Neuroscience

Evaluation Summary:

The manuscript by Elferich et al. describes challenging experiments to visualize components of the hair-cell mechanotransduction complex, especially PCDH15, in unfixed, fast-frozen stereocilia. The manuscript presents exquisite images of PCDH15 in its native state, confirming the predictions of earlier studies. While much of what is presented here was predicted from less-direct measurements, it is useful to confirm these with direct imaging of single molecules.

(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.)

Evaluation Summary:

This paper will be of interest to neuroscientists who wish to understand how descending cortical projections interact in auditory midbrain neurons with their ascending inputs. The results have implications for other sensory systems and potentially other subcortical structures too. The data support the main conclusions of the manuscript, but additional control experiments and clarification of some parts are needed to strengthen the conclusions drawn and ensure that the findings of this interesting study can provide the basis for future modelling work.

(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. All reviewers agreed to share their names with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

This manuscript describes a pipeline to assess the number of a certain cell type in the larval Drosophila brain. Their work provides automated neuronal segmentation and topographical analysis methods for the whole larval nervous system organization in flies, revealing the previously unexpected sexual dimorphism. This paper may be of interest to the large class of neuroscientists and specialists, from those who use larval Drosophila as their study model to others who are generally interested in connectomics and transcriptomics, among others.

(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:

How the brain is organized to represent various concepts has long been a central cognitive neuroscience research topic. Zhang and colleagues investigated the spatial distribution of feature tuning for different face-parts within face-selective regions of human visual cortex using ultra-high resolution 7.0 T fMRI. The findings complement non-human primate studies of face-selective patches and will be of interest to psychologists and system neuroscientists.

(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 addresses important questions: what is the relationship between circadian and homeostatic regulation of sleep, and how do the circuits underlying these levels of control interact? The authors have designed a very elegant method to answer these questions in Drosophila: a new sleep-deprivation protocol that allows them to test sleep rebound over the course of the day. Interesting observations are made, such as time-of-day dependence of sleep homeostasis, identification of important neural pathways modulating sleep rebound in a time-dependent manner, and molecular and physiological variations that might drive time-dependent sleep homeostasis. Experiments establishing a link between the circadian clock/neurons and molecular and physiological changes observed in sleep homeostat neurons would help to provide support for the claims made in the title and abstract.

(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 manuscript is of interest to molecular neurobiologists studying Nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) or other membrane bound receptors. The paper highlights several different and complementary techniques relevant for studying membrane proteins in native conditions, which are relevant and useful to a wide audience.

(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 manuscript is of broad interest to those interested in the relationship between mind wandering and reading, at the behavioral and neural levels, including when both processes occur at the same time. As such, this manuscript has important implications for clarifying how the experience of mind wandering while reading may occur. The results partially support the proposed theoretical framework that mind wandering during reading disrupts processing of visual input, however, not all of the authors' claims appear to be supported by the experimental design and 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 #1 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

This manuscript is of broad interest to the neuroimaging community. It establishes a detailed reference model of human brain development and lifespan trajectories based on a very large data set, across many cortical and subcortical brain regions. The model not only explains substantial variability on test data, it also successfully uncovers individual differences on a database of psychiatric patients that, in addition to group-level analyses, may be critical for diagnosis, thereby demonstrating high clinical potential. It presents a clear overview of the data resource, including detailed evaluation metrics, and makes code, models and documentation directly available to the community.

(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, Reviewer #2 and Reviewer #3 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

This paper will be of interest to electrophysiologists, systems neuroscientists and neural engineers. The authors describe a framework for evaluating the comparison between LFP dynamics and spikes and perform this comparison for several datasets recorded from motor, premotor, and sensory areas of cortex in rhesus macaque monkeys. These results serve as an important benchmark for the information content of LFP recordings, which is relevant to data collection in neuroscientific investigations and to designing brain computer interfaces.

(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.)

Evaluation Summary:

This study will interest neuroscientists, in particular those interested in the neurocircuitry of emotional behaviors. Using modern neuroscience techniques, the authors demonstrate that anatomical projections from a brain stem structure called the parabrachial nucleus to the paraventricular nucleus thalamus contribute to aversive states like fear and anxiety. Overall, the study offers important details of a previously uncharacterized brain circuit, although some additional experiments are required to fully substantiate the authors' claims.

(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.)