Neuroscience

GPRC6A as a novel kokumi receptor responsible for enhanced taste preferences by ornithine

1. Takashi Yamamoto
2. Kayoko Ueji
3. Haruno Mizuta
4. Chizuko Inui-Yamamoto
5. Natsuko Kumamoto
6. Yasuhiro Shibata
7. Shinya Ugawa

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  In this valuable study, the authors used rats to determine the receptor for a food-related perception that has been characterized in humans. The data are solid in terms of methods and analysis: the data show that this stimulus (ornithine) has some additive effects in terms of increasing preference and taste response in rats when it is mixed with other more common taste stimuli. Therefore, the combinations of experiments generally support (but do not conclusively prove) the hypothesis that the "kokumi" taste effect elicited by this stimulus in humans may be mediated by the specific receptor examined in the study.

Reviewed by eLife

Master control genes in the regeneration of rod photoreceptors from endogenous progenitor cells in zebrafish retina

1. Eyad Shihabeddin
2. Abirami Santhanam
3. Stephan Tetenborg
4. Alexandra L Aronowitz
5. Haichao Wei
6. Guoting Qin
7. Chengzhi Cai
8. Jiaqian Wu
9. John O’Brien

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  Shihabeddin et al utilized single-cell RNA-Seq analysis of adult P23H zebrafish animals to identify transcription factors (e2fs, Prdm1a, Sp1) expressed selectively in neural progenitors and immature rods, and validated their necessity for regeneration using morphant analysis. The finding is useful, and the evidence is convincing. The deeper mechanistic analysis could further strengthen the current work by (1) distinguishing developmental vs regenerative transcriptional factors, (2) the addition of matched scATAC-Seq data, and (3) integration with single-cell multiome data from developing retina.

Reviewed by eLife

Aberration correction in long GRIN lens-based microendoscopes for extended field-of-view two-photon imaging in deep brain regions

1. Andrea Sattin
2. Chiara Nardin
3. Simon Daste
4. Monica Moroni
5. Innem Reddy
6. Carlo Liberale
7. Stefano Panzeri
8. Alexander Fleischmann
9. Tommaso Fellin

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This valuable study builds on previous work by the authors by presenting a potentially key method for correcting optical aberrations in GRIN lens-based microendoscopes used for imaging deep brain regions. By combining simulations and experiments, the authors provide convincing evidence showing that the obtained field of view is significantly increased with corrected, versus uncorrected microendoscopes. Because the approach described in this paper does not require any microscope or software modifications, it can be readily adopted by neuroscientists who wish to image neuronal activity deep in the brain.

Reviewed by eLife

Cingulate cortex shapes early postnatal development of social vocalizations

1. Gurueswar Nagarajan
2. Denis Matrov
3. Anna C Pearson
4. Cecil C Yen
5. Sean P Bradley
6. Yogita Chudasama

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study investigates the influence of the cingulate cortex on the development of the social vocalizations of marmoset monkeys by making bilateral lesions of this brain area in neonatal animals. The evidence supporting the authors' claims is convincing. The work will be of broad interest to cognitive neuroscientists, speech and language researchers, and primate neuroscientists.

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Selective attention and sensitivity to auditory disturbances in a virtually real classroom

1. Orel Levy
2. Shirley Libman Hackmon
3. Yair Zvilichovsky
4. Adi Korisky
5. Aurelie Bidet-Caulet
6. Julie B Schweitzer
7. Elana Zion Golumbic

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study investigates how AD(H)D affects attention using neural and physiological measures in a Virtual Reality (VR) environment. Solid evidence is provided that individuals diagnosed with AD(H)D differ from control participants in both the encoding of the target sound and the encoding of acoustic interference. The VR paradigm here can potentially bridge lab experiments and real-life experiments. The study is of potential interests to researchers who are interested in auditory cognition, education, and ADHD.

Reviewed by eLife

Dynamics of striatal action selection and reinforcement learning

1. Jack W Lindsey
2. Jeffrey Markowitz
3. Winthrop F Gillis
4. Sandeep R Datta
5. Ashok Litwin-Kumar

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  The authors present a biologically plausible framework for action selection and learning in the striatum that is a fundamental advance in our understanding of possible neural implementations of reinforcement learning in the basal ganglia. They provide compelling evidence that their model can reconcile realistic neural plasticity rules with the distinct functional roles of the direct and indirect spiny projection neurons of the striatum, recapitulating experimental findings regarding the activity profiles of these distinct neural populations and explaining a key aspect of striatal function.

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Gender–specific Single Transcript Level Atlas of Vasopressin and its Receptor (AVPR1a) in the Mouse Brain

1. Anisa Gumerova
2. Georgii Pevnev
3. Funda Korkmaz
4. Uliana Cheliadinova
5. Guzel Burganova
6. Darya Vasilyeva
7. Liam Cullen
8. Orly Barak
9. Farhath Sultana
10. Weibin Zhou
11. Steven Sims
12. Victoria Laurencin
13. Tal Frolinger
14. Se-Min Kim
15. Ki A Goosens
16. Tony Yuen
17. Mone Zaidi
18. Vitaly Ryu

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This work presents an atlas of vasopressin (AVP) and its receptor AVPR1a in mouse brains using RNAscope to map single transcript expressions of Avp and Avpr1a across various brain regions in males and females. The findings are valuable in that they identify brain regions expressing Avpr1a mRNA transcript. The impact of findings is decreased by incomplete analysis of the data due to limited description of Avpr1a mRNA distribution within brain regions and limited statistical inference.

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Top-down feedback matters: Functional impact of brainlike connectivity motifs on audiovisual integration

1. Mashbayar Tugsbayar
2. Mingze Li
3. Eilif B Muller
4. Blake Richards

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This valuable study investigates the computational role of top-down feedback -- a property that is found in biological circuits -- in Artificial Neural Network (ANN) models of the neocortex. Using hierarchical recurrent ANNs in an audiovisual integration task, the authors show a visual bias consistent with that observed in human perception, which mildly improves learning speed. While the study offers a tool that is of value for studying top-down feedback in cortical models, with the potential to inspire other fields (e.g. machine learning), the presented evidence for a general framework of deep learning architectures that predict behavior is incomplete, and the methods section lacks sufficient detail in terms of hyperparameter choice and network structures.

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Decoding semantics from natural speech using human intracranial EEG

1. Camille R. C. Pescatore
2. Haoyu Zhang
3. Alex E. Hadjinicolaou
4. Angelique C. Paulk
5. John D. Rolston
6. R. Mark Richardson
7. Ziv M. Williams
8. Jing Cai
9. Sydney S. Cash

Reviewed by PREreview

Cholesterol taste avoidance in Drosophila melanogaster

1. Roshani Nhuchhen Pradhan
2. Craig Montell
3. Youngseok Lee

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This useful study provides convincing evidence that Drosophila can taste cholesterol through a subset of bitter-sensing gustatory receptor neurons, and that flies avoid high-cholesterol food. However, the same receptors have been previously found to be involved in the detection of multiple seemingly unrelated chemicals, and the reported expression patterns of these receptors contradict past reports. These caveats are not mentioned in the paper, raising critical concerns about the study's conclusions.

Reviewed by eLife