Neuroscience

Endophilin A1 facilitates organization of the GABAergic postsynaptic machinery to maintain excitation-inhibition balance

1. Xue Chen
2. Deng Pan
3. Jia-Jia Liu
4. Yanrui Yang

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study presents a valuable finding on the molecular mechanisms that govern GABAergic inhibitory synapse function. The authors propose that Endophilin A1 serves as a novel regulator of GABAergic synapses by acting as a component of the inhibitory postsynaptic density. Although the study employs a variety of approaches to address this question, the current analysis is incomplete and requires further experiments to substantiate the claims fully. The findings are likely to interest a broad audience of scientists focusing on inhibitory synaptic transmission, the excitation-inhibition balance, and its disruption in disorders such as epilepsy.

Reviewed by eLife

DendroTweaks: An interactive approach for unraveling dendritic dynamics

1. Roman Makarov
2. Spyridon Chavlis
3. Panayiota Poirazi

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  Computational simulation of neuron function depends on a collection of morphological properties and ion channel biophysics. This manuscript introduces DendroTweaks, a useful web application and Python library that, compared to existing modeling tools, eases interactive graphical exploration, development, and validation of single-neuron models. The authors provide a convincing demonstration that their software aids with building intuition and rapid prototyping of biophysical models of neurons, which improves the accessibility of dendritic simulation.

Reviewed by eLife

PointTree: Automatic and accurate reconstruction of long-range axonal projections of single-neuron

1. Lin Cai
2. Taiyu Fan
3. Xuzhong Qu
4. Ying Zhang
5. Xianyu Gou
6. Quanwei Ding
7. Weihua Feng
8. Tingting Cao
9. Xiaohua Lv
10. Xiuli Liu
11. Qing Huang
12. Tingwei Quan
13. Shaoqun Zeng

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important paper takes a novel approach to the problem of automatically reconstructing long-range axonal projections from stacks of images. The key innovation is to separate the identification of sections of an axon from the statistical rules used to constrain global structure. The authors provide convincing evidence that their method is a significant improvement over existing measures in circumstances where the labelling of axons and dendrites is relatively dense, but the robustness to image noise remains to be tested.

Reviewed by eLife

Oxytocin restores context-specific hyperaltruistic preference through moral framing

1. Hong Zhang
2. Yinmei Ni
3. Jian Li

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study presents a valuable finding that altruistic tendency during moral decision-making is context-dependent (present in the gain domain but absent in the loss domain) and its absence in the loss domain can be restored by the neuropeptide oxytocin. However, the evidence supporting this claim is somewhat incomplete and would benefit from better overall framing and clarity on its approaches. Overall, this study will be of interest to social scientists and neuroscientists who work on moral decision-making and oxytocin.

Reviewed by eLife

Parvalbumin interneuron ErbB4 controls ongoing network oscillations and olfactory behaviors in mice

1. Bin Hu
2. Chi Geng
3. Feng Guo
4. Ying Liu
5. Ran Wang
6. You-Ting Chen
7. Xiao-Yu Hou

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This study provides useful information on the potential role of ERbB4 expression in parvalbumin-positive cells on olfactory behaviour and circuit dynamics in the olfactory bulb. The question is timely and novel, and findings could shed light on the critical role that ErbB4 may play in modulating olfactory bulb cell function and olfactory perception. Although the authors use a comprehensive set of experiments for their analysis, the evidence is incomplete as many of the experiments are underpowered and the model for selective knockout of ErbB4 in olfactory parvalbumin cells is not validated.

Reviewed by eLife

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

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