Neuroscience

Motor planning brings human primary somatosensory cortex into action-specific preparatory states

1. Giacomo Ariani
2. J Andrew Pruszynski
3. Jörn Diedrichsen

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  The authors studied the neural correlates of planning and execution of single finger presses in a 7T fMRI study focusing on primary somatosensory (S1) and motor (M1) cortices. BOLD patterns of activation/deactivation and finger-specific pattern discriminability indicate that M1 and S1 are involved not only during execution, but also during planning of single finger presses. These results contribute to a developing story that the role of primary somatosensory cortex goes beyond pure processing of tactile information and will be of interest for researchers in the field of motor control and of systems neuroscience.

  (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

Individual variations in ‘brain age’ relate to early-life factors more than to longitudinal brain change

1. Didac Vidal-Pineiro
2. Yunpeng Wang
3. Stine K Krogsrud
4. Inge K Amlien
5. William FC Baaré
6. David Bartres-Faz
7. Lars Bertram
8. Andreas M Brandmaier
9. Christian A Drevon
10. Sandra Düzel
11. Klaus Ebmeier
12. Richard N Henson
13. Carme Junqué
14. Rogier Andrew Kievit
15. Simone Kühn
16. Esten Leonardsen
17. Ulman Lindenberger
18. Kathrine S Madsen
19. Fredrik Magnussen
20. Athanasia Monika Mowinckel
21. Lars Nyberg
22. James M Roe
23. Barbara Segura
24. Stephen M Smith
25. Øystein Sørensen
26. Sana Suri
27. Rene Westerhausen
28. Andrew Zalesky
29. Enikő Zsoldos
30. Kristine Beate Walhovd
31. Anders Fjell

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This paper is of interest to scientists within the field of lifespan developmental neuroscience. The data analysis is rigorous and the conclusions are justified by the data. The key claims of the manuscript are directly related to, and support, a more reasonable interpretation of previous known findings.

  (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

Activity-dependent modulation of synapse-regulating genes in astrocytes

1. Isabella Farhy-Tselnicker
2. Matthew M Boisvert
3. Hanqing Liu
4. Cari Dowling
5. Galina A Erikson
6. Elena Blanco-Suarez
7. Chen Farhy
8. Maxim N Shokhirev
9. Joseph R Ecker
10. Nicola J Allen

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This paper describes the transcriptome and synaptogenic function of astrocytes in the developing visual cortex (VC), a widely used model for neural development. The central questions examined are two-fold: 1) deciphering layer specific organization of astrocytes and 2) how neuronal activity can influence layer specific astrocyte profiles that relate to synaptogenic gene families. Using bulk RNAseq and detailed histology, they demonstrate that expression of key synaptogenic genes are timepoint and layer specific during development, providing an essential resource for understanding how astrocytes change and impact the development of VC circuits. Moreover, the authors revealed that expression of synapse-regulating genes is also regulated by input from thalamic neuronal activity (using vGlut2 KO mice) and astrocyte calcium activity in vivo (using IP3R2 KO mice). They further demonstrate astrocyte molecular changes using snRNA-seq in VGlut2 cKO and Ip3r2 cKO mice. Collectively, these results show that neuronal activity drives the changes in astrocyte function and layer-specific expression of synaptogenic secreted proteins. Overall, this a rigorous and well conducted study that provides important and new information on astrocyte diversity, neuron-astrocyte interactions during development, and mechanisms underlying the expression of key astrocyte synaptogenic genes.

  (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

Rotational dynamics in motor cortex are consistent with a feedback controller

1. Hari Teja Kalidindi
2. Kevin P Cross
3. Timothy P Lillicrap
4. Mohsen Omrani
5. Egidio Falotico
6. Philip N Sabes
7. Stephen H Scott

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  The authors use numerical simulations and analyses of neural data from non-human primates to investigate whether rotational dynamics in motor cortical population activity which are typically attributed to recurrent connections can alternatively be explained by sensory feedback alone. They find that neural networks performing the same tasks will produce rotational dynamics even without any internal recurrent units. Overall, this paper examines an important question in the motor control field. The authors should clarify in more detail how the case with no recurrent dynamics has been simulated and address/discuss the role of task structure in their conclusions. Once the authors address issues associated with precisely how they eliminated recurrence from their simulations, the results that rotational dynamics are not necessarily generated autonomously due to recurrent connections will be a valuable and important addition to the ongoing debate about the nature of these rotational dynamics.

  (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

Systematic morphological and morphometric analysis of identified olfactory receptor neurons in Drosophila melanogaster

1. Cesar Nava Gonzales
2. Quintyn McKaughan
3. Eric A Bushong
4. Kalyani Cauwenberghs
5. Renny Ng
6. Matthew Madany
7. Mark H Ellisman
8. Chih-Ying Su

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  Nava Gonzales et al. have reconstructed in unprecedented detail the morphology of olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) and supporting cells within the sensilla in D. melanogaster, characterising the majority of sensory hairs, and OSN types. The morphometric dataset collected will be a reference point for the field of olfaction research in Drosophila, and furthermore might inspire similar analyses of other sensory systems, building our understanding of how peripheral morphological features contribute to sensory neuron processing.

  (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

Spike protein multiorgan tropism suppressed by antibodies targeting SARS-CoV-2

1. Molly Brady
2. Conor McQuaid
3. Alexander Solorzano
4. Angelique Johnson
5. Abigail Combs
6. Chethana Venkatraman
7. Akib Rahman
8. Hannah Leyva
9. Wing-Chi Edmund Kwok
10. Ronald W. Wood
11. Rashid Deane

Reviewed by ScreenIT

Developmental change in prefrontal cortex recruitment supports the emergence of value-guided memory

1. Kate Nussenbaum
2. Catherine A Hartley

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This is a follow-up on an impactful behavioral study from the same team, characterizing age-related differences in how individuals use information about environmental regularities to guide memory encoding. This paper will be relevant to those interested in the neurodevelopment of reward learning, episodic memory, and memory-guided decision-making. The combination of a clever task and thorough data analysis make this an impactful paper, but future longitudinal studies will need to determine whether these findings reflect developmental changes or cohort effects.

  (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

Learning accurate path integration in ring attractor models of the head direction system

1. Pantelis Vafidis
2. David Owald
3. Tiziano D'Albis
4. Richard Kempter

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This paper will be of interest to neuroscientists studying the navigation system, and in particular those who study the ability of animals to path integrate. This study proposes an elegant synaptic plasticity rule that maintains the connectivity required for path integration by integrating visual and self-motion input arriving at different dendritic locations in a neuron. This idea is applied to the central complex of Drosophila, a well-characterized system. The study is timely and well executed, however the generality of the suggested mechanism needs further discussion.

  (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

Neural dynamics between anterior insular cortex and right supramarginal gyrus dissociate genuine affect sharing from perceptual saliency of pretended pain

1. Yili Zhao
2. Lei Zhang
3. Markus Rütgen
4. Ronald Sladky
5. Claus Lamm

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  Lamm and colleagues explore brain dynamics of empathy in response to facial expressions of simulated versus genuine pain in others. Using a novel experimental fMRI task and dynamic causal modelling, the findings suggest that activation of the anterior insula for genuine pain reflects affect sharing rather than automatic responses triggered by the perceptual salience of events. The paper is of broad interest to an audience of social and affective neuroscientists interested in how humans track the emotional responses of 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. The reviewers remained anonymous to the authors.)

Reviewed by eLife

Modelling the neural code in large populations of correlated neurons

1. Sacha Sokoloski
2. Amir Aschner
3. Ruben Coen-Cagli

• Curated by eLife

  Evaluation Summary:

  This paper is of potential interest to neuroscientists interested in neural coding. It presents a novel family of statistical models that is more accurate than simple models that assume independence between neurons. The results provide evidence that the proposed encoding models accurately capture key statistics of realistic neural activity, and that Bayesian decoding based on them can be accurate and efficient. The manuscript would benefit from a more complete comparison with other models.

  (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