Neuroscience

Evaluation Summary:

Neural activity measured in both electrophysiological and functional neuroimaging experiments are often temporally correlated, and the timescales of such correlation in ongoing neural activity, or intrinsic neural timescales, show a hierarchical pattern across the cortical surface. The present study establishes a close link between these timescales and functional connectivity in the brains of non-human primates, suggesting that temporal autocorrelation is an important organizing feature of large-scale neural activity.

(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:

The paper develops a mathematical approach to study the allocation of cortical area to sensory representations in the presence of resource constraints. The theory is applied to study sensory representations in the somatosensory system. This problem is largely unexplored, the results are novel and can be of interest to experimental and theoretical 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 #2 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

eLife assessment

This is a valuable contribution to the effort to provide genetic access to and characterization of the major classes of interneurons in the mammalian neocortex. The authors develop an improved strategy for intersectionally targeting a fourth (and final) major category of diverse interneurons in the mouse, including the previously studied neurogliaform cells. They provide a detailed characterization of these cells and show convincingly that their genetic strategy can be used to identify and manipulate these cells, both in vitro and in vivo.

eLife assessment

This manuscript is important as it showed an establishment of a method for looking a neuronal activity in embryos which can support the previously reported laterality in chick thalamofugal system. However, the evidence the author provided was incomplete as no actual data was provided.

Evaluation Summary:

The manuscript by Wang and colleagues expands our understanding of the neural circuit mechanisms underpinning innate sexual behaviors in Drosophila. It exploits an arsenal of sophisticated tools to demonstrate that the neuropeptide Drosulfakinin (DSK) modulates female sexual receptivity via 71G01-neurons > Dsk-m-neurons > CCKLR-17D3 receptor expressing neurons. The study also introduces new transgenic tools that will be valuable for the community and will be of interest to neuroscientists exploring neuropeptide function and female sexual behavior.

(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:

Gaffield and Christie investigate how the cerebellum contributes to the reward-driven, periodic licking behavior by using electrophysiology and calcium imaging in awake mice. The authors reveal that the cerebellar Purkinje cells can signal temporal information about the onset and offset of ongoing movements: this may be potentially important in understanding the mechanism for cerebellar temporal processing. However, further data analysis is required to support the main conclusion.

(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 paper will be of interest to a large class of neuroscientists who work with MRI. It presents the Digital Brain Bank website and project, which is an effort to curate and share high-quality post-mortem co-registered MRI and histology data of healthy human brains, pathological human brains, and brains from a variety of other species. These data allow investigators to address scientific questions that cannot be answered with in vivo imaging alone and are accompanied by an online browser-based viewer. The described datasets provide a highly valuable resource for multiscale investigations of brain architecture and comparative neuroanatomy, which is unique in its selection of modalities and species.

(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 names with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

This paper will be of interest to developmental neurobiologists working on the transcriptional control of neural cell fate and connectivity. The data largely support the authors' finding that a single homeodomain transcription factor is a circuit-wide specifier of cell fate that functions combinatorially with other factors in the development of the C. elegans pharyngeal nervous system. The authors speculate about intriguing similarities between the nematode pharyngeal nervous system and vertebrate enteric nervous systems.

(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 paper will be of interest to neuroscientists interested in predictive coding. By using complementary neuroimaging and electrophysiological methods to measure brain-wide activation patterns in marmosets in response to sound pattern violations, the authors provide evidence for the hierarchical organization of predictive coding across subcortical and cortical levels of the auditory pathway.

(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 is very much needed work, especially in light of the recent debate regarding whether or not microsaccades are the cause of peripheral attentional effects. A few influential papers have been published recently strongly suggesting that attentional effects are primarily the result of the execution of tiny microsaccades that humans/primates perform during fixation while attending to peripheral stimuli. These past findings have, naturally, a number of implications for the way we interpret visual attention, and raised the question of whether shifts of attention are dependent on microsaccades. By explicitly comparing and quantifying the effects of attention on neuronal responses in the presence and in the absence of microsaccades, this work provides important insights into this debate.

(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.)