Neuroscience

eLife Assessment

This work describes a highly complex automated algorithm for analyzing vascular imaging data from two-photon microscopy. This tool has the potential to be extremely valuable to the field and to fill gaps in knowledge of hemodynamic activity across a regional network. The solid biological application provides a demonstration of their pipeline's capabilities and suggests intriguing hypotheses around prolonged vascular tone changes, but will need to be followed up by further experiments to be conclusively demonstrated.

eLife Assessment

This revised manuscript presents an important characterization of mouse auditory cortex receptive field organization, utilizing two-photon imaging of specific subpopulations. They demonstrate a degradation of tonotopic organization from the input to the output neurons. The strength of the evidence is convincing.

eLife Assessment

Endothelial cell-specific loss of TGF-beta signaling in mice leads to CNS vascular defects, specifically impairing retinal development and promoting immune cell infiltration. The data are solid, showing that loss of TGF-beta signaling triggers vascular inflammation and attracts immune cells specific to CNS vasculature. These findings are important, highlighting TGF-beta's role in maintaining vascular-immune homeostasis and its therapeutic potential in neurovascular inflammatory diseases.

eLife Assessment

This important study characterizes and validates a new activity marker - fast labelling of engram neurons (FLEN) - which is transiently active and driven by cFos, allowing the monitoring of intrinsic and synaptic properties of engram neurons shortly after the learning experience. The results convincingly demonstrate the utility of this novel viral tool for studying early changes in the properties of engram cells. FLEN will provide a beneficial tool for the neuroscience community once it is made available at a plasmid repository.

eLife Assessment

This work derives a valuable general theory unifying theories of efficient information transmission in the brain with population homeostasis. The general theory provides an explanation for firing rate homeostasis at the level of neural clusters with firing rate heterogeneity within clusters. Applying this theory to the primary visual cortex, the authors present solid evidence that accounts for stimulus-specific and neuron-specific adaptation. Reviewers have provided additional suggestions for improving the readability of the manuscript, as well as discussing previous results on adapting coding as well as those aspects of experimental data that are not fully explained by the present theory.

eLife Assessment

This important study provides solid evidence for new insights into the role of Type-1 nNOS interneurons in driving neuronal network activity and controlling vascular network dynamics in awake, head-fixed mice. The authors use an original strategy based on the ablation of Type-1 nNOS interneurons with local injection of saporin conjugated to a substance P analogue into the somatosensory cortex. They show that ablation of type I nNOS neurons has surprisingly little effect on neurovascular coupling, although it alters neural activity and vascular dynamics.

eLife Assessment

This study presents important information about the role of mu opioid receptors in neurotransmission between the medial habenula and the interpeduncular nucleus. The authors provide convincing evidence that mu opioid receptor activation has differential effects on transmission from substance P neurons and cholinergic neurons, and that blockade of potassium channels can unmask a nicotinic cholinergic synaptic response. This work will be of high interest to those studying this brain region, and potentially to the larger neuroscience community studying motivated behavior.

eLife Assessment

This study reports important findings about the nature of feedback to primary visual cortex (V1) during object recognition. The state-of-the-art functional MRI evidence for the main claims is solid, and the combination of high-resolution fMRI with MEG yields significant insight into neural mechanisms. The findings presented here are relevant to a number of scientific fields such as object recognition, categorisation and predictive coding.

eLife Assessment

This study presents a valuable finding regarding the role of oxytocin neurons in thermogenesis and behavioral thermoregulation. The use of numerous converging methods, including behavior, fiber photometry, optogenetics, thermal recordings, metabolic analyses, and more, produces a multi-dimensional dataset delivering findings that provide solid support for the conclusions. Conclusions would be strengthened with validation of the approaches, inclusion of a loss of function experiment, and further investigation of the social nature of the behavior. The maternal findings are, at present, somewhat disconnected from the conclusions. The findings are novel and open new doors for understanding the role of the PVT and oxytocin in thermoregulation work; the work will be of strong interest to the thermoregulation, social behavior, and oxytocin signaling communities.

eLife Assessment

Whole-brain imaging of neuronal activity in freely behaving animals holds great promise for neuroscience, but numerous technical challenges limit its use. In this important study, the authors describe a new set of deep learning-based tools to track and identify the activity of head neurons in freely moving nematodes (C. elegans) and jellyfish (Clytia hemisphaerica). While the tools convincingly enable high tracking speed and accuracy in the settings in which the authors have evaluated them, the claim that these tools should be easily generalizable to a wide variety of datasets is incompletely supported.