Neuroscience

Excitation–inhibition balance controls coupling stability and network reorganization in a plastic Kuramoto model

1. Satoshi Kuroki
2. Kenji Mizuseki

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This useful study investigates how plasticity and homeostatic adaptation can lead to the emergence of synchronization patterns associated with different sleep phases. The ideas are novel and interesting, but the evidence at present remains incomplete. Further work is needed to determine whether the reported states persist for larger system sizes, longer integration times, and how robust the results are to different initial conditions.

Reviewed by eLife

The openretina Project: Collaborative Retina Modelling Across Datasets and Species

1. Federico D’Agostino
2. Thomas Zenkel
3. Baptiste Lorenzi
4. Michaela Vystrčilová
5. Dominic Gonschorek
6. Samuel Suhai
7. Samuele Virgili
8. Alexander S Ecker
9. Olivier Marre
10. Larissa Höfling
11. Thomas Euler
12. Matthias Bethge

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This manuscript presents openretina, an open-source platform that integrates retinal datasets, model training, benchmarking, and in silico analysis tools within a unified framework. The resource is valuable because it addresses long-standing challenges in reproducibility, accessibility, and cross-study comparison in computational retina research, while providing a foundation for community-driven model development and evaluation. The supporting evidence is solid, with the authors demonstrating a functional and well-documented platform across multiple datasets and species, although a clearer discussion of model interpretability, current performance limitations, and data quality standards would strengthen the resource.

Reviewed by eLife

Neurons, Muscles, and Venom: Elucidating a Neural-to-Secretory Pathway in Cephalopod Predation

1. Kim N. Kirchhoff
2. José Ramón Pardos-Blas
3. Amy Courtney
4. Belkes Stambouli
5. Andrew L. Sugarman
6. Daniel J. Vanselow
7. Melvin Williams
8. Christian Carrasco
9. Mariam Gelashvilli
10. Cecilia Cuddy
11. Praveena Naidu
12. William R. Schafer
13. Keith C. Cheng
14. Eve Seuntjens
15. Mandë Holford

Reviewed by Review Commons

Symmetric brain-liver circuits mediate lateralized regulation of hepatic glucose output in mice

1. Zhonglong Wang
2. Xiangfei Gong
3. Li Jiang
4. Ke Wang
5. Xinyuan Sun
6. Yingxi Li
7. Mengtong Ran
8. Yanshen Chen
9. Hongdong Wang
10. Xuehui Chu
11. Shun Wang
12. Junjie Wang
13. Xiao Zheng
14. Haiping Hao
15. Hao Xie

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study combines anatomical tracing, tissue clearing, and functional manipulations to demonstrate lateralized brainstem control of hepatic glucose metabolism and identify a site of sympathetic nerve crossover supplying the liver. The evidence supporting the anatomical organization of hepatic sympathetic innervation is compelling, and the functional studies provide solid support for a role of asymmetric sympathetic outflow in regulating glucose homeostasis. While some uncertainty remains regarding the contribution of sensory innervation and the extent to which these findings generalize beyond mice, the work provides an invaluable advance in understanding neural regulation of liver metabolism.

Reviewed by eLife

Behavioural and neurogenetic evidence for emotion primitives in the fruit fly Drosophila: insights from the Open Field Test

1. Yi Lueningschroer-Wang
2. Emilia Derksen
3. Hannah Wilde
4. Maria Steigmeier
5. Christian Wegener

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This useful study reports findings that support the use of the Open Field Test in Drosophila as a model to study "emotion-like states", which are behavioral responses to several stressful or aversive treatments, and resilience upon their subsequent removal. Behavioral data, by employing established stress-causing treatments and genetic manipulations, are solid. The main advance of this work over previous Drosophila work using a similar experimental setup is systematic analysis of various stressors.

Reviewed by eLife

Arm Control and its Recovery after Selective Lesions of Sensorimotor Cortex and the Red Nucleus: A Kinematic Study in Non-Human Primates

1. Anna Baines
2. Annie Poll
3. Anne ME Baker
4. John W Krakauer
5. Stuart N Baker

• Curated by eLife

  eLife Assessment

  This important study describes how selective lesions of key cortical and subcortical motor areas affect reaching actions in macaque monkeys. The results will be of interest to both basic and clinical researchers studying the neural control of movement. Kinematic analysis of movement quality is solid but could be improved by considering other metrics, especially those that relate to grasping. Evidence for the general claims related to the role of specific motor areas is incomplete because the lesions did not fully eliminate any single area while simultaneously involving neighbouring areas.

Reviewed by eLife