit-level insight into solid food consumption and naturalistic feeding behavior. Although some neuroscience conclusions remain more preliminary than the methodological validation, the study provides strong evidence for the utility of the Crunchometer and will be of interest to researchers studying ingestive behavior, hypothalamic circuits, and metabolic regulation.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study characterizes the emergence of the membrane-associated periodic cytoskeleton (MPS) in the axons of human motor neurons derived from induced pluripotent stem cells. Super-resolution imaging of beta-II spectrin provides convincing evidence for the patterned assembly of spectrin-poor gaps and spectrin-rich MPS in the medial region of the axons and its enhancement by the kinase inhibitor staurosporine. The data advocates against gap formation by axonal degeneration or cytoskeleton disassembly in a continuous MPS. Instead, a continuous MPS may result from nascent MPS patches and their maturation, a model that would benefit from live imaging for validation.

eLife Assessment

This manuscript describes convincing and very interesting findings that substantially advance our understanding of a major research question on the role of Cx32 hemichannels in the Schwann cell paranode. It provides an interdisciplinary integration of imaging, in silico approaches, and functional data. This important study proposes a new mechanism with profound physiological relevance and provides new insights into glial modulation of electrical conduction in sensory/motor myelinated nerves.

eLife Assessment

This important work employed a recent functional muscle network analysis to evaluate rehabilitation outcomes in post-stroke patients. The research direction is relevant and supported by solid evidence from gross motor function assessment. The framework is a step toward standardized assessment of motor recovery in the rehabilitation process, but future studies would focus on linking functional recovery to muscle interaction biomarkers to provide more physiologically grounded interpretations.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study reports evidence that items maintained in working memory can bias attention in an oscillatory manner, with the attentional capture effect fluctuating at theta frequency. The study provides solid evidence that this dynamic attentional bias is associated with oscillatory neural mechanisms, particularly in the alpha and theta bands, as measured by EEG. The study will be relevant for researchers studying attention, working memory, and neural oscillations, particularly those interested in how memory and perception interact over time.

eLife Assessment

The authors have presented a study which addresses a recognised gap in the literature, the emergence of the neural correlates of cognitive and affective empathy in children; they introduce a task for measuring both positive and negative empathy in a relatively large group of children aged 3-5. The task was combined with functional near-infrared spectroscopy to examine brain regions involved in the task. The findings are interpreted as providing evidence for the earlier emergence of cognitive than affective empathy. The study represents a valuable contribution to understanding the development of cognitive function, but in its current form, the strength of support for the conclusion is incomplete due to limited support for the comparison to the adult literature and a need to more clearly justify the pre-selected brain regions, their links to empathy and the justification of the hypotheses.

eLife Assessment

Based on several lines of interesting data, the authors conclude that neuronal FMRP, which is associated with stalled ribosomes and mRNP granules, does not determine position on the mRNAs at which ribosomes stall. They instead propose a role in subsequent translational activation of arrested mRNAs. Supported by generally solid experimental data, the paper represents a valuable contribution to the field. The generality of these conclusions, particularly for neurons of different development stages and for different subtypes of mRNP granules, should become clear with future studies that replicate and extend this work.

eLife Assessment

This manuscript represents a valuable contribution to understanding motion processing in the visual cortex. Based on a heterogeneous collection of previous empirical findings, the authors show that the diversity of tuning curves in the middle temporal (MT) area, in response to moving center-surround images, can be explained by Bayesian inference combined with neural sampling. The model rests on strong and solid assumptions about the prior and likelihood; independent evidence that neither of these factors is misspecified would strengthen the work.

eLife Assessment

The authors combine a modeling approach, using a digital twin, with electrophysiological evidence in two species to assess the role of inhibition in shaping selectivity in the visual cortex. The results provide a fundamental advance beyond the classic view of sensory coding by proving compelling evidence that many neurons in visual areas exhibit dual-feature selectivity. Overall, the work compellingly showcases how in silico experiments can generate concrete hypotheses about neuronal coding that are difficult to discover experimentally.

eLife Assessment

This fundamental study provides compelling evidence for the functional segregation of the sensorimotor cortex into precisely delineated areas, and highlights a rapid transition in functional properties at the boundaries between these areas. This result further confirms and extends recent work on the diversity of neural response specificities across cortical areas in the context of complex behavioral tasks. This work will be of interest to neuroscientists studying sensory-motor functions.