Neuroscience

Voltage imaging reveals the emergence of population activity in the spinal cord

1. Asuka Shiraishi
2. Ayane Hayashi
3. Narumi Fukuda
4. Mari Hishinuma
5. Hiroaki Miyazawa
6. Sachiko Tsuda

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This paper presents an important advance in genetically encoded voltage imaging of the developing zebrafish spinal cord in vivo, capturing voltage dynamics in neuronal populations, single cells, and subcellular compartments inaccessible to patch clamp, and diverse spike waveforms and subthreshold voltage dynamics inaccessible to calcium imaging. The work identifies a developmental progression from irregular voltage fluctuations to coordinated contralateral and ipsilateral activity, providing insight into how electrical dynamics and cellular morphology evolve during circuit formation. The strength of evidence is solid, with imaging data supporting the main conclusions, although the manuscript would be strengthened by more complete methodological documentation and clearer context relative to earlier calcium imaging studies. Overall, this study provides a resource that is of importance for researchers investigating neural development and circuit assembly, illustrating the value of voltage imaging as a general tool for probing bioelectric mechanisms in morphogenesis and circuit development.

Reviewed by eLife

Maximized field-of-view deep-brain calcium imaging through gradient-index lenses

1. Chenmao Wang
2. Zongyue Cheng
3. Yuting Li
4. Jianian Lin
5. Meng Cui

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study presents a valuable and practical approach for one-photon imaging through GRIN lenses. By scanning a low numerical aperture (NA) beam and collecting fluorescence with a high NA, the method expands the usable field of view and yields clearer cellular signals. The evidence is solid overall, with strong qualitative demonstrations, but some claims would benefit from additional quantitative tests. The work will interest researchers who need simple, scalable tools for large‑area cellular imaging in the brain.

Reviewed by eLife

Non-decision time-informed collapsing threshold diffusion model: A joint modeling framework with identifiable time-dependent parameters

1. Amir Hosein Hadian Rasanan
2. Lukas Schumacher
3. Michael D Nunez
4. Gabriel Weindel
5. Jörg Rieskamp

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study provides a valuable advance in understanding how decision boundaries may change over time during simple choices by introducing a method that uses information about non-decision components to improve parameter estimates. The evidence supporting the main claims is convincing, with clear demonstrations on simulated and real data, although additional model comparison work would further strengthen confidence. The findings will be of interest to researchers studying human decision processes and the methods used to analyse them.

Reviewed by eLife

Insulin resistance alters cortical inhibitory neurons and microglia to exacerbate Alzheimer’s knock-in mouse phenotypes

1. LaShae Nicholson
2. Si Jie Tang
3. Tejaswini Karra
4. Habiba Abouelatta
5. Stephen M. Strittmatter

Reviewed by PREreview

Shaker it OFF: Biophysical Characterization of an Inactivating Potassium Conductance Mediating Object Segmentation in a Collision-Detecting Neuron

1. Gil Shaulsky
2. David Bellini
3. Dylan Ulloa
4. Eleni Nasiotis
5. Hala Khan
6. Hongxia Wang
7. Jiayi Luo
8. Herman Dierick
9. Chenghang Zong
10. Fabrizio Gabbiani
11. Richard B. Dewell

Reviewed by PREreview

Movie reconstruction from mouse visual cortex activity

1. Joel Bauer
2. Troy W Margrie
3. Claudia Clopath

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This valuable study uses state-of-the-art neural encoding and video reconstruction methods to achieve a substantial improvement in video reconstruction quality from mouse neural data. It provides a convincing demonstration of how reconstruction performance can be improved by combining these methods. The goal of the study was improving reconstruction performance rather than advancing theoretical understanding of neural processing, so the results will be of practical interest to the brain decoding community.

Reviewed by eLife

Biologically informed cortical models predict optogenetic perturbations

1. Christos Sourmpis
2. Carl CH Petersen
3. Wulfram Gerstner
4. Guillaume Bellec

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study demonstrates the significance of incorporating biological constraints in training neural networks to develop models that make accurate predictions under novel conditions. By comparing standard sigmoid recurrent neural networks (RNNs) with biologically constrained RNNs, the manuscript offers compelling evidence that biologically grounded inductive biases enhance generalization to perturbed conditions. This manuscript will appeal to a wide audience in systems and computational neuroscience.

Reviewed by eLife

Dissecting surveying behavior of reactive microglia under chronic neurodegeneration

1. Sunitha Subhramanian
2. Olga Bocharova
3. Natallia Makarava
4. Tarek Safadi
5. Ilia V Baskakov

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This fundamental study provides new evidence of a change in how microglia survey neurons during the chronic phase of neurodegeneration, which researchers studying neuroinflammation and its role in neurodegenerative disease should find interesting. In this research, using time-lapse imaging of acute brain slices from prion-affected mice, the researchers show that, unlike in healthy brains, microglia become reactive, lose their territorial boundaries, and become highly mobile, exhibiting "kiss-and-ride" behavior, migrating into brain tissue and forming reversible, transient body-to-body contact with neurons. The evidence is compelling, with well-executed time-lapse imaging, good quantitative analysis across several disease stages, pharmacological validation of P2Y6 involvement, and the very surprising finding that this mobile behavior persists after microglia are removed from the brain.

Reviewed by eLife

PRRT2 as an auxiliary regulator of Nav channel slow inactivation

1. Bin Lu
2. Qi-Wu Xu
3. Jing Zhang
4. Xue-Mei Wu
5. Jun-Yan He
6. Guang Yang
7. Ke-Xian Li
8. Ling Zhuang
9. Yu-Xian Zhang
10. Zhi-Qi Xiong

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study identifies PRRT2 as an auxiliary regulator of Nav channel slow inactivation, proposing that PRRT2 facilitates entry into, and delays recovery from, the slow-inactivated state. The evidence provided is compelling and well executed, though the work would be bolstered by additional studies of Nav1.6, as well as structural studies to directly investigate the molecular basis of gating modulation. Overall, this study will be of interest to ion channel biophysicists and neurophysiologists, particularly those studying channelopathies.

Reviewed by eLife

Inflammatory reprogramming of human brain endothelial cells compromises blood–brain barrier integrity in Alzheimer’s disease

1. Rebecca L. Pinals
2. Md Rezaul Islam
3. Oisín King
4. Aaron Choi
5. Eulim Kang
6. Masayuki Nakano
7. Anjanet Tuyéras
8. Maeesha Tasnim Naomi
9. Arthur Ngo
10. Alan Jiang
11. Nhat Truong
12. Emre Agbas
13. Claudia F. Lozano Cruz
14. Colin Staab
15. Tak Ko
16. David A. Bennett
17. Alice E. Stanton
18. Robert Langer
19. Li-Huei Tsai

Reviewed by PREreview