Neuroscience

eLife Assessment

This study proposes a useful assay to identify relative social ranks in mice incorporating the competitive drive for two basic resources - food and living space. Using this new protocol, the authors provide solid evidence of stable ranking among male and female pairs, while reporting more fluctuant hierarchies among triads of males. The evidence is, however, limited by the lack of ethologically based validation, assessment of the influence of competitor recognition, and proof of concept of application to neuroscience. This manuscript may be of interest to those interested in social behavior and related neuroscience.

eLife Assessment

Peukes et al. report compelling ultrastructures of excitatory synapses in the mouse forebrain that will serve as a reference for future work in the field. Their important findings using correlated fluorescence and cryo-electron tomography challenge the textbook view of synaptic structure that emerged from chemically fixed and metal-stained tissues. Instead of a post-synaptic density, these authors reveal the architecture of the cytoskeletal, neurotransmitter receptor clusters, and organelles in the 'synaptoplasm'.

eLife Assessment

This study dissects the function of 3 outputs of a specific population of modulatory neurons, dorsal raphe dopamine neurons, in social and affective behavior. It provides valuable information that both confirms prior results and provides new insights. The strength of the evidence is convincing, based on cutting-edge approaches and analysis. This study will be of interest to behavioral and systems neuroscientists, especially those interested in social and emotional behavior.

eLife Assessment

This paper reports on an important study that aims to move beyond current experimental approaches in speech production by (1) investigating speech in the context of a fully interactive task and (2) employing advanced methodology to record intracranial brain activity. Together these allow for examination of the unfolding temporal dynamics of brain-behaviour relationships during interactive speech. This approach and the analyses presented in support of the authors' claims pose convincing evidence.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study addresses a gap in our understanding of how the size of the attentional field is represented within the visual cortex. The evidence supporting the role of visual cortical activity is convincing, based on a novel modeling analysis of fMRI data. The results will be of interest to psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists.

eLife Assessment

This study presents a valuable finding on the neural representation of time from two distinct egocentric and allocentric reference frames. The presentation of evidence in the version of the original submission is incomplete, as further conceptual clarifications, methodological details, and addressing potential confounds would strengthen the study. The work will be of interest to cognitive neuroscientists working on the perception and memory of time.

eLife Assessment

This important study describes a computational model of the rat spinal locomotor circuits and how they could be plastically reconfigured after lateral hemisection or contusion injuries to replicate gaits observed experimentally in vivo. Overall, the simulation results convincingly mirror the gait parameters observed experimentally. The model suggests the emergence of detour circuits after lateral hemisection, whereas after a midline contusion, the model suggests plasticity of left-right and sensory inputs below the injury.

eLife Assessment

This study convincingly demonstrates that odors evoke a feeding response in Drosophila, mediated by gustatory receptors and observed as a proboscis extension. The evidence is comprehensive, encompassing behavior, functional imaging and electrophysiology. This important results on the molecular and cellular basis of multimodal integration across olfaction and gustation will be of interest for the study of chemosensation, sensory biology, and animal behavior.

eLife Assessment

With a computational analysis of a neuroanatomical network model in C. elegans, this valuable work investigates the synaptic mechanism for memory-dependent klinotaxis, i.e., salt concentration chemotaxis. By incorporating experimental data altering the ASER neuron's basal glutamate release into their model, the authors demonstrate the possibility of a transition between excitatory and inhibitory signaling at the ASER-AIY synapse, depending on environmental and cultivated salt concentrations. These solid findings offer a proposal for how synaptic plasticity plays a role in sensorimotor navigation, and will be of interest to worm biologists and theoretical neuroscientists.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study asks how the neural representation of individual finger movements changes during the early periods of sequence learning. By combining a new method for extracting features from human magnetoencephalography data and decoding analyses, the authors provide solid evidence of an early, swift change in the brain regions correlated with sequence learning, including a set of previously unreported frontal cortical regions. The authors also show that offline contextualization during short rest periods is the basis for improved performance. Further confirmation of these results on multiple movement sequences would further strengthen the key claims.