Neuroscience

eLife Assessment

This important study presents convincing findings on creating an exhaustive library of new enhancer-AAVs targeting astrocytes and oligodendrocytes with high potential for both basic and translational work, which will be of value to a large and growing community. The revisions appropriately addressed some of the previous concerns by updating description of glial biology in the Introduction and modifying text on experimental results and approaches. Overall, these amendments have strengthened the claims. The work will be of interest to neuroscientists working on glial cell biology.

eLife Assessment

This study provides valuable insights into the role of thalamic nuclei in associative threat and extinction learning, underpinned by a large dataset and rigorous, multipronged analyses. The evidence provided is solid, supporting the main conclusions. The manuscript will be of broad interest to researchers in learning and memory, fear, thalamic circuitry, and related mental health conditions.

eLife Assessment

This is an important study that establishes a novel and enabling 3D super-resolution imaging approach for visualizing the nanoscale organization of AMPA receptors in thick mouse brain tissue. The biological findings are of importance and interest to the neuroscience field, with potential implications for neurodegenerative disease research. However, the evidence remains incomplete and some of the biological conclusions would benefit from strengthened quantitative analysis and revisions to the manuscript to ensure that the interpretations are appropriately aligned with what is supported by the analysis.

eLife Assessment

This important study demonstrates how individual taste preferences change over time, how these changes are reflected in cortical activity, and how sensory experience contributes to reshaping both. The evidence is convincing and broadly supports the main conclusions. The findings should be of interest to neuroscientists studying sensory processing and cortical plasticity.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study tests to what extent dopamine neuron stimulation produces striatal serotonin release, and vice versa - a topic of interest to neuroscientists studying the basal ganglia, neuromodulation, and reward learning. Employing a combination of modern optical and genetic methods, it provides solid evidence that the mesolimbic dopamine and serotonin systems operate primarily in parallel, with little crosstalk observed when each of the pathways are activated individually. The results are generally convincing, although the reviewers were still concerned about the absence of control experiments examining light artifacts.

eLife Assessment

This is a useful study that seeks to elucidate the molecular mechanisms underlying spinal circuit assembly. The authors demonstrate that Onecut transcription factors in spinal motor neurons control the development of pre-motor interneurons in a non-cell autonomous manner. However, certain conclusions are incompletely supported by the data at hand. The work will be of broad interest to cell and developmental biologists.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study introduces an innovative task and framework for examining whether movement vigor and reward-seeking behavior are governed by common or separate processes. The behavioral findings provide solid evidence that these behaviors can be differentially influenced by effort and delay, but support for the proposed model and its mechanistic claims remains incomplete, requiring more rigorous validation and analyses to address potential confounds. The work will be of interest to researchers studying motor control, decision-making, and effort-based behavior.

eLife Assessment

Overall, this is an important manuscript that delivers an invaluable community resource. The execution is relatively simple, but the evidence of this resource is solid. The effort invested in generating the knockout lines that for validation experiments is a clear strength of the study, but it doesn't substitute for a careful evaluation of the same reagents in the end-users' specific protocols before making any biological statement.

eLife Assessment

This study introduces a valuable simulation-based inference (SBI) framework to identify degenerate compensatory mechanisms that stabilize network activity despite neuronal hyperexcitability, a feature common to many brain disorders. By estimating posterior distributions of network parameters, the authors highlight factors such as threshold potential and interneuron-to-principal cell connectivity as key compensators for increased intrinsic excitability and interneuron loss. The approach is promising and can become a convincing tool for probing network degeneracy.

eLife Assessment

This important study introduces Hetlearn, a novel learning algorithm that demonstrates that an ensemble of simple sub-learners with varying learning rates can effectively manage inference in complex, unstable environments. While the theoretical framework and its proposed application to parallel memory traces in the insect mushroom body are intriguing, the evidence supporting the core claims is currently incomplete. To fully validate the authors' conclusions, further exploration is needed to rigorously define the boundaries of the model's hyperparameter space, along with a deeper justification and clarification of its biological plausibility.