Neuroscience

eLife Assessment

Recent studies have shown that mRNA can be acetylated (ac4c), altering mRNA stability and translation efficiency; however, the role of mRNA acetylation in the brain remains unexplored. In this important study, the authors demonstrate that ac4c occurs in synaptically localised mRNAs, mediated by NAT10. Conditional reduction of NAT10 protein levels led to decreases in ac4c of mRNAs and deficits in synaptic plasticity and memory. These solid results suggest that mRNA acetylation may play a role in memory consolidation.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study describes significant differences in prey capture behavior between PSD-95 knock-out and wild-type mice, despite prior work by the same authors showing only modest visual deficits in the former. The data convincingly demonstrated prey capture performance in PSD-95 knock-out mice to improve under monocular viewing conditions. However, this finding alone was inadequate to support the interpretation of results as revealing a deficit in binocular visual integration, especially given the lack of eye and head tracking data or consideration of alternative explanations for the observed behavior.

eLife Assessment

This manuscript details important findings that DNA polymerase kappa shows age-related changes in subcellular localization within different cell types in the brains of mice, from the nucleus in young cells to the cytoplasm in old cells. The authors' findings suggest that age-related alterations in POLK localization could drive mechanistic and functional changes in the aging brain. The authors provide solid evidence for their study, with data broadly supporting their claims with minor weaknesses.

eLife Assessment

Li et al. present an important and innovative study linking developmental changes in sleep to ecological context in Drosophila mojavensis, and propose that sleep at one stage of an animal's life might anticipate needs at a future stage. The results fit well with this model, but are correlative in nature. The work is convincing, scientifically rigorous, and effectively bridges sleep biology and evolutionary ecology, opening promising new directions for the field.

eLife Assessment

This important work introduces a splitGFP-based labeling tool with an analysis pipeline for the synaptic scaffold protein bruchpilot, with tests in the adult Drosophila mushroom bodies, a learning center in the Drosophila brain. The evidence supporting the conclusions is convincing.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study investigates the computational role of top-down feedback - a property found in biological circuits - in artificial neural network (ANN) models of the neocortex. Using hierarchical recurrent ANNs in an audiovisual integration task, the authors show that an anatomically inspired feedback motif induces a stable visual bias consistent with human perception and yields modest but meaningful benefits for learning dynamics and robustness. The strength of evidence is solid: the modeling, analyses, and controls mostly support the central claim that top-down feedback motifs impose persistent inductive biases that shape functional specialization and behavior. But the evidence for a broad, general framework that predicts behavior remains only partially supported, and the Methods would benefit from a compact, reproducible summary of hyperparameters and architectural details.

eLife Assessment

This manuscript investigates the extremely interesting and important claim that the human hippocampus represents interactions with multiple social interaction partners on two relatively abstract social dimensions - and that this ability correlates with the social network size of the participant. This research potentially demonstrates the intricate role of the hippocampus in navigating our social world. While most of the results are solid, the paper requires some further clarification.

eLife Assessment

This study presents a potentially valuable exploration of the role of thalamic nuclei in language processing. The results will be of interest to researchers interested in the neurobiology of language. However, the evidence is incomplete to support robust conclusions at this point.

eLife Assessment

This study provides a useful contribution to understanding how wearable augmentation devices interact with human proprioception, using a longitudinal design over a single session. Results demonstrate that the perceptual representation of the biological finger and augmentation device changes across different phases of device exposure and use. The evidence supporting a representational change over time is solid, although it is still not clear whether these changes reflect three distinct phases of sensorimotor plasticity, as argued, versus 'washout' or adaptation effects. This work will be of interest to researchers studying body representation, sensorimotor learning, and human-technology interaction.

eLife Assessment

This fundamental manuscript describes how the posterolateral cortical amygdala (plCoA) generates appetitive or aversive behaviors in response to odors. By combining optogenetic stimulation, single-cell RNA sequencing, and spatial analysis, the authors identify a topographically organized circuit within plCoA that governs these behaviors. The manuscript shows convincingly that multiple features (spatial, genetic, and projection) contribute to overall population encoding of valence. Overall, the authors conduct many challenging experiments, each of which contains the relevant controls, and the results are interpreted within the framework of their experiments.