Neuroscience

Multisensory inputs control the regulation of time investment for mating by sexual experience in male Drosophila melanogaster

1. Seung Gee Lee
2. Changku Kang
3. Baraa Saad
4. Khoi-Nguyen Ha Nguyen
5. Adrian Guerra-Phalen
6. Dorothy Bui
7. Al-Hassan Abbas
8. Brian Trinh
9. Ashvent Malik
10. Mahdi Zeghal
11. Anne-Christine Auge
12. Md Ehteshamul Islam
13. Kyle Wong
14. Tiffany Stern
15. Elizabeth Lebedev
16. Dongyu Sun
17. Hongyu Miao
18. Zekun Wu
19. Thomas N. Sherratt
20. Woo Jae Kim

Reviewed by Review Commons

A striatal circuit balances learned fear in the presence and absence of sensory cues

1. Michael Kintscher
2. Olexiy Kochubey
3. Ralf Schneggenburger

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This paper will interest neuroscientists working in the field(s) of basal ganglia, amygdala, and fear learning. Overall this is an important study that examines the contribution of an understudied brain region to fear conditioning in male subjects. Some conclusions will benefit from additional verification and evaluation of the specificity of the findings to the amygdala-striatal transition zone relative to adjacent regions.

Reviewed by eLife

Disease-modifying effects of sodium selenate in a model of drug-resistant, temporal lobe epilepsy

1. Pablo M Casillas-Espinosa
2. Alison Anderson
3. Anna Harutyunyan
4. Crystal Li
5. Jiyoon Lee
6. Emma L Braine
7. Rhys D Brady
8. Mujun Sun
9. Cheng Huang
10. Christopher K Barlow
11. Anup D Shah
12. Ralf B Schittenhelm
13. Richelle Mychasiuk
14. Nigel C Jones
15. Sandy R Shultz
16. Terence J O'Brien

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  Sodium selenate reduced seizures when administered after initiation of epilepsy, complementing earlier work showing efficacy if administered before initiation. The novelty of the results is not much more than the earlier study. Sodium selenate reduced phospho-tau and increased PP2A protein expression, and reversed TLE-associated telomere-shortening. However, whether these effects were critical to the reduced seizures is not clear. Finally, proteome and metabolome data from the animal model of epilepsy is discussed and provide initial insights into the effects of sodium selenate treatment on molecular pathology, however, the data are not well developed so revisions along these lines will be important so conclusions can be made.

Reviewed by eLife

Single amino acid residue mediates reciprocal specificity in two mosquito odorant receptors

1. Flavia P Franco
2. Pingxi Xu
3. Brandon J Harris
4. Vladimir Yarov-Yarovoy
5. Walter S Leal

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This manuscript addresses the mechanism of ligand specificity of odorant receptors (OR) through mutational analyses and structure prediction. The authors identify a single amino acid substitution that switches ligand specificity between two olfactory receptors. Obtaining structures of OR complexes has been challenging, so such an approach is valuable and will be of interest to scientists within the fields of chemical ecology and sensory neuroscience.

Reviewed by eLife

Cortex-wide response mode of VIP-expressing inhibitory neurons by reward and punishment

1. Zoltán Szadai
2. Hyun-Jae Pi
3. Quentin Chevy
4. Katalin Ócsai
5. Dinu F Albeanu
6. Balázs Chiovini
7. Gergely Szalay
8. Gergely Katona
9. Adam Kepecs
10. Balázs Rózsa

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This paper is of potential interest to neuroscientists expert in cortical circuitry and behavioral role of neuron types. The imaging technique used permitted to detect a specific group of cortical neurons known as vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP)-expressing interneurons from several cortical regions with high temporal resolution. The main message conveyed by this manuscript is that many VIP-expressing interneurons respond to reward and punishment but also show regional differences. The conclusions drawn are generally supported by the data, but some claims and interpretations require further attention and clarification.

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Active immunotherapy reduces NOTCH3 deposition in brain capillaries in a CADASIL mouse model

1. Daniel V Oliveira
2. Kirsten G Coupland
3. Wenchao Shao
4. Shaobo Jin
5. Francesca Del Gaudio
6. Sailan Wang
7. Rhys Fox
8. Julie W Rutten
9. Johan Sandin
10. Henrik Zetterberg
11. Johan Lundkvist
12. Saskia AJ Lesnik Oberstein
13. Urban Lendahl
14. Helena Karlström

Reviewed by Review Commons

Mice and primates use distinct strategies for visual segmentation

1. Francisco J Luongo
2. Lu Liu
3. Chun Lum Andy Ho
4. Janis K Hesse
5. Joseph B Wekselblatt
6. Frank F Lanfranchi
7. Daniel Huber
8. Doris Y Tsao

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  Primates perceive and detect stimuli differently depending on the stimulus context in which they are embedded, and have a remarkable ability to understand the way in which objects and parts of objects are embedded in natural scenes (scene segmentation). An example of this is figure-ground segmentation, a well documented phenomenon resulting in a "pop-out" of a figure region and corresponding enhanced neural firing rates in visual areas. It is unknown whether mice show similar behavioral and neural signatures as primates. The present study suggests that mice show different segmentation behavior than primates, lacking texture-invariant segmentation of figures and corresponding neural correlates. This reveals a fundamental difference between primates and mice important for researchers working on these species and researchers studying scene segmentation. The findings are further interpreted in terms of neural network architectures (feedforward networks) and are relevant for this field too.

Reviewed by eLife

Fast rule switching and slow rule updating in a perceptual categorization task

1. Flora Bouchacourt
2. Sina Tafazoli
3. Marcelo G Mattar
4. Timothy J Buschman
5. Nathaniel D Daw

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This study modeled monkeys' behavior in a stimulus-response rule-learning task to show that animals can adopt mixed strategies involving inference for learning latent states and incremental updating for learning action-outcome associations. The task is cleverly designed, the modeling is rigorous, and importantly there are clear distinctions in the behavior generated by different models, which makes the authors' conclusions convincing. The study makes a strong contribution overall, however, there were aspects of the design that were unclear and some alternative accounts that were not considered.

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Olfactory receptor neurons generate multiple response motifs, increasing coding space dimensionality

1. Brian Kim
2. Seth Haney
3. Ana P Milan
4. Shruti Joshi
5. Zane Aldworth
6. Nikolai Rulkov
7. Alexander T Kim
8. Maxim Bazhenov
9. Mark A Stopfer

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  The study by Kim et al. combines extracellular recordings from olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) in locusts with computational modelling approaches to investigate the dynamics of odour responses. The authors demonstrate that OSN responses can be grouped into four distinct response motifs, with OSNs showing different motifs in an odour-dependent manner. Using computational modelling the authors provide some evidence that these diverse response motifs expand the coding space and could facilitate odour discrimination and navigation. This study can be of high relevance to both experimental and theoretical neuroscientists investigating odour coding and odour-driven behaviours such as navigation. In its present form, while the experimental data and analysis are of the highest quality, the modelling part needs to be expanded to fully support the experimental measurements.

Reviewed by eLife