Neuroscience

A comprehensive mechanosensory connectome reveals a somatotopically organized neural circuit architecture controlling stimulus-aimed grooming of the Drosophila head

1. Steven A Calle-Schuler
2. Alexis E Santana-Cruz
3. Lucia Kmecová
4. Stefanie Hampel
5. Andrew M Seeds

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study extends prior work on head bristle mechanosensation by delivering a synaptic-resolution map of second-order partners that preserves somatotopy and highlights a cholinergic pathway linking sensory input to grooming circuits, providing a valuable resource for the field. The reconstructions and quantitative connectivity analyses provide solid support the main anatomical claims, while causal sufficiency for the behavioral sequence remains inferential and could be strengthened by a simple rank-order test relating wiring to the known grooming hierarchy.

Reviewed by eLife

Long-range inhibitory axons from medial entorhinal cortex target lateral entorhinal neurons projecting to the hippocampal formation

1. Eirik S Nilssen
2. Bente Jacobsen
3. Thanh P Doan
4. Paulo JB Girão
5. Menno P Witter

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study provides a valuable insight into how the medial and lateral entorhinal cortices interact through distinct excitatory and inhibitory pathways. Using anatomical tracing, optogenetics, and electrophysiology, the authors show that glutamatergic medial entorhinal neurons provide broad excitatory input to lateral entorhinal, while long-range SST+ interneurons deliver selective inhibition to layer I. These findings reveal a novel layer- and cell-type-specific organization of medial to lateral entorhinal connectivity with implications for spatial and episodic memory. The work is solid, but validation of injection specificity and viral spread is needed to fully confirm the anatomical interpretations; with these clarifications, this will be a significant contribution to understanding entorhinal-hippocampal circuit organization.

Reviewed by eLife

Heat-off responses of epidermal cells sensitize Drosophila larvae to noxious inputs

1. Jiro Yoshino
2. Avery Chiu
3. Takeshi Morita
4. Chang Yin
5. Federico M. Tenedini
6. Takaaki Sokabe
7. Kazuo Emoto
8. Jay Z. Parrish

Reviewed by Review Commons

A Scene with an Invisible Wall—Navigational Experience Shapes Visual Scene Representation

1. Shi Pui Donald Li
2. Jiayu Shao
3. Zhengang Lu
4. Michael McCloskey
5. Soojin Park

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This important study provides novel evidence that navigational experiences can shape perceptual scene representations. The evidence presented is incomplete and would benefit from clearer explanations of the experiment design and careful discussion of alternative interpretations such as contextual associations or familiarity. The work will be of interest to cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists working on perception and navigation.

  [Editors’ note: A revised version of this work has been published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/JOCN.a.2409).]

Reviewed by eLife

Identifiability-Guided Assessment of Digital Twins in Alzheimer’s Disease Clinical Research and Care

1. Juliet Jiang
2. Jeffrey R. Petrella
3. Wenrui Hao
4. the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative

Reviewed by preLights

Modified self-amplifying RNA mediates robust and prolonged gene expression in the mammalian brain

1. Jennifer Freire
2. Joshua E. McGee
3. Dana Shaw
4. Yuxin Zhou
5. Yangyang Wang
6. Colin Porter
7. Lauren Dang
8. Erynne San Antonio
9. Ziqing Yu
10. Kexin Li
11. Wilson W. Wong
12. Mark W. Grinstaff
13. Xue Han

Reviewed by Arcadia Science

Dorsal hippocampus mediates light-tone associations in male mice

1. Julia S Pinho
2. Carla Ramon-Duaso
3. Irene Manzanares-Sierra
4. Arnau Busquets-García

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  Pinho et al use in vivo calcium imaging and chemogenetic approaches to examine the involvement of hippocampal sub-regions across the different stages of a sensory preconditioning task in mice. They find evidence for sensory preconditioning in male mice. They also find that, in these mice, CaMKII-positive neurons in the dorsal hippocampus encode the audio-visual association that forms in stage 1 of the task. The evidence in support of these findings is convincing. The important study will be of interest to researchers in the fields of learning and memory and/or hippocampus function.

Reviewed by eLife

Neural Correlates and Reinstatement of Recent and Remote Memory: A Comparison Between Children and Young Adults

1. Iryna Schommartz
2. Philip F Lembcke
3. Javier Ortiz-Tudela
4. Martin Bauer
5. Angela M Kaindl
6. Claudia Buss
7. Yee Lee Shing

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This paper provides potentially valuable insight into why memory consolidation may differ between children (5-7 years of age) and adults. The work hints at developmental differences in neural engagement during the retrieval of recent and remote memories. However, there are several major concerns with the analyses not alleviated by included controls, and as such the evidence supporting the authors' main claims remains incomplete.

Reviewed by eLife

Motor biases reflect a misalignment between visual and proprioceptive reference frames

1. Tianhe Wang
2. Ryan J Morehead
3. Amber Jiang
4. Richard B Ivry
5. Jonathan S Tsay

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study uses an original method to address the longstanding question of why reaching movements are often biased. The combination of a wide range of experimental conditions and computational modeling is a strength. Solid evidence is presented in support of the main claim that most of the biases in 2-D movement planning originate in misalignment between visuo-proprioceptive reference frames.

Reviewed by eLife

The inevitability and superfluousness of cell types in spatial cognition

1. Xiaoliang Luo
2. Robert M Mok
3. Bradley C Love

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study demonstrates that some degree of spatial tuning (e.g., place cells) and ability to decode spatial location emerges in sufficiently complex systems trained to process visual information. This intriguing observation challenges existing approaches and findings used in the study of spatial navigation. However, the strength of evidence regarding the nature and quality of spatial tuning, its compatibility with experimental data, and the overall interpretation of the study remains incomplete. This work will be of interest to the research community of spatial navigation.

Reviewed by eLife