Neuroscience

Early lock-in of structured and specialised information flows during neural development

1. David P Shorten
2. Viola Priesemann
3. Michael Wibral
4. Joseph T Lizier

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This work analyzes how meaningful connections develop in the nervous system. Studying the dissociated neuronal cultures, the authors find that the information processing connections develop after 5-10 days. The direction of the information flow is influenced by neuronal bursting properties: the early bursting neurons emerge as sources and late bursting neurons become sinks in the information flow.

  (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.)

Reviewed by eLife

Coupling of pupil- and neuronal population dynamics reveals diverse influences of arousal on cortical processing

1. Thomas Pfeffer
2. Christian Keitel
3. Daniel S Kluger
4. Anne Keitel
5. Alena Russmann
6. Gregor Thut
7. Tobias H Donner
8. Joachim Gross

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  The study presents novel results on spontaneous fluctuations in pupil dilation in relation to the spectral dynamics in a large sample of human participants. The study is based on MEG recordings allowing for quantifying these relations in time and space. The data provide important new insight into the temporal and spatial characteristics of pupil-linked changes in cortical states which form the basis for incorporating this insight in future clinical and cognitive neuroscience studies.

  (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.)

Reviewed by eLife

An open-source tool for automated analysis of breathing behaviors in common marmosets and rodents

1. Mitchell Bishop
2. Maximilian Weinhold
3. Ariana Z Turk
4. Afuh Adeck
5. Shahriar SheikhBahaei

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This manuscript from Bishop et al aims to quantify the hypoxic and hyperoxic ventilatory response in the marmoset, an increasingly more common primate research model. The strongest contribution of the paper is the presentation of an analysis toolkit to perform unsupervised analyses of respiratory data, which are not widely available.

  (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.)

Reviewed by eLife

SARS-CoV-2 entry sites are present in all structural elements of the human glossopharyngeal and vagal nerves: Clinical implications

1. Lynn Vitale-Cross
2. Ildiko Szalayova
3. Aiden Scoggins
4. Miklos Palkovits
5. Eva Mezey

Reviewed by ScreenIT

Invariant representation of physical stability in the human brain

1. RT Pramod
2. Michael A Cohen
3. Joshua B Tenenbaum
4. Nancy Kanwisher

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This is an intriguing study using cleverly designed stimuli to investigate the representation of physical stability in the human brain. This paper will be of interest to readers wondering when human cognition uses generalizable pattern matching similar to that used by machine learning algorithms, and when it relies on more specialized processes evolved for specific tasks. The well-crafted experiments generally support the authors' major claim.

  (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.)

Reviewed by eLife

Opioid analgesia alters corticospinal coupling along the descending pain system in healthy participants

1. Alexandra Tinnermann
2. Christian Sprenger
3. Christian Büchel

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This is a challenging study exploring the effects of a commonly used analgesic, remifentanil, on brain and spinal cord related pain processing in humans. It is of considerable interest to the pain research, neuroimaging and opioid neuroscience communities and are also relevant to clinicians who commonly use opioid infusions. The authors have used sophisticated methods for combined brain and spinal cord functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the influence of an intravenous opioid on pain processing in the ascending and descending pain pathways in healthy subjects. The authors have conducted a comprehensive assessment in large numbers of subjects and have explored both changes in amplitude of activity as well as connectivity. Their detailed analysis strengthens findings from previous human and animal studies and extend to demonstrate novel changes in connectivity in the descending pathway to the spinal cord although these data are potentially compatible with alternative interpretations and may need to be reinforced by further analysis.

  (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.)

Reviewed by eLife

Perception is associated with the brain’s metabolic response to sensory stimulation

1. Mauro DiNuzzo
2. Silvia Mangia
3. Marta Moraschi
4. Daniele Mascali
5. Gisela E Hagberg
6. Federico Giove

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  Giove and colleagues demonstrate an intriguing dissociation of neurovascular (as measured with BOLD-fMRI) and neurometabolic (measured with fMRS) responses during perception. This is a thought-provoking study that makes one wonder about the signals we measure with human neuroimaging, especially fMRI. It will therefore be of great interest to the broad community of neuroimagers, as well as perception researchers.

  (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.)

Reviewed by eLife

Shallow neural networks trained to detect collisions recover features of visual loom-selective neurons

1. Baohua Zhou
2. Zifan Li
3. Sunnie Kim
4. John Lafferty
5. Damon A Clark

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This paper uses an anatomically-constrained neural network model to investigate how looming visual stimuli - i.e. stimuli likely to collide with an organism - could be detected. The authors find one dominant solution to this problem reproduces both the computational properties and neural responses of known collision detecting neurons in the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, without ever being trained on neural data. Their findings shed light on why biological collision detection circuits may have converged on particular solutions. A similar approach could reveal important computational features in other circuits.

  (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.)

Reviewed by eLife

Impairing one sensory modality enhances another by reconfiguring peptidergic signalling in Caenorhabditis elegans

1. Giulio Valperga
2. Mario de Bono

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This manuscript reports a surprising discovery in C. elegans: upon losing its normal sensory properties, the ADL nociceptive/pheromone sensing neuron relays and thereby enhances oxygen behavioral responses via neuropeptide signaling. This effect could be interpreted as cross-modal sensory plasticity or more general a cross-modulation between sensory circuits, a still open question that should be addressed in a revision. The study is relevant to scientists working on sensory neurobiology and neuronal plasticity.

  (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.)

Reviewed by eLife

Adaptation in cone photoreceptors contributes to an unexpected insensitivity of primate On parasol retinal ganglion cells to spatial structure in natural images

1. Zhou Yu
2. Maxwell H Turner
3. Jacob Baudin
4. Fred Rieke

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This manuscript provides strong evidence that adaptation in cone photoreceptors of the primate retina can subtly change the balance of excitatory and inhibitory inputs to On parasol ganglion cells and thereby fundamentally affect how these cells integrate visual information. This study provides important mechanistic insight into the previous observation that On parasol cells display nonlinear spatial stimulus integration under standard reversing gratings but linearly integrate signals in the context of natural scenes. The findings will be of great interest to visual 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 #1 and Reviewer #2 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Reviewed by eLife