eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. Concatenated Modular BK Channel Constructs Reveal Divergent Stoichiometry in Gating Control by LRRC26 (γ1), Pore, and Selectivity Filter

   This article has 3 authors:

   1. Guanxing Chen
   2. Qin Li
   3. Jiusheng Yan

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     In this important contribution, Yan and colleagues describe a powerful and compelling strategy to generate concatamers of the BK channel and their fusion constructs with the auxiliary gamma subunits, which allows exploring contributions of individual subunits of the tetrameric channel to its gating and the study of heteromeric channel complexes of defined composition. Distinct examples are presented, which illustrate great diversity in the stoichiometric control of BK channel gating, depending on the site and nature of molecular perturbations. The molecular approaches could be extended to other membrane proteins whose N and C termini face opposite sides of the membrane.

   Reviewed by eLife

2. Smed-pou4-2 regulates mechanosensory neuron regeneration and function in planarians

   This article has 8 authors:

   1. Ryan A McCubbin
   2. Mohammad A Auwal
   3. Shengzhou Wang
   4. Sarai Alvarez Zepeda
   5. Roman Sasik
   6. Robert W Zeller
   7. Kelly G Ross
   8. Ricardo M Zayas

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This is a valuable study that explores the role of the conserved transcription factor POU4-2 in the maintenance, regeneration, and function of planarian mechanosensory neurons. The authors provide solid evidence provided by gene expression and functional studies to demonstrate that POU4-2 is required for the maintenance and regeneration of functional mechanosensory neurons in planarians. Furthermore, the authors identify conserved genes associated with human auditory and rheosensory neurons as potential targets of this transcription factor.

   Reviewed by eLife

3. The Anti-Inflammatory Role of GPNMB in Post-Traumatic Osteoarthritis

   This article has 9 authors:

   1. Asaad A Al-Adlaan
   2. Bryson Cook
   3. Solorzano Z Ernesto
   4. Nazar J Hussein
   5. Fatima A Jaber
   6. Trinity Kronk
   7. Salvatore Frangiamore
   8. Hope C Ball
   9. Fayez F Safadi

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This study offers useful findings demonstrating the cartilage-protective effects of osteoactivin in inflammatory experimental models. The study provides compelling evidence that osteoactivin may serve as a promising therapeutic target for inflammatory joint diseases.

   Reviewed by eLife

4. Atypical collective oscillatory activity in cardiac tissue uncovered by optogenetics

   This article has 7 authors:

   1. Alexander S Teplenin
   2. Nina N Kudryashova
   3. Rupamanjari Majumder
   4. Antoine AF de Vries
   5. Alexander V Panfilov
   6. Daniël Pijnappels
   7. Tim De Coster

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This important work provides mechanistic insights into the development of cardiac arrhythmia and establishes a new experimental use case for optogenetics in studying cardiac electrophysiology. The agreement between computational models and experimental observations provides a convincing level of evidence that wave train-induced pacemaker activity can originate in continuously depolarized tissue, with the limitation that there may be differences between depolarization arising from constant optogenetic stimulation, as opposed to pathophysiological tissue depolarization. Future experiments in vivo and in other tissue preparations would extend the generality of these findings.

   Reviewed by eLife

5. Non-equilibrium strategies for ligand specificity in signaling networks

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Andrew Goetz
   2. Jeremy Barrios
   3. Ralitsa Madsen
   4. Purushottam Dixit

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This study presents a valuable finding about how receptor-ligand binding pathways with multi-site phosphorylation can show non-monotonic responses to increasing ligand affinity and to kinase activity. The authors provide convincing evidence through a simple ordinary differential equation model of such signaling networks with the key new ingredient of ligand-induced receptor degradation. The work will be of interest to physicists and biologists working on signal transduction and biological information processing.

   Reviewed by eLife

6. Estimating probabilities of malaria importation in southern Mozambique through P. falciparum genomics and mobility patterns

   This article has 33 authors:

   1. Arnau Pujol
   2. Arlindo Chidimatembue
   3. Clemente da Silva
   4. Simone Boene
   5. Henriques Mbeve
   6. Pau Cisteró
   7. Carla García-Fernández
   8. Arnau Vañó-Boira
   9. Dário Tembisse
   10. José Inácio
   11. Glória Matambisso
   12. Fabião Luis
   13. Nelo Ndimande
   14. Humberto Munguambe
   15. Lidia Nhamussua
   16. Wilson Simone
   17. Andrés Aranda-Díaz
   18. Manuel García-Ulloa
   19. Neide Canana
   20. Maria Tusell
   21. Júlia Montaña
   22. Laura Fuente-Soro
   23. Khalid Ussene Bapu
   24. Maxwell Murphy
   25. Bernardete Rafael
   26. Eduard Rovira-Vallbona
   27. Caterina Guinovart
   28. Bryan Greenhouse
   29. Sonia Maria Enosse
   30. Francisco Saúte
   31. Pedro Aide
   32. Baltazar Candrinho
   33. Alfredo Mayor

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This study introduces a useful method to estimate the probability that a malaria case is imported and to identify the geographic origin of parasites by using a Bayesian approach that integrates epidemiological, travel, and genetic data. The authors provide convincing evidence that the approach can reliably identify the main sources of malaria imports. This work will be of great interest to the area of genomic epidemiology and public health strategies aiming to eliminate malaria.

   Reviewed by eLife

7. Working memory shapes neural geometry in human EEG over learning

   This article has 7 authors:

   1. Michał J Wójcik
   2. Amy Li
   3. Dante Wasmuht
   4. Jake P Stroud
   5. Mark G Stokes
   6. Nicholas E Myers
   7. Laurence T Hunt

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     The findings are valuable, given that they highlight the flexible and future-oriented nature of working memory. However, the evidence for the claims about context/color generalization, behavioural relevance of context decoding, dimensionality reduction, neural geometry, the XOR representation, and the specific contribution of working memory is incomplete. The work could be reframed in terms of prospective remapping.

   Reviewed by eLife

8. The influence of nucleus accumbens shell D1 and D2 neurons on outcome-specific Pavlovian instrumental transfer

   This article has 6 authors:

   1. Octavia Soegyono
   2. Elise Pepin
   3. Beatrice K Leung
   4. Billy C Chieng
   5. Bernard W Balleine
   6. Vincent Laurent

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This study provides novel and convincing evidence that both dopamine D1 and D2 expressing neurons in the nucleus accumbens shell are crucial for the expression of cue-guided action selection, a fundamental component of decision-making. The research is systematic and rigorous in using optogenetic inhibition of either D1- or D2-expressing medium spiny neurons in the NAc shell to reveal attenuation of sensory-specific Pavlovian-Instrumental transfer, while largely sparing value-based decision on an instrumental task. Findings in this report build on prior research and resolve some conflicts in the literature regarding decision making.

   Reviewed by eLife

9. Hypothalamic deiodinase type-3 establishes the period of circannual interval timing in mammals

   This article has 9 authors:

   1. Calum Stewart
   2. T Adam Liddle
   3. Elisabetta Tolla
   4. Jo Edward Lewis
   5. Christopher Marshall
   6. Neil P Evans
   7. Peter J Morgan
   8. Fran JP Ebling
   9. Tyler J Stevenson

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This study provides potentially important findings on the understanding of circannual timing in mammals, for which iodothyronine deiodinases (DIOs) have been suggested to be of critical importance, yet functional genetic evidence has been missing. The authors aim to implicate dio3, the major inactivator of the biologically active thyroid hormone T3, in circannual timing in Djungarian hamsters, using a combination of correlative and gene knock-out experiments. Currently, several questions have been raised concerning either the methodological description and/or the design of the experiments, and so the experimental evidence is considered incomplete.

   Reviewed by eLife

10. Paraventricular Thalamus Hyperactivity Mediates Stress-Induced Sensitization of Unlearned Fear but Not Stress-Enhanced Fear Learning (SEFL)

    This article has 5 authors:

    1. Kenji J Nishimura
    2. Denisse Paredes
    3. Nathaniel A Nocera
    4. Dhruv Aggarwal
    5. Michael R Drew

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      eLife Assessment

      These findings are among some of the first to identify a behavioral and neurobiological substrate that disentangles nonassociative from associative fear responses following stress, providing a fundamental push forward in the field. The evidence supporting this is convincing and uses a variety of conceptual and technological approaches. This investigation will be of interest to neuroscientists and behaviourists broadly, as well as clinicians for its relevance to post-traumatic stress disorder.

    Reviewed by eLife