Neuroscience

Longitudinal tracking of neuronal activity from the same cells in the developing brain using Track2p

1. Jure Majnik
2. Manon Mantez
3. Sofia Zangila
4. Stéphane Bugeon
5. Léo Guignard
6. Jean-Claude Platel
7. Rosa Cossart

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This fundamental study presents a new method for longitudinally tracking cells in two-photon imaging data that addresses the specific challenges of imaging neurons in the developing cortex. It provides compelling evidence demonstrating reliable longitudinal identification of neurons across the second postnatal week in mice. The study should be of interest to development neuroscientists engaged in population-level recordings using two-photon imaging.

Reviewed by eLife

A stretching mechanism evokes mechano-electrical transduction in auditory chordotonal neurons

1. Atitheb Chaiyasitdhi
2. Manuela Nowotny
3. Marcel Van der Heijden
4. Benjamin Warren

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This valuable study uses a sophisticated array of techniques to investigate the mechanisms through which the chordotonal receptors in the locust ear (Müller's organ) sense auditory signals. Ultrastructural reconstruction of the sensory organ provides convincing evidence of the organization of the scolopidial structure that wraps the sensory neuron cilium. However, the recordings of sound-evoked motion and electrophysiological activity from the chordotonal sensory neurons provide incomplete evidence for the proposed axial stretch model of mechanotransduction.

Reviewed by eLife

The Crunchometer: A Low-Cost, Open-Source Acoustic Analysis of Feeding Microstructure

1. Elvi Gil-Lievana
2. Benjamin Arroyo
3. Jesús Pérez-Ortega
4. Axl Lopez
5. Luis Alfredo Rodriguez Blanco
6. Xarenny Diaz
7. Gustavo Hernandez
8. Alam Coss
9. Emily Alway
10. Naama Reicher
11. Enrique Hernández Lemus
12. Maya Kaelberer
13. Diego V Bohórquez
14. Ranier Gutierrez

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This valuable manuscript presents an open-source and low-cost acoustic system for quantifying biting and chewing in mice. The approach is carefully validated against human observers, demonstrating strong methodological reliability and enabling high-resolution analysis of feeding microstructure. The tool has broad relevance for studies of appetite circuits and pharmacological interventions. A significant contribution is the identification of previously unrecognized "meal-related" neurons in the lateral hypothalamus, providing novel biological insight into food consumption. While the support for the methodological advances is compelling and robust, some circuit-level conclusions are preliminary or incomplete, relying on small pilot samples and manual classification, and should be interpreted with caution. This paper will be of interest to those interested in ingestive behavior and/or hypothalamus.

Reviewed by eLife

Time-adaptive modulation of evidence evaluation in rat posterior parietal cortex

1. Preetham Ganupuru
2. Adam B Goldring
3. Tanner Stevenson
4. Kendall Stewart
5. Rishidev Chaudhuri
6. Timothy D Hanks

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This valuable study examined the roles of the posterior parietal cortex in rats performing an auditory change-detection decision task. It provided solid evidence for two subpopulations with opposing modulation patterns during decision formation and for a correspondence between neural and behavioral measures of the short timescale used for evidence evaluation.

Reviewed by eLife

Effects of transcranial photobiomodulation on peripheral biomarkers associated with oxidative stress and complex IV activity in the prefrontal cortex in rats subjected to chronic mild stress

1. Luciana Bortoluzzi
2. Rafael Colombo
3. Karoline Motta Pinto
4. Lucas Henriques Viscardi
5. Ricardo Missiaggia
6. Douglas Jean Turella
7. Lisandra Schwantess
8. Mirian Salvador
9. Catia Santos Branco
10. Marina Rigotti
11. Ellen Scotton
12. Tainá Schons
13. Silene Bazi Ribeiro
14. Marco Antonio Caldieraro
15. Adriane R Rosa

Reviewed by preLights

Twice as nice: Boosts in adolescent reinforcement learning from Pavlovian bias and age-related prioritization of reward-motivated incidental memory

1. Haley Hegefeld
2. Juliet Y Davidow

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This valuable developmental study provides intriguing but incomplete evidence suggesting that, relative to adults, the enhancement of instrumental learning by Pavlovian bias is most pronounced in adolescence, while reward-induced memory enhancements are strongest in childhood. Although the authors tackle a key aspect of learning and motivation with rigorous experimental methods and sophisticated modeling techniques, there are substantial concerns about the absence of relevant analyses, the lack of accord between model-based and exploratory analyses, and the lack of an explanation for how the results cohere with inconsistent findings in the literature.

Reviewed by eLife

Heterogeneous responses to embryonic critical period perturbations within the Drosophila larval locomotor circuit

1. Niklas Krick
2. Jacob Davies
3. Bramwell Coulson
4. Daniel Sobrido-Cameán
5. Michael Miller
6. Matthew CW Oswald
7. Aref A Zarin
8. Richard Baines
9. Matthias Landgraf

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This is an important study of critical period plasticity, focused on temperature manipulations, and how different parts of the Drosophila larval motor circuit adapt or maladapt. The work convincingly demonstrates that components of the motor network respond in distinct ways to the heat shock, and the combination of functional, structural, and electrophysiological approaches makes the study of significant interest. The work points to central interneurons as primary drivers of maladaptive changes, while motoneurons and neuromuscular junctions show compensatory or homeostatic adjustments. The study is methodologically rigorous, contributing significant insights into critical period biology using a tractable invertebrate model.

Reviewed by eLife

Confidence over competence: Real-time integration of social information in human continuous perceptual decision-making

1. Felix Schneider
2. Antonino Calapai
3. Roger Mundry
4. Raymundo Báez-Mendoza
5. Alexander Gail
6. Igor Kagan
7. Stefan Treue

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study developed a novel continuous dot-motion decision-making task, in which participants can see another player's responses as well as their own, to measure perceptual performance and confidence judgments in a social context. The study is a valuable contribution to social decision-making primarily by introducing a new task and offering convincing evidence on how participants are impacted by others' decisions during continuous perceptual choices. The manuscript delivers clear evidence that participants judgements are driven by metacognitive confidence over simpler primary uncertainty.

Reviewed by eLife

Virtual Brain Inference (VBI), a flexible and integrative toolkit for efficient probabilistic inference on whole-brain models

1. Abolfazl Ziaeemehr
2. Marmaduke Woodman
3. Lia Domide
4. Spase Petkoski
5. Viktor Jirsa
6. Meysam Hashemi

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This paper presents a valuable software package, named "Virtual Brain Inference" (VBI), that enables faster and more efficient inference of parameters in dynamical system models of whole-brain activity, grounded in artificial network networks for Bayesian statistical inference. The authors have provided convincing evidence, across several case studies, for the utility and validity of the methods using simulated data from several commonly used models, but more thorough benchmarking could be used to demonstrate the practical utility of the toolkit. This work will be of interest to computational neuroscientists interested in modelling large-scale brain dynamics.

Reviewed by eLife

Dependence of contextual modulation in macaque V1 on interlaminar signal flow

1. Shude Zhu
2. Yu Jin Oh
3. Ethan B Trepka
4. Xiaomo Chen
5. Tirin Moore

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  The results by Zhu et al provide valuable insights into the representation of border ownership in area V1. They used neuropixel recording to demonstrate the clustering of border ownership, and compared cross-correlation functions between neurons in different layers to demonstrate that they depend on the type of stimulus. The strength of the evidence is solid but can be improved by performing additional analyses and addressing some concerns (as raised in the previous and current review), and accounting for the differences in classical and non-classical receptive field stimulation conditions.

Reviewed by eLife