Neuroscience

eLife Assessment

This study presents a useful characterisation of the topographical organisation of the human pulvinar, an associative thalamic subregion crucial for visual perception and attention. The evidence supporting the conclusions is solid given the multimodal validation and replication across datasets, although even higher-resolution imaging data would have strengthened the study. The manuscript would also be strengthened by clarifying how the work extends previous assessments of thalamic connectivity and expanding the results with a more digested interpretation of the findings and validation of the segmentation quality. With these components strengthened, the work would be of interest to neuroscientists, neurologists, and neuropsychiatrists working on pulvinar functioning in health and disease.

eLife Assessment

This study presents useful quantitative insights into the prevalence of functionally clustered synaptic inputs on neuronal dendrites. The simple analytical calculations and computer simulations provide solid support for the main arguments. With improvements to the presentation and more realistic simulations (e.g. including the interaction between calcium and electric signals) the findings can lead to a more detailed understanding of how dendrites contribute to the computation of neuronal networks.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study describes an apparatus, workflow, and proof-of-concept data for a system to study social cooperation in marmosets, an increasingly popular primate model for neuroscience. The apparatus and methodology have clear and convincing advantages over conventional methods based on manual approaches. However, claims of faster social learning or of finer-grained behavioural analysis in this setup will require further corroboration.

eLife Assessment

This study introduces a useful extension to a recently proposed model of neural assembly activity. The extension was to add recurrent connections to the hidden units of the Restricted Boltzmann Machine. The authors show solid evidence that the new model outperforms their earlier model on both a simulated dataset and on whole-brain neural activity from zebrafish.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study combined multiple approaches to gain insight into why rising estradiol levels, by influencing hypothalamic neurons, ultimately lead to ovulation. The experimental data were solid, but evidence for the conclusion that the findings explain how estradiol acts in the intact female were incomplete because they lacked experimental conditions that better approximate physiological conditions. Nevertheless the work will be of interest to reproductive biologists working on ovarian biology and female fertility.

eLife Assessment

This study provides important new insight into chemosensation by showing that odors activate taste sensory neurons in Drosophila to promote feeding behaviors. Using a convincing methodology, combining behavior analysis, electrophysiology, and calcium imaging, Kazama and colleagues have deepened our understanding of how this phenomenon modulates the feeding behavior, although in some cases additional controls would strengthen the conclusions. Here, the authors articulate a clear instance of a novel neural and behavioral mechanism for gustatory receptors in an olfactory response making this work relevant to researchers studying chemosensation, sensory biology, and insect behavior.

eLife Assessment

This work by Hill and colleagues offers valuable insights into the development of learning abilities involved in action control from toddlerhood to adulthood. Data across 4 experiments provide solid evidence that in a task involving noisy but continuous action, the ability to learn reward probability develops gradually and may be limited by spatial processing and probabilistic reward reasoning. Questions remain about whether the task truly measures motor learning or more generic cognitive capacities, and whether a proposed model of reinforcement-based motor learning adequately captures the data.

eLife Assessment

This important study provides convincing evidence that emotional information in biological motion can induce different patterns of pupil responses, which could serve as a behavioral marker of an autistic trait. These results broaden our understanding of how emotional biological motion can automatically trigger physiological changes and reveal the potential of using emotional-modulated pupil response to facilitate the diagnosis of social cognitive disorders. The work will be of broad interest to cognitive neuroscience, psychology, affective neuroscience, and vision science.

eLife Assessment

Brain inflammation is a hallmark of multiple sclerosis. Using novel spatial transcriptomics methods, the authors provide solid evidence for a gradient of immune genes and inflammatory markers from the meninges toward the adjacent brain parenchyma in a mouse model. This important study advances our understanding of the mechanisms of brain damage in this autoimmune disease.

eLife Assessment

This important study shows that a splice variant of the kainate receptor Glu1-1a that inserts 15 amino acids in the extracellular N-terminal region substantially changes the channel's desensitization properties, the sensitivity to glutamate and kainate, and the effects of modulatory Neto proteins. In the revised paper the authors have clarified several points raised by reviewers but the structural portion of the study has not been improved and consequently, more data are needed to determine the molecular mechanism by which the insert changes the functional profile of the channel. Even so, these solid findings advance our understanding of splice variants among glutamate receptors and will be of interest to neuro- and cell-biologists and biophysicists in the field.