Neuroscience

eLife assessment

This valuable work discusses the phylogenetic conservation of the hippocampal region and primary sensory cortical regions in mammalian species. The authors propose that species-specific differences in behavior and mnemonic functions may be due to differences in cortico-hippocampal connectivity patterns. However, the manuscript, in its present form, is speculative, and the strength of evidence for this proposition is incomplete.

eLife assessment

This study explores the role of protein synthesis in spinal cord neurons in the regulation of chronic pain. Using innovative techniques, this valuable study outlines cell-type specific gene changes that occur in the spinal cord in the early and late phases of nerve injury. The presented evidence and methods used are, however, incomplete: there are several major technical and analysis issues that need to be addressed, and in addition, deeper gene expression analysis and additional controls would have strengthened the conclusions. This work will be of broad interest to biologists studying pathological plasticity in circuits.

eLife assessment

Kewenig et al. present a timely and valuable study that extends prior research investigating the neural basis of abstract and concrete concepts by examining how these concepts are processed in a naturalistic stimulus: during movie watching. The authors provide convincing evidence that the varying strength of the relationship between a word and a particular visual scene is associated with a change in the similarity between the brain regions active for concrete and abstract words. This work makes a contribution that will be of general interest within any field that faces the inherent challenge of quantifying context in a multimodal stimulus.

eLife assessment

The methods and findings of the current work are important and well-grounded. The strength of the evidence presented is convincing and backed up by rigorous methodology. The work, when elaborated on how to access the app, will have far-reaching implications for current clinical practice.

eLife assessment

This is an important paper that reports in vivo physiological abnormalities in the hippocampus of a rat model of traumatic brain injury (TBI). In this study, authors focused on changes in theta-gamma phase coupling and action potential entrainment to theta, phenomena hypothesized to be critical for cognition. While the authors provide solid evidence of deficits in both features post-TBI, the study would have been stronger with a more hypothesis-driven approach and consideration of alterations of the animal's behavioral state or sensorimotor deficits beyond memory processes.

eLife assessment

This valuable contribution follows past descriptions of ciliation defects, potentially linked to cholinergic neuronal dysfunction, associated with mutated G2019S Lrrk2 expression. The strength of evidence is considered solid and broadly supportive of the claims concerning well-characterized cilia changes in cholinergic neurons over time in the model; however, additional work may be required to define the specificity of the pRab12 antibody in the IHC technique, dependence on LRRK2, and clarification of the cilia phenotype in sporadic PD brains that exists (for the moment) only in a non-peer-reviewed pre-print, despite the prominence of these (preliminary) results highlighted in the abstract and text of the current manuscript. It is hoped that the authors will begin to address the feedback provided by the expert reviewers to help provide a more mechanistic basis for the audience interested in cholinergic defects associated with Parkinson's disease.

eLife assessment

This study presents an important finding on the spontaneous emergence of structured activity in artificial neural networks endowed with specific connectivity profiles. The evidence supporting the claims of the authors is convincing, providing direct comparison between the properties of the model and neural data although investigating more naturalistic inputs to the network would have strengthened the main claims. The work will be of interest to systems and computational neuroscientists studying the hippocampus and memory processes.

eLife assessment

This important computational study provides new insights into how neural dynamics may lead to time-evolving behavioral errors as observed in certain working-memory tasks. By combining ideas from efficient coding and attractor neural networks, the authors construct a two-module network model to capture the sensory-memory interactions and the distributed nature of working memory representations. They provide convincing evidence supporting that their two-module network, although none of the alternative circuit structures they considered can account for error patterns reported in orientation-estimation tasks with delays.

eLife assessment

This fundamental study reports the most comprehensive neurotransmitter atlas of any organism to date, using fluorescent knock-in reporter lines. The work is comprehensive, rigorous, and compelling. The tool will be used by broad audience of scientists interested in neuronal cell type differentiation and function, and could be a seminal reference in the field.

eLife assessment

Zhou et al. introduce cascading neural activations, known as 'replay', into a context-maintenance and retrieval model (CMR) that has been previously used to capture a range of memory phenomena. The proposed 'CMR-replay' model outperforms its CMR predecessor in a compelling way, and thus, the work makes important strides towards understanding the empirical memory literature as well as some of the cognitive functions of replay. Notable limitations include the scope of the model with respect to established aspects of memory consolidation, such as the stages and physiology of sleep, and the lack of integration with highly relevant associative and deep learning theories.