Neuroscience

Evaluation Summary:

This report by LeClair et al. shows the importance of considering social dominance rank and history of winning/losing rank to define susceptibility to stress in mice. It has many strengths, including an elegant experimental design, including experiments in both males and females, and carefully considering two models of social defeat in females, and an excellent writing and representation of the 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 #2 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

Using a range of cutting-edge techniques, the authors of this manuscript explore the functional consequences of developmental changes in dendritic morphology and synapse distribution in a GABAergic interneuron. The experiments are carefully performed and represent a thorough investigation of the structural and functional changes in synaptic inputs and postsynaptic dendritic branching patterns, an important topic for both developmental neurobiologists and synaptic physiologists. The data support most conclusions, but alternative interpretations remain possible and should be further considered.

(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:

Wang et al. explores the relationship between the vigor of behavioral escape and cholecystokinin-expressing neurons in the premammillary nucleus of the hypothalamus that project to the periaqueductal gray. The experiments presented use a range of complementary approaches and techniques to perform a comprehensive examination of the circuitry underlying a particular aversively motivated behavior. However, a lack of clarity and specificity in how experiments and results are described, as well as a missed opportunity to relate this work to recent publications by many of the same authors, soften the conclusions that can be drawn from the manuscript in its current form.

(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 reports on two separate investigations. In the first, the authors provide novel evidence from two anaesthesia challenges that the slope of the 1/f structure of the power spectrum of the EEG fluctuates in a manner that tracks the presumed excitation : inhibition (E:I) balance of the tissue generating the EEG signal. Next they show that fluctuations in this slope also covary in systematic and modality- and stimulus-specific ways with behavioural performance on a multimodal attention task. These observations have potential foundational implications for how this previously unappreciated component of the EEG can be interpreted in terms of brain physiology and function. While the methodology employed is novel and interesting, the data as they stand, do not yet support the strong conclusions proposed by the authors.

(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:

Sleep serves vital functions for the body and particularly the brain, and accordingly these functions are impaired by sleep deprivation, as has been repeatedly shown for different cognitive processes. However, the neural mechanisms of such effects of sleep loss are still poorly understood. This manuscript is of interest to both sleep researchers and cognitive neuroscientists looking for insights into the effects of sleep deprivation across a broad range of methods and measures. The reported studies comprehensively investigate cortical excitability and plasticity with non-invasive brain stimulation, as well as electrophysiological markers and behavior. The studies confirm and extend previous findings, stating that, in general, sleep deprivation results in higher cortical excitability as well as a negative impact on cognitive processes.

(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 investigates the neural underpinnings of the bias property of timing, namely an overestimation for short and underestimation for long intervals, during an interval reproduction task in the medial prefrontal cortex of gerbils. The key novel result is that only neural populations with mixed responses, including ramping activity with linear increasing and slope-changing modulations as a function of reproduced durations, can encode the bias effect. Overall, experiment and data analysis are technically sound, and the conclusions are mostly well supported. However, the interpretation is too broad, and the manuscript would benefit of a more focused framing.

(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 paper presents the results of a model for cortical plasticity and resulting increase in neuronal responses to unexpected stimuli. This is an elegant study that provides a number of interesting, experimentally testable, hypotheses and develops a prediction for a mechanism for novelty response generation. However, a number of concerns were raised about the model, including how it relates to certain experimental data, that should 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 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

This study reports on the synaptic impact of basal forebrain stimulation on a population of olfactory bulb interneurons in acute mouse brain slices. The author reveals that optogenetic stimulation of GABAergic basal forebrain afferents by and large inhibits the discharge of periglomerular cells, whereas cholinergic afferents evoke a prolonged, M1 receptor-mediated depolarization and increase in firing in a subpopulation of periglomerular cells. The current study would further our understanding of the olfactory neural circuit and how different co-released neurotransmitters shape postsynaptic neuronal responses.

(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 rigorous computational study simulates the sampling of the visual image by cone photoreceptors in the human eye, and explains how the image content can be reconstructed from those cone signals. The authors show that a number of properties of the human retina and of human perception are predicted from these simulations. The manuscript could be further improved by analysis of how these conclusions compare to those reached by alternate theoretical approaches, and by a consideration of human eye movements.

(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 research will be of interest to neuroscientists who want to understand how visual systems are tuned to and encode natural scenes. It reports that rats share phenomenology with humans in sensitivity to spatial correlations in scenes. This work shows that an earlier paper's hypothesis about efficient coding may be broadly applicable, but it is perhaps most interesting in opening up the possibility of studying this sort of visual tuning in an animal where invasive techniques can be used to study this sensitivity and its development.

(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.)