eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. Dissecting oligogenic and polygenic indirect genetic effects through the lens of neighbor genotypic identity

   This article has 2 authors:

   1. Yasuhiro Sato
   2. Kosuke Hamazaki

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This useful study introduces a statistical model and accompanying software for jointly analysing how an organism's own genotype, and those of its neighbors, shape its traits (assessing both direct and indirect genetic effects), based on simulations and three datasets from plants. The implementation and its behavior on simulated data are solid, but the evidence that the approach is more powerful, more interpretable, or more novel than established alternatives is incomplete, because the authors do not benchmark against existing methods, nor validate the candidate genes they identify, nor test realistic scenarios in which neighbor effects are weaker than direct effects. The work will be of interest to quantitative geneticists and plant breeders studying competition among neighboring genotypes.

   Reviewed by eLife

2. Connections across regional glymphatic clearance, neural activity and amyloid-β deposition in cortex

   This article has 8 authors:

   1. Yifei Li
   2. Xiao Zhu
   3. Ying Zhou
   4. Xuting Zhang
   5. Ziyu Zhou
   6. Kai Wei
   7. Jianzhong Sun
   8. Min Lou

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     The framework of the study - with the integration of multiple levels of analysis, glymphatic MRI, transcriptomics, functional MRI, and public amyloid maps, in one framework - is clever. The assertion that regional amyloid vulnerability may depend not just on neural activity alone, but on whether clearance is appropriately matched to activity is an interesting and novel concept. However, the chosen approach to imaging glymphatic clearance relies on indirect inferences from a small subgroup. In its current form, the main conclusions of this study are therefore incompletely supported.

   Reviewed by eLife

3. Intersecting experimental evolution and CRISPR screens to identify novel toxin resistance loci

   This article has 11 authors:

   1. Michele Marconcini
   2. Steeve Cruchet
   3. Srishti Goswami
   4. Raghuvir Viswanatha
   5. Matthew Butnaru
   6. Joydeep De
   7. Camilla Roselli
   8. Dafni Hadjieconomou
   9. Norbert Perrimon
   10. Stephanie E. Mohr
   11. Richard Benton

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This valuable study advances our understanding of genes contributing to Drosophila resistance to octanoic acid, a primary toxin present in Morinda fruit, which is the natural host plant for Drosophila sechellia, a species that has become a model for understanding evolutionary specialization. The authors provide solid results from an original combination of experimental evolution and cell-based CRISPR screens. This work will be of interest to the Drosophila community and researchers interested in the genetic basis of polygenic traits.

   Reviewed by eLife

4. A Single-Cell Signaling Atlas of Spinal Cord BDNF Responses Reveals Determinants Beyond Receptor Expression

   This article has 6 authors:

   1. Jonathon M. Sewell
   2. Autumn C. Bissett
   3. Grace Lee
   4. Eli R. Zunder
   5. Bettina Winckler
   6. Chris D. Deppmann

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This study of BDNF signaling in heterogeneous spinal cord cultures provides a fundamental conceptual advance by demonstrating that cell identity and maturation state, rather than receptor stoichiometry alone, ultimately determine how a trophic message is interpreted, in a framework the authors call "prepared competence." The evidence is compelling, with the discrete subpopulation behavior, the maturation-dependent acquisition of signaling competence, and the dissociation between receptor abundance and signaling output emerging clearly from the high-dimensional dataset. This study will be of interest to neurobiologists as well as cell biologists who study the molecular basis of cell signaling.

   Reviewed by eLife

5. Integrin-deficient T cell leukemia accumulates in the central nervous system

   This article has 12 authors:

   1. Samantha Y. Lux
   2. Cynthia Chen
   3. Bibi S. Subhan
   4. Hyunsoo Chung
   5. Martyna Okuniewska
   6. Asha Y. Caslin
   7. Kathleen A. Martin
   8. Jennifer K. Schiavo
   9. Jonah B. Vernejoul
   10. Robert C. Froemke
   11. Michael Cammer
   12. Susan R. Schwab

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This study presents an important finding that loss or blockade of key integrins unexpectedly enhances central nervous system accumulation of T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia cells and may increase their sensitivity to chemotherapy. The evidence is convincing, supported by well-designed in vivo models, CRISPR-based perturbations, competitive assays, imaging, and complementary therapeutic experiments. However, the mechanistic basis linking integrin loss, altered spatial distribution, and increased proliferation remains incompletely defined, and the translational implications would be strengthened by additional survival studies and validation in more clinically relevant models.

   Reviewed by eLife

6. LiFE, a multimodal circadian intervention, improves sleep, glycemic control, and recognition memory

   This article has 13 authors:

   1. Yu Shi
   2. Stephen D Rozen
   3. Jordan T Swint
   4. Williams A McRoberts
   5. Sophia N McCurry
   6. Ricardo Salinas
   7. Elizabeth G Moffett
   8. Clara M Pollock
   9. Lila R Goldstein
   10. Soraya S Katzev
   11. Matthew E Carter
   12. George S Bloom
   13. Ali D Güler

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This study provides important findings regarding the efficacy of a chronotherapeutic protocol (termed LiFE), combining timed light, food, and exercise exposure in improving several physiological and health metrics in a rodent model. The evidence advanced in wild-type mice is solid but inconclusive and underpowered when applied to two transgenic mouse models of Alzheimer's Disease. Additionally, the potential of such protocols in clinical human studies is an open question. Overall, the study suggests that LiFE intervention may have positive effects on metabolic and brain health.

   Reviewed by eLife

7. Meaning-based guidance of attention in rhesus monkeys during naturalistic scene viewing

   This article has 7 authors:

   1. Orhan Soyuhos
   2. Taylor R Hayes
   3. Wenqing Hu
   4. Taylor P Hamel
   5. Brinda Sevak
   6. John M Henderson
   7. Xiaomo Chen

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This valuable study shows that macaque monkeys preferentially fixate regions in natural scenes that are classified as "meaningful" by a computational model - an earlier model that was developed to identify locations that are semantically informative to humans - suggesting that overt attention to structured visual content is shared across primates. However, support is incomplete for the stronger claim that macaques are guided by semantic meaning, which is confounded by lower-level visual features that co-vary with it and by methodological limitations that complicate interpretation. If the semantic interpretation were more reliably established, the significance of the findings would increase, as they would connect the human cognitive process of scene understanding to neural circuit mechanisms accessible in non-human primates.

   Reviewed by eLife

8. Human and mouse cerebellar inhibitory circuits in dystonic crisis and their modulation with therapeutic stimulation

   This article has 7 authors:

   1. Alejandro G. Rey Hipolito
   2. Michael P. Dew
   3. Jason S. Gill
   4. Janelle E. Allen
   5. Karissa A. Chesky
   6. Mariam Hull
   7. Roy V. Sillitoe

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This important study identifies inhibitory cerebellar nuclei neurons as drivers of dystonic crisis and shows that their modulation can both induce and alleviate severe motor symptoms, proposing a cerebello-thalamic circuit mechanism with clear therapeutic relevance. The evidence is convincing, supported by rigorous bidirectional optogenetic manipulations, iCNN-to-CL thalamic monosynaptic tracing, and deep brain stimulation experiments, although the specificity of the genetic strategy remains to be fully resolved. The study will be of broad interest to neuroscientists and clinicians working on movement disorders and circuit-based therapies.

   Reviewed by eLife

9. Tonic feedback motor commands predict visuomotor learning

   This article has 3 authors:

   1. Yuto Makino
   2. Toshiki Kobayashi
   3. Daichi Nozaki

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This valuable study rigorously examines how motor learning is influenced by the feedback response to a previous movement error. Using a series of well-conducted experiments, the authors provide solid evidence that the learning response following a cursor jump does not depend on the timing of the perturbation and is influenced by the tonic component of the feedback responses. Further work is needed to determine whether this generalizes to other perturbation paradigms and to more fully understand the relationship between learning and the tonic and phasic components of the feedback response.

   Reviewed by eLife

10. A surviving beta cell subpopulation enriched in patients with T1D

    This article has 3 authors:

    1. Maxwell Spurrell
    2. John S Tsang
    3. Kevan C Herold

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      eLife Assessment

      This study leverages publicly available datasets to confirm, validate and extend the knowledge of the transcriptional profile of beta cells that resist destruction in Type 1 diabetes. The significance of the findings is considered valuable as they could be used for engineering stem cell-derived islets and for identifying therapeutic targets to preserve beta cell survival. The strength of the evidence is solid, in that the findings are supported by a sophisticated bioinformatic analysis pipeline and are largely consistent with and extend the existing literature.

    Reviewed by eLife