Neuroscience

Evaluation Summary:

This is a well-designed study that will be of interest to cognitive neuroscientists studying event perception and memory, particularly those interested in naturalistic paradigms. The main contribution is in growing our understanding of how interpretational differences of events are reflected in differences in neural representations of those events. While the presented results are convincing, it remains somewhat unclear what processes drive the observed effects, and thus what the role of the implicated brain regions is in memory updating.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #3 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

This manuscript presents a combination of in vivo recording and optogenetic experiments that together with modeling brings a significant message: inhibition is functionally present in the newborn frontal cortex having major effects in EEG dynamics. The work challenges the view on the switch in GABAergic excitation to inhibition and extends phenomenological observations to human infant EEG data.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #3 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

Jia et al. present an exciting machine learning framework named "Selfee" for unsupervised and objective analysis of animal behavior that should draw broad interest from researchers studying quantitative animal behavior. However, there are some unresolved issues for establishing credibility of the method that needs to be addressed.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1 and Reviewer #3 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

This manuscript by Kosillo and colleagues presents a series of carefully carried out experiments evaluating the impact of perturbing the mTORC1 and mTORC2 protein complexes selectively in mouse dopamine neurons. By utilizing dopamine neuron-specific Raptor and Rictor cKO mice, this paper elucidated which of these mTOR complexes are responsible for the regulation of dopamine neuronal functions, revealing the importance of mTORC1/2 signaling for the structure and function of dopamine neurons. This paper provided comprehensive data including structural, physiological, and biochemical alterations by genetic deletion of Raptor/Rictor in dopamine neurons.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #2 and Reviewer #3 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

This study describes the correlations between different membrane properties and the size of the soma of spinal alpha-motoneurons (MNs) using data from 40 experimental in vivo studies. The authors have distilled decades of research on motoneuron properties into a set of mathematical relationships that can guide both experimentalists and modelers interested in developing realistic models of populations of motoneurons. The key result is a complete table of the empirical relationships between the anatomical and physiological properties of MNs. Overall, the dataset approach is interesting, although a detailed analysis of the variability within and between datasets is urgently needed. In addition, a simpler framing of the paper could make the main message easier to grasp.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #2 and Reviewer #3 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

This work seeks to resolve questions surrounding "unexplained variability in functional recovery" after experimental spinal cord injury in mice using virus-based retrograde tracing from cervical, thoracic and lumbar spinal cord injection sites, tissue clearing and cutting-edge imaging, to develop a supraspinal connectome or map of neurons in the brain that project to the spinal cord. They apply their methods to understand the differences in the connections between the brain and the cervical or lumbar spinal cord and to compare the connectome from intact mice to those of mice with mild, moderate and severe spinal cord injuries. This work will be of interest to neuroscientists interested in tissue clearing, viral labelling, and its applications to spinal cord injury.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1 and Reviewer #2 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

This paper will be of great interest to the field of developmental neuroscience and social communication. The authors identified prenatal sensorimotor vocal precursors by detecting rhythmic orofacial movements related to vocalizations. These findings will provide new insights into the development of vocal behavior in primates. The data acquired by a highly quantitative approach support the major claims of the paper.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1 and Reviewer #2 agreed to share their names with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

Eckstein and colleagues take a within-participant approach to answer two critical questions in the field of human reinforcement learning: to what extent do estimated computational model parameters generalize across different tasks and can their meaning be interpreted in the same way in different task contexts? The authors find that inferred parameters show moderate to little generalizability across tasks, and that their interpretation strongly depends on task context. Support for these claims could be further strengthened through additional simulations and by providing greater methodological detail.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #2 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

This manuscript will be of interest to cell and developmental biologists and neuroscientists. It addresses the question of how the number of connecting neurons in a circuit is matched whilst maintaining topography. It shows that non-autonomous control of neuronal number involves a relay mechanism through two distinct glial cell types, enabling the specification of distinct neuronal classes.

This manuscript was co-submitted with: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.02.21.481306v1

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

This is a useful study employing a well-established one-pawed reaching/grasping paradigm for fine-motor skill learning to assess if learning is associated with cortical structural changes as assessed by longitudinal MRI measurements in mice. The authors report a non-linear time course of MRI signal changes representing a decrease in grey matter and an increase in white matter volumes in the cerebral cortex and other regions. The authors ascribe these changes to increased myelination, a conclusion that is supported by quantitative immunolabelling for the myelin protein MBP. These results represent an interesting addition to the literature around myelination changes associated with learning/activity (adaptive myelination). Additional histological analysis of changes in myelination would bolster support for the authors' conclusions.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. The reviewers remained anonymous to the authors.)