Neuroscience

eLife Assessment

This valuable study presents findings on the role of the small GTPase Rab3A in homeostatic plasticity. While the study provides solid evidence for a requirement of Rab3A in homeostatic up-scaling in cultured mouse neurons, it does not provide a model of how Rab3A is involved in homeostatic plasticity. The work will be of interest to researchers in the field of synaptic transmission and synaptic plasticity.

eLife Assessment

This valuable work uses serial block face electron microscopy to reconstruct detailed morphologies of large populations of Drosophila sensory neurons to determine the degree of diversity both within and across distinct neuronal populations. The authors convincingly show that there is considerable morphological diversity even within classes, and develop testable hypotheses about how arbors are optimized for particular sensory function and physiology. This work will be of interest to biologists working in physiology, insect chemosensation, and neuroscience.

eLife Assessment

This manuscript reports a useful computational study of information encoding across the monkey prefrontal and pre-motor cortices during decision making. While many of the conclusions are supported with solid analyses, the evidence for the main interpretation of the results, the role of an information bottleneck across areas, is not complete. The results will be of interest to a systems and computational neuroscience audience.

eLife Assessment

Endothelial cell-specific loss of TGF-beta signaling in mice leads to CNS vascular defects, specifically impairing retinal development and promoting immune cell infiltration. The data are solid, showing that loss of TGF-beta signaling triggers vascular inflammation and attracts immune cells specific to CNS vasculature, but there are issues with the single-nucleus RNA sequencing of immune cells. These findings are valuable, highlighting TGF-beta's role in maintaining vascular-immune homeostasis and its therapeutic potential in neurovascular inflammatory diseases.

eLife Assessment

This important study provides converging results from complementary neuroimaging and behavioral experiments to identify human brain regions involved in representing regular geometric shapes. Geometric shape concepts are universally present across diverse human cultures and possibly essential for unique human capabilities such as numerical cognition and symbolic reasoning, and identifying the brain networks involved in geometric shape representation is of broad interest to researchers studying human visual perception, reasoning, and cognitive development. The provided experimental evidence regarding the presence of geometric shape regularity representation in dorsal parietal and prefrontal cortex is solid, but the claimed link with mathematical reasoning, the influence of experimental tasks, and the role of experience in driving geometric shape representation in both humans and artificial vision models require further elucidation.

eLife Assessment

The study investigated the effects of the peptide galanin on brain Ca2+ activity in zebrafish, which provides a useful model organism for whole-brain imaging because of its transparency. They found that galanin has distinct effects on hyperactivity and expression of galanin changes after activity increases. The strength of evidence was incomplete particularly for some of the conclusions regarding the use of convulsants and relevance to epilepsy because of limitations to the methods and interpretations of results.

eLife Assessment

The songbird vocal motor nucleus HVC contains cells that project to the basal ganglia, the auditory system, or to downstream vocal motor structures. In this fundamental study, the authors conduct optogenetic circuit mapping to clarify how four distinct inputs to HVC act on these distinct HVC cell types. They provide compelling evidence that all long range projections engage inhibitory circuits in HVC and can also exhibit cell-type specific preferences in monosynaptic input strength. Understanding HVC at this microcircuit level is critical for constraining models of song learning and production.

eLife Assessment

The authors provide a valuable contribution by documenting the role of microglia in pruning the axon terminals of AgRP neurons. The analysis of microglial axonal pruning is solid; however, the analysis of the effects inhibiting microglia on subsequent food consumption is not fully complete.

eLife Assessment

By using sparse Cre-dependent deletion of GluN1 subunit, in vitro quadruple patch clamp recordings, and pharmacological interventions, the authors show that spike timing dependent plasticity at between L5 synapses in the mouse visual cortex is: (i) dependent on presynaptic NMDA receptors; (ii) mediated by non-ionotropic NMDA receptor signaling, and (iii) reliant on presynaptic JNK2/Syntaxin-1a interactions. These fundamental findings advance our understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying spike time dependent plasticity. The data are compelling and are supported by the elegant application of sophisticated experimental approaches.

eLife Assessment

This useful study presents a biologically realistic, large-scale cortical model of the rat's non-barrel somatosensory cortex, investigating synaptic plasticity of excitatory connections under varying patterns of external activations and characterizing relations between network architecture and plasticity outcomes. The model offers an impressive level of biological detail, addressing many aspects of the cellular and network anatomy and properties, and investigating their relationships to the biologically plausible plasticity. The numerical simulations appear to be well executed and documented, providing an excellent resource to the community. The evidence supporting the main conclusions is solid with results being more observational in nature, and minor weaknesses relating to the lack of explanatory power of causal relationships and mechanisms.