Neuroscience

eLife Assessment

This study makes an important contribution to the molecular mechanisms of neural circuit formation. The data convincingly show that the transcription factor Sp1 regulates ephrin-mediated axon guidance in the spinal cord. Although the authors show that Sp1 and its co-activators p300 and CBP are required to induce ephrin expression, additional discussion and/or experiments are needed to support the claims that Sp1 regulates cis-binding of Epha receptors, or that Sp1 controls ephrin expression in relevant motor neuron populations. The study will be of broad interest to developmental neurobiologists.

eLife Assessment

This study presents useful findings on the role of AFD thermosensory neurons in locomotory behaviours. The study appears solid with respect to parsing out the non-thermosensory role of AFD and also brings to light the role of AFD and AIB (linked through electrical synapses) in tactile-dependent locomotory modulation.

eLife Assessment

This study presents valuable findings on the role of specific dopamine neurons for aversive learning and modulation of innate behavior in Drosophila larvae. The authors present solid evidence backed up by detailed behavioral quantification and rigorous testing. Their data confirms previous findings and will be of interest to the learning and memory community.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.