Neuroscience

GluA3 subunits are required for appropriate assembly of AMPAR GluA2 and GluA4 subunits on cochlear afferent synapses and for presynaptic ribbon modiolar–pillar morphology

1. Mark A Rutherford
2. Atri Bhattacharyya
3. Maolei Xiao
4. Hou-Ming Cai
5. Indra Pal
6. Maria Eulalia Rubio

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  Hearing is mediated by hair cells in the cochlea, which synapse onto the primary dendrites of the auditory nerve. This study shows how deletion of a postsynaptic glutamate receptor subtype strongly influences inner hair cell-spiral ganglion cell synapse formation. Thus pre- and post-synaptic changes are dynamically intertwined, providing insights into how pathological outcomes arise from synaptic perturbations.

Reviewed by eLife

Human endogenous oxytocin and its neural correlates show adaptive responses to social touch based on recent social context

1. Linda Handlin
2. Giovanni Novembre
3. Helene Lindholm
4. Robin Kämpe
5. Elisabeth Paul
6. India Morrison

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This manuscript contains fundamental work on hormonal and neurobiological processing of social experience in humans. It sheds compelling new light on potential mechanisms underlying how humans place social experiences in context, demonstrating how oxytocin and cortisol might interact to modulate higher-level processing and contextualizing of familiar vs. stranger encounters.

Reviewed by eLife

The aperiodic exponent of subthalamic field potentials reflects excitation/inhibition balance in Parkinsonism

1. Christoph Wiest
2. Flavie Torrecillos
3. Alek Pogosyan
4. Manuel Bange
5. Muthuraman Muthuraman
6. Sergiu Groppa
7. Natasha Hulse
8. Harutomo Hasegawa
9. Keyoumars Ashkan
10. Fahd Baig
11. Francesca Morgante
12. Erlick A Pereira
13. Nicolas Mallet
14. Peter J Magill
15. Peter Brown
16. Andrew Sharott
17. Huiling Tan

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  In this important manuscript the authors use a powerful cross-specifies approach and cutting-edge experimental methods to examine possible shifts in the excitatory and inhibitory balance in both an animal model of Parkinsonism and in human patients with Parkinson's disease. Their solid findings support such a shift, wherein untreated Parkinson's disease is characterized by excessive activity in the subthalamic nucleus. While a strong paper, there are concerns with some of the methodological choices and their implications.

Reviewed by eLife

Huntingtin recruits KIF1A to transport synaptic vesicle precursors along the mouse axon to support synaptic transmission and motor skill learning

1. Hélène Vitet
2. Julie Bruyère
3. Hao Xu
4. Claire Séris
5. Jacques Brocard
6. Yah-Sé Abada
7. Benoît Delatour
8. Chiara Scaramuzzino
9. Laurent Venance
10. Frédéric Saudou

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  In this important study, the authors examine transport and synaptic activity in the corticostriatal circuit in both microfluidic devices and in mice. They convincingly show that the Huntingtin protein regulates the anterograde transport of synaptic vesicle precursors in coordination with the molecular motor KIF1A. Activated Huntingtin recruits KIF1A, accelerates synaptic vesicle precursor's transport, modifies synaptic transmission and motor skill learning in mice. This work sheds new light on the role of axonal transport in synaptic function under physiological and pathological conditions related to Huntington's disease.

Reviewed by eLife

A Drosophila glial cell atlas reveals a mismatch between detectable transcriptional diversity and morphological diversity

1. Inês Lago-Baldaia
2. Maia Cooper
3. Austin Seroka
4. Chintan Trivedi
5. Gareth T. Powell
6. Stephen Wilson
7. Sarah D. Ackerman
8. Vilaiwan M. Fernandes

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This study presents an atlas of glial cell morphology in Drosophila, from distinct locations at different periods of life. The authors integrate morphological information with the transcriptomic signatures of those cells and find that morphological diversity among glial cells of a given class is not a strong predictor of transcriptional identity. The study is of great value as connecting morphology with scRNA sequencing analysis is rarely done and is a necessary step for understanding the underlying biology of these cells. While the weak morphotype-transcriptomic link in many cases may be due to low sequencing resolution, nonetheless, the data are of very high quality and the study will be a very useful resource for the glial biology field.

Reviewed by eLife

ENGRAILED‐1 transcription factor has a paracrine neurotrophic activity on adult spinal α‐motoneurons

1. Mélanie Lebœuf
2. Stephanie E Vargas‐Abonce
3. Eugénie Pezé‐Hedsieck
4. Edmond Dupont
5. Lucia Jimenez‐Alonso
6. Kenneth L Moya
7. Alain Prochiantz

Reviewed by Review Commons

Signal denoising through topographic modularity of neural circuits

1. Barna Zajzon
2. David Dahmen
3. Abigail Morrison
4. Renato Duarte

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This manuscript puts forward a new idea that topography in neural networks helps to remove noise from inputs. The authors show that there is a critical level of topography that is needed for network to denoise inputs. At present, the analysis is limited to inputs that are constant in time.

Reviewed by eLife

Expansive linguistic representations to predict interpretable odor mixture discriminability

1. Amit Dhurandhar
2. Hongyang Li
3. Guillermo A Cecchi
4. Pablo Meyer

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  Dhurhandar and colleagues developed a computational method that predicts discriminability of odor mixtures based on chemical structures of component molecules. The model first transforms chemical structures into natural language descriptions of odor, and then perform Lasso regressions to obtain a compact transformation into discriminability. The results suggest that the model performs better compared to that without transformation to language descriptions, yet, there are some issues that need to be addressed to make strong conclusions.

Reviewed by eLife

Generating variability from motor primitives during infant locomotor development

1. Elodie Hinnekens
2. Marianne Barbu-Roth
3. Manh-Cuong Do
4. Bastien Berret
5. Caroline Teulier

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  In learning to walk, infants must balance the need to explore their movement repertoire with the need to establish regular movement patterns. Using a longitudinal approach, this paper suggests that while young infants generate high variability from a small number of regular patterns ('primitives'), older infants use a greater number of primitives with less variability. These interesting conclusions are not currently fully supported by the small and somewhat selective sample of data, and some alternative explanations need to be considered more thoroughly.

Reviewed by eLife

Right inferior frontal gyrus damage is associated with impaired initiation of inhibitory control, but not its implementation

1. Yoojeong Choo
2. Dora Matzke
3. Mark D Bowren
4. Daniel Tranel
5. Jan R Wessel

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This study takes a fresh view of the hypothesis that right inferior frontal gyrus is critical in inhibitory control in humans, as assessed by the widely-used stop signal task. It applies recent development in modeling and EEG measures in patients with focal brain damage, yielding causal insights. It will be of interest to neuroscientists and clinical researchers who study the brain basis of response control. Reviewers found this to be a strong, hypothesis-driven study that makes new progress on an important topic.

Reviewed by eLife