Neuroscience

Electrophysiology and morphology of human cortical supragranular pyramidal cells in a wide age range

1. Pál Barzó
2. Ildikó Szöts
3. Martin Tóth
4. Éva Adrienn Csajbók
5. Gábor Molnár
6. Gábor Tamás

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  In this revised work, Barzó et al. assessed the electrophysiological and anatomical properties of a large number of layer 2/3 pyramidal neurons in brain slices of human neocortex across a wide range of ages, from infancy to elderly individuals, using whole-cell patch clamp recordings and anatomical reconstructions. This large data set represents an important contribution to our understanding of how these properties change across the human lifespan, supported by convincing data and analyses. The authors have addressed the concerns raised in previous reviews. Overall, this study strengthens our understanding of how the neural properties of human cortical neurons change with age and will contribute to building more realistic models of human cortical function.

Reviewed by eLife

Prosapip1 in the dorsal hippocampus mediates synaptic protein composition, long-term potentiation, and spatial memory

1. Zachary W Hoisington
2. Himanshu Gangal
3. Khanhky Phamluong
4. Chhavi Shukla
5. Yann Ehinger
6. Jeffrey J Moffat
7. Gregg E Homanics
8. Jun Wang
9. Dorit Ron

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study aims to understand the function of ProSAP-interacting protein 1 (Prosapip1) in the brain. Using a conditional Prosapip1 KO mouse (floxed prosapip1 crossed with Syn1-Cre line), the authors performed analysis including protein biochemistry, synaptic physiology, and behavioral learning. Convincing evidence from this study supports a role of Prosapip 1 in synaptic protein composition, synaptic NMDA responses, LTP, and spatial memory.

Reviewed by eLife

A gradual transition toward categorical representations along the visual hierarchy during working memory, but not perception

1. Chaipat Chunharas
2. Michael J Wolff
3. Meike D Hettwer
4. Rosanne L Rademaker

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study examined orientation representations along the visual hierarchy during perception and working memory. The authors provide results suggesting that during working memory there is a gradient where representations are more categorical in nature later in the visual hierarchy. The evidence presented is solid, most notably a match between behavioral data, though minor weakness can be attributed to the tasks and behaviors not being designed to address this question. The findings should be of interest to a relatively broad audience, namely those interested in the relationship between sensory coding and memory.

Reviewed by eLife

Stimulus representation in human frontal cortex supports flexible control in working memory

1. Zhujun Shao
2. Mengya Zhang
3. Qing Yu

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This work presents important findings that the human frontal cortex is involved in a flexible, dual role in both maintaining information in short-term memory, and controlling this memory content to guide adaptive behavior and decisions. The evidence supporting the conclusions is compelling, with a well-designed task, best-practice decoding methods, and careful control analyses. The work will be of broad interest to cognitive neuroscience researchers working on working memory and cognitive control.

Reviewed by eLife

Plasma Membrane Remodelling in GM2 Gangliosidoses Drives Synaptic Dysfunction

1. Alex S. Nicholson
2. David A. Priestman
3. Robin Antrobus
4. James C. Williamson
5. Reuben Bush
6. Henry G. Barrow
7. Emily Smith
8. Kostantin Dobrenis
9. Nicholas A. Bright
10. Frances M. Platt
11. Janet E. Deane

Reviewed by Review Commons

Reproducibility of in vivo electrophysiological measurements in mice

1. International Brain Laboratory
2. Kush Banga
3. Julius Benson
4. Jai Bhagat
5. Dan Biderman
6. Daniel Birman
7. Niccolò Bonacchi
8. Sebastian A Bruijns
9. Kelly Buchanan
10. Robert AA Campbell
11. Matteo Carandini
12. Gaelle A Chapuis
13. Anne K Churchland
14. M Felicia Davatolhagh
15. Hyun Dong Lee
16. Mayo Faulkner
17. Berk Gerçek
18. Fei Hu
19. Julia Huntenburg
20. Cole Lincoln Hurwitz
21. Anup Khanal
22. Christopher Krasniak
23. Petrina Lau
24. Christopher Langfield
25. Nancy Mackenzie
26. Guido T Meijer
27. Nathaniel J Miska
28. Zeinab Mohammadi
29. Jean-Paul Noel
30. Liam Paninski
31. Alejandro Pan-Vazquez
32. Cyrille Rossant
33. Noam Roth
34. Michael Schartner
35. Karolina Z Socha
36. Nicholas A Steinmetz
37. Karel Svoboda
38. Marsa Taheri
39. Anne E Urai
40. Shuqi Wang
41. Miles Wells
42. Steven J West
43. Matthew R Whiteway
44. Olivier Winter
45. Ilana B Witten
46. Yizi Zhang

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This paper represents an important contribution to the field. Summarizing results from neural recording experiments in mice across ten labs, the work provides compelling evidence that basic electrophysiology features, single-neuron functional properties, and population-level decoding are fairly reproducible across labs with proper preprocessing. The results and suggestions regarding preprocessing and quality metrics may be of significant interest to investigators carrying out such experiments in their own labs.

Reviewed by eLife

Serotonin modulates infraslow oscillation in the dentate gyrus during non-REM sleep

1. Gergely F Turi
2. Sasa Teng
3. Xinyue Chen
4. Emily CY Lim
5. Carla Dias
6. Ruining Hu
7. Ruizhi Wang
8. Fenghua Zhen
9. Yueqing Peng

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study shows that a very slow (infraslow) oscillation occurs in voltage recordings from the dentate gyrus of the adult mouse. The authors suggest that it is related to sleep stage and serotonin acting at one type of serotonin receptor in the dentate gyrus. The results are significant because they suggest new insight into how a slow oscillation affects memory through serotonin receptors in the dentate gyrus. Convincing data are provided to support the claims.

Reviewed by eLife

A toolbox for ablating excitatory and inhibitory synapses

1. Aida Bareghamyan
2. Changfeng Deng
3. Sarah Daoudi
4. Shubhash C Yadav
5. Xiaocen Lu
6. Wei Zhang
7. Robert E Campbell
8. Richard H Kramer
9. David M Chenoweth
10. Don B Arnold

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This compelling study introduces a set of novel genetically encoded tools for the selective and reversible ablation of excitatory and inhibitory synapses. These new tools enable selective and efficient ablation of excitatory synapses, and photoactivatable and chemically inducible methods for inhibitory synapse ablation in specific cell types, providing valuable methods for disrupting neural circuits. This approach holds broad potential for investigating the roles of specific synaptic input onto genetically determined cells.

Reviewed by eLife

Altered visual cortex excitatory/inhibitory ratio following transient congenital visual deprivation in humans

1. Rashi Pant
2. Kabilan Pitchaimuthu
3. José P Ossandón
4. Idris Shareef
5. Sunitha Lingareddy
6. Jürgen Finsterbusch
7. Ramesh Kekunnaya
8. Brigitte Röder

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This neuroimaging and electrophysiology study in a small cohort of congenital cataract patients with sight recovery aims to characterize the effects of early visual deprivation on excitatory and inhibitory balance in visual cortex. While contrasting sight-recovery with visually intact controls suggested the existence of persistent alterations in Glx/GABA ratio and aperiodic EEG signals, it provided incomplete evidence supporting claims about the effects of early deprivation itself. The reported data were considered valuable, given the rare study population. However, methodological limitations will likely restrict usefulness to scientists working in this particular subfield.

Reviewed by eLife

Convolutional networks can model the functional modulation of the MEG responses associated with feed-forward processes during visual word recognition

1. Marijn van Vliet
2. Oona Rinkinen
3. Takao Shimizu
4. Anni-Mari Niskanen
5. Barry Devereux
6. Riitta Salmelin

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  van Vliet and colleagues show a useful correlation between internal states of a convolutional neural network (CNN) trained on visual word stimuli with three specific components of evoked MEG potentials during reading in humans. The findings are solid, though quantitative evidence that model can produce any of the phenomena that the human visual system is known to have (e.g., feedback connections, sensitivity to word frequency), or that it has comparable performance to human behaviour (i.e., similar task accuracy with a comparable pattern of mistakes) would make the conclusions much stronger.

Reviewed by eLife