Neuroscience

Slow fluctuations in ongoing brain activity decrease in amplitude with ageing yet their impact on task-related evoked responses is dissociable from behavior

1. Maria Ribeiro
2. Miguel Castelo-Branco

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This manuscript is of interest to cognitive neuroscientists working in the field of (fMRI or EEG) resting-state fluctuations. The role of these fluctuations is compellingly demonstrated in solving an existing mystery about brain variability and ageing; namely, that older adults exhibit increased behavioural variability but reduced neural variability. The work should be of interest to cognitive neuroscientists using fMRI and EEG to study neural noise and inter-individual and inter-group differences, particularly in the realm of aging and age-related disorders.

  (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

Drosophila mechanical nociceptors preferentially sense localized poking

1. Zhen Liu
2. Meng-Hua Wu
3. Qi-Xuan Wang
4. Shao-Zhen Lin
5. Xi-Qiao Feng
6. Bo Li
7. Xin Liang

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  Liu et al present fascinating findings that significantly extend the understanding of molecular and cellular pathways of mechanical nociception in Drosophila larvae. This work is of very high interest to neuroscientists studying sensory function and its molecular underpinnings with implications for our understanding of acute sensation of painful stimuli. The approach and data are of very high quality and provide unprecedented insight into mechanosensory functions in an intact tissue environment.

  (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.)

Reviewed by eLife

A single exposure to altered auditory feedback causes observable sensorimotor adaptation in speech

1. Lana Hantzsch
2. Benjamin Parrell
3. Caroline A Niziolek

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  The paper demonstrates the adaptation of speech after a single trial of perturbing the fundamental frequency of an utterance. The findings confirm existing theories of speech adaptation, but constitute an important missing piece of evidence in the current literature.

  (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.)

Reviewed by eLife

Robust effects of corticothalamic feedback and behavioral state on movie responses in mouse dLGN

1. Martin A Spacek
2. Davide Crombie
3. Yannik Bauer
4. Gregory Born
5. Xinyu Liu
6. Steffen Katzner
7. Laura Busse

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  Spacek et al. study the corticothalamic feedback of different visual stimuli on visual thalamus. With optogenetic suppression of visual cortex feedback and simultaneous multi-channel recordings in visual thalamus, the authors succeeded to acquire important data about this essential feedback loop in awake, behaving animals. The authors impressively show that the cortical feedback acts as a gain factor in thalamus for the transmission of signals from retina to cortex, specifically for natural scenes. These careful measurements performed in a well-defined circuit also advance our understanding of the role of feedback more generally in the brain.

  (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

Double-μPeriscope, a tool for multilayer optical recordings, optogenetic stimulations or both

1. Mototaka Suzuki
2. Jaan Aru
3. Matthew E Larkum

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This Tools and Resources article presents an innovative method for simultaneously stimulating and imaging two cortical layers in tandem while causing minimal damage to brain tissue. The method substantially builds on existing methods in several ways, while still pinpointing the limitations of existing methods that are overcome in this new approach. Three well-described sets of experiments demonstrate the method's reliability and versatility, and highlight its promise in tackling big questions about cortical microcircuit functions.

  (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

Probing the segregation of evoked and spontaneous neurotransmission via photobleaching and recovery of a fluorescent glutamate sensor

1. Camille S Wang
2. Natali L Chanaday
3. Lisa M Monteggia
4. Ege T Kavalali

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This paper studies spontaneous and evoked excitatory synaptic transmission in cultured hippocampal neurons using a genetically encoded fluorescent glutamate sensor. The central finding of this study is that after photobleaching, the spontaneous release of glutamate recovers rapidly, while the evoked release of glutamate recovers much more slowly. This study is potentially of very high interest to neurobiologists as there has been a long-running interest in understanding spontaneous versus evoked neurotransmitter release. Clarification of a few key technical issues central to the study is required to fully interpret the study.

  (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.)

Reviewed by eLife

Environmental enrichment enhances patterning and remodeling of synaptic nanoarchitecture as revealed by STED nanoscopy

1. Waja Wegner
2. Heinz Steffens
3. Carola Gregor
4. Fred Wolf
5. Katrin I Willig

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  Synapses convey information in the brain, including signals from the environment. The changes in the incoming signals can alter the efficacy of synaptic transmission, which in turn can be represented by the changes in synaptic structure that is particularly evident in the postsynaptic compartment called spines. This study uses a custom-built superresolution microscope to follow individual spine shape and the dynamics of the resident scaffolding protein PSD95 simultaneously, to study the effects of rearing mice in an enriched environment relative to a simple standard cage. The imaging data are of superb quality. The authors find that regardless of the rearing condition, dynamic changes in the sizes of spine head and PSD95 are detected that do not necessarily correlate with each other. Furthermore, mice reared in an enriched environment show less variable spine head size. While these findings may be of potential interest to neuroscientists studying synaptic network architecture, a clarification of the biological question being addressed, and validation of the method used to monitor PSD95, would considerably strengthen the study and enhance its overall impact.

  (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

A general decoding strategy explains the relationship between behavior and correlated variability

1. Amy M Ni
2. Chengcheng Huang
3. Brent Doiron
4. Marlene R Cohen

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This manuscript will be of interest to the community interested in how the coordinated activity of neurons influence both coding and behaviour. It successfully combines a sophisticated model of the visual system with data analysis to support a well-formulated hypothesis of the importance of general decoding. This is a potentially important contribution, that addresses a widely observed, but puzzling, relation between perceptual performance and noise correlations.

  (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

WITHDRAWN: SARS-CoV-2 invades cognitive centers of the brain and induces Alzheimer’s-like neuropathology

1. Wei-Bin Shen
2. Montasir Elahi
3. James Logue
4. Penghua Yang
5. Lauren Baracco
6. E. Albert Reece
7. Bingbing Wang
8. Ling Li
9. Thomas G Blanchard
10. Zhe Han
11. Robert A Rissman
12. Matthew B Frieman
13. Peixin Yang

Reviewed by Rapid Reviews Infectious Diseases, ScreenIT

Neural synchronization is strongest to the spectral flux of slow music and depends on familiarity and beat salience

1. Kristin Weineck
2. Olivia Xin Wen
3. Molly J Henry

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This study investigated the neural tracking of music using novel methodology. The core finding was stronger neuronal entrainment to "spectral flux" than to other, more commonly tested features such as amplitude envelope. As such the study is methodologically sophisticated and provides novel insight on the neuronal mechanisms of music perception.

  (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 names with the authors.)

Reviewed by eLife