Neuroscience

Leveraging place field repetition to understand positional versus nonpositional inputs to hippocampal field CA1

1. William Hockeimer
2. Ruo-Yah Lai
3. Maanasa Natrajan
4. William Snider
5. James J. Knierim

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This is a valuable work that convincingly reveals that place cells in the hippocampus that exhibit repeated firing fields incorporate information about non-positional variables in each firing field. They reveal that individual firing fields of a single place cell can exhibit tuning to different head orientations, suggesting hippocampal neurons are flexible in terms of how they incorporate non-positional inputs.

Reviewed by eLife

Oral Administration of Boldine Reduces Spare Nerve Injury-Induced Neuropathic Pain

1. Jiangping Pan
2. Carlos A. Toro
3. Christine Chow
4. Yorley Duarte
5. Juan C. Sáez
6. Christopher P. Cardozo
7. Wei Zhao

Reviewed by Arcadia Science

Spatial frequency adaptation modulates population receptive field sizes

1. Ecem Altan
2. Catherine A Morgan
3. Steven C Dakin
4. D. Sam Schwarzkopf

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study presents an important finding regarding a significant, understudied question: How does adaptation affect spatial frequency processing in the human visual cortex? Using both psychophysics and neuroimaging the authors conclude that adaptation induces changes in perceived spatial frequency and population receptive field size (pRF) size, depending on the adaptation state. Specifically, adapting to a low spatial frequency increases perceived spatial frequency and results in smaller pRFs, whereas adapting to a high spatial frequency decreases perceived spatial frequency and leads to broader pRFs. These results offer an explanation for previous seemingly conflicting findings regarding the effects of adaptation on size illusions and the evidence is solid; however, including a clear, direct comparison between pRF sizes in the high-adapted and low-adapted conditions would further strengthen the argument.

Reviewed by eLife

Molecular characterization of gustatory second-order neurons reveals integrative mechanisms of gustatory and metabolic information

1. Rubén Mollá-Albaladejo
2. Manuel Jiménez-Caballero
3. Juan A. Sánchez-Alcañiz

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study presents valuable insights into the organization of second-order circuits for gustatory neurons, particularly how they integrate opposing taste inputs and the metabolic states that regulate feeding behavior. An elegant, compelling combination of multiple techniques discovered the target neurons for gustatory integration. However, the functional and behavioral evidence for the function of these neurons is incomplete.

Reviewed by eLife

An altered cell-specific subcellular distribution of translesion synthesis DNA polymerase kappa (POLK) in aging neurons

1. Mofida Abdelmageed
2. Premkumar Palanisamy
3. Victoria Vernail
4. Yuval Silberman
5. Shilpi Paul
6. Anirban Paul

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  Abdelmageed et al. demonstrate POLK expression in neurons and report an important observation that POLK exhibits an age-dependent change in subcellular localization, from the nucleus in young tissue to the cytoplasm in old tissue. Despite potentially exciting and novel findings, many of the authors' claims are provided with incomplete support (e.g. lack of validation of the POLK antibody, characterization of the subcellular compartment, etc).

Reviewed by eLife

Adaptive Integration of Perceptual and Reward Information in an Uncertain World

1. Prashanti Ganesh
2. Radoslaw M Cichy
3. Nicolas W Schuck
4. Carsten Finke
5. Rasmus Bruckner

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This valuable study by Ganesh and colleagues examined how both the value and salience of sensory information can affect economic decision-making. The results provide insights into how different sources of uncertainty found in the real world, including those related to the perception of objects and those related to values associated with objects, can together influence decision-making behavior in systematic ways. The evidence is solid but overlaps with previous studies and could be improved by clarifying novelty and experimental details and considering additional models.

Reviewed by eLife

Implicit motor adaptation patterns in a redundant motor task manipulating a stick with both hands

1. Toshiki Kobayashi
2. Daichi Nozaki

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study presents a valuable finding on how the sensorimotor control system deals with redundancy within our body, based on a novel bimanual task. The evidence supporting the authors' claims is convincing, as demonstrated over four different experiments. The work will be of interest to researchers from the motor control community and related fields, and further investigation into the interpretation of the findings could increase the generalisation of the study to a broader audience.

Reviewed by eLife

Cortical neuroprosthesis-mediated functional ipsilateral control of locomotion in rats with spinal cord hemisection

1. Elena Massai
2. Marco Bonizzato
3. Isley De Jesus
4. Roxanne Drainville
5. Marina Martinez

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  The contributions of ipsilateral cortical pathways to motor control are yet not fully understood. Here, the authors present important insights into their role in locomotion following unilateral spinal cord injury. Their data provide convincing evidence in rats that stimulation of ipsilateral motor cortex improves the injured side's ability to support weight and leads to improved locomotion, a result that may inspire new treatments for spinal or cerebral injuries.

Reviewed by eLife

Molecular, cellular, and developmental organization of the mouse vomeronasal organ at single cell resolution

1. Max Henry Hills
2. Limei Ma
3. Ai Fang
4. Thelma Chiremba
5. Seth Malloy
6. Allison R Scott
7. Anoja G Perera
8. C Ron Yu

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  The manuscript by Hills, et al. presents data that support multiple conclusions regarding the gene expression patterns of cells, especially chemosensory neurons. The evidence is largely solid, with transcriptomic analysis combined and validated by spatially resolved expression in tissue sections, but is incomplete in other ways with some claims not fully supported. This large-scale single-cell transcriptomics dataset is an important resource, alongside a thorough exploration of the molecular features of the different cell types within the mouse vomeronasal organ, including expression of chemosensory receptors.

Reviewed by eLife

Circadian regulation of endoplasmic reticulum calcium response in cultured mouse astrocytes

1. Ji Eun Ryu
2. Kyu-Won Shim
3. Hyun Woong Roh
4. Minsung Park
5. Jae-Hyung Lee
6. Eun Young Kim

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This work describes a circadian regulation in the expression of HERP, a regulator of endoplasmic reticulum calcium, in primary astrocytic cultures. This work is important because it highlights the potential importance of circadian rhythms in astrocytes, even though making a direct comparison between these rhythms in vitro and in vivo remains challenging. The technical approaches used in this work (RNA-seq, siRNA, Ca2+ imaging) are a solid support for data interpretation.

Reviewed by eLife