Neuroscience

Progressive overfilling of readily releasable pool underlies short-term facilitation at recurrent excitatory synapses in layer 2/3 of the rat prefrontal cortex

1. Jiwoo Shin
2. Seung Yeon Lee
3. Yujin Kim
4. Suk-Ho Lee

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This valuable work explores how synaptic activity encodes information during memory tasks. All reviewers agree that the work is of very high quality and that the methodological approach is praiseworthy. Although the experimental data support the possibility that phospholipase diacylglycerol signaling and synaptotagmin 7 (Syt7) dynamically regulate the vesicle pool required for presynaptic release, a concern remains that the central finding of paired-pulse depression at very short intervals could be due to a mechanism that does not depend on exocytosis, such as Ca²⁺ channel inactivation, rather than vesicle pool depletion. Overall, this is a solid study although the results still warrant consideration of alternative interpretations.

Reviewed by eLife

Auditory perception and neural representation of temporal features are altered by age but not by cochlear synaptopathy

1. Friederike Steenken
2. Rainer Beutelmann
3. Henning Oetjen
4. Christine Köppl
5. Georg M Klump

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study tested the specific hypothesis that age-related changes to hearing involve a partial loss of synapse connections between sensory cells in the ear and the nerve fibers that carry information about sounds to the brain, and that this interferes with the ability to discriminate rapid temporal fluctuations in sounds. Physiological, behavioral, and histological analyses provide a powerful combination to test this hypothesis in gerbils. Contrary to previous suggestions, it was found that chemically-induced isolated synaptopathy (at similar levels as observed in aged gerbils) did not result in worse performance on a behavioral task measuring sensitivity to temporal fine-structure, nor did it produce degradations in auditory-nerve fiber encoding of fine structure. Aged gerbils showed degraded behavior and stronger than normal envelope responses, but temporal fine-structure coding was not affected; interpreted by the authors as suggesting central processing contributions to aging effects on discrimination. These findings are important for advancing our knowledge of the mechanistic bases for age-related changes to hearing, and the evidence provided is solid with the results largely supporting the claims made and minor limitations related to possible confounds discussed in reasonable depth.

Reviewed by eLife

Local synthesis of Reticulon-1C lessens the outgrowth of injured axons and Spastin activity

1. Alejandro Luarte
2. Javiera Gallardo
3. Daniela Corvalán
4. Ankush Chakraborty
5. Cláudio Gouveia-Roque
6. Francisca Bertin
7. Carlos Contreras
8. Juan Pablo Ramírez
9. André Weber
10. Waldo Acevedo
11. Werner Zuschratter
12. Rodrigo Herrera-Molina
13. Úrsula Wyneken
14. Andrea Paula-Lima
15. Tatiana Adasme-Rocha
16. Jorge Toledo
17. Rodrigo Vergara
18. Antonia Figueroa
19. Carolina González
20. Christian González-Billault
21. Ulrich Hengst
22. Andrés Couve

Reviewed by Review Commons

The gut-brain vagal axis governs mesolimbic dopamine dynamics and reward events

1. Oriane Onimus
2. Faustine Arrivet
3. Tinaïg Le Borgne
4. Sylvie Perez
5. Julien Castel
6. Anthony Ansoult
7. Benoit Bertrand
8. Nejmeh Mashhour
9. Camille de Almeida
10. Linh-Chi Bui
11. Marie Vandecasteele
12. Serge Luquet
13. Laurent Venance
14. Nicolas Heck
15. Fabio Marti
16. Giuseppe Gangarossa

Reviewed by PREreview

Rhythmic sampling and competition of target and distractor in a motion detection task

1. Changhao Xiong
2. Nathan M Petro
3. Ke Bo
4. Lihan Cui
5. Andreas Keil
6. Mingzhou Ding

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This work presents important information on rhythmicity of overlapping target and distractor processing and how this affects behaviour. The methods are, in general, clearly laid out and defensible, with several supplementary analyses leading to a solid base of evidence for their claims.

Reviewed by eLife

Realistic coupling enables flexible macroscopic traveling waves in the mouse cortex

1. Guanhua Sun
2. James Hazelden
3. Ruby Kim
4. Daniel B Forger

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This valuable work presents a novel computational framework for modeling macroscopic traveling waves in the mouse cortex by integrating open-source connectomic and transcriptomic data into a spiking network model. This approach allows the computational model to assign excitatory/inhibitory connections based on neurotransmitter profiles and extends simulations to the 3D domain. The authors present results that demonstrate how spatiotemporal dynamics such as slow oscillations (0.5-4 Hz) emerge and self-organize at the whole-brain scale. This study provides convincing initial insights into the structural basis of traveling waves at the whole-brain scale in the mouse.

Reviewed by eLife

Cortical projection neurons with distinct axonal connectivity employ ribosomal complexes with distinct protein compositions

1. Tien Phuoc Tran
2. Bogdan Budnik
3. John E Froberg
4. Jeffrey D Macklis

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study presents a valuable and rigorous molecular resource, offering subtype-specific insight into the composition of ribosome-associated protein complexes in the developing cerebral cortex. The evidence is compelling in terms of data quality and is strongly supported by the results, given the rigorous technical execution. However, the findings remain primarily descriptive, as the study lacks functional validation to support mechanistic conclusions.

Reviewed by eLife

Co-release of opposing signaling molecules controls the escalation and release of aggression

1. Rachel E. Gatlin
2. Jordyn Gagon
3. Damhyeon Kwak
4. Sewon Park
5. Hailee Walker
6. Lo Kronheim
7. Thomas Everett
8. Ashley Covington
9. Michaela M. Fluck
10. Tobias Zickmund
11. Nicholas A. Frost
12. Moriel Zelikowsky

Reviewed by PREreview

Morphology and ultrastructure of pharyngeal sense organs of Drosophila larvae

1. Vincent Richter
2. Tilman Triphan
3. Albert Cardona
4. Andreas S Thum

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  In this fundamental manuscript, Richter et al. present a thorough anatomical characterization of the Drosophila melanogaster larval pharyngeal sensory system, which is involved in taste-guided behaviors. This study fills a major gap in the larval sensory map, providing a compelling neuroanatomical foundation for future investigations into sensory circuits and behavior. The data presented here are of exceptional quality and will be of interest to the Drosophila neurobiology community.

Reviewed by eLife

Remote automated delivery of mechanical stimuli coupled to brain recordings in behaving mice

1. Justin Burdge
2. Anissa Jhumka
3. Ashar Khan
4. Simon Ogundare
5. Nicholas Baer
6. Sasha Fulton
7. Alexander Kaplan
8. Brittany Bistis
9. William Foster
10. Joshua Thackray
11. Andre Toussaint
12. Miao Li
13. Yosuke M Morizawa
14. Jake Nazarian
15. Leah Yadessa
16. Arlene J George
17. Abednego Delinois
18. Wadzanayi Mayiseni
19. Noah Loran
20. Guang Yang
21. David J Margolis
22. Victoria E Abraira
23. Ishmail Abdus-Saboor

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study describes the development and validation of an Automated Reproducible Mechano-stimulator (ARM), a tool for standardizing and automating tactile behavior experiments. The data supporting the use of the ARM system are compelling, and demonstrate that by removing experimenter effects on animals, it reduces variability in various parameters of stimulus application. Moreover, the authors demonstrate that any noise emitted from the ARM does not induce an increased stress state. Once commercially available, the ARM system has the potential to increase experimental reproducibility between laboratories in the somatosentation and pain fields.

Reviewed by eLife