eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. Polarised moonlight guides nocturnal bull ants home

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Cody A Freas
   2. Ajay Narenda
   3. Trevor Murray
   4. Ken Cheng

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This important study substantially advances our understanding of nocturnal animal navigation and the ways that animals use polarized light. The evidence supporting the conclusions is convincing, with elegant behavioural experiments in actively navigating ants. The work will be of interest to biologists working on animal navigation or sensory ecology.

   Reviewed by eLife

2. Nitric oxide modulates contrast suppression in a subset of mouse retinal ganglion cells

   This article has 9 authors:

   1. Dominic Gonschorek
   2. Matías A Goldin
   3. Jonathan Oesterle
   4. Tom Schwerd-Kleine
   5. Ryan Arlinghaus
   6. Zhijian Zhao
   7. Timm Schubert
   8. Olivier Marre
   9. Thomas Euler

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This important study is the first comprehensive analysis of the modulatory effects of nitric oxide (NO) on the response properties of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) in the mouse retina using two-photon calcium imaging and multi-electrode arrays (MEA). The results provide compelling evidence that a subset of suppressed-by-contrast RGCs are affected. These unexpected findings are likely of broad interest to visual neuroscientists.

   Reviewed by eLife

3. Comparative analysis of multiplexed in situ gene expression profiling technologies

   This article has 2 authors:

   1. Austin Hartman
   2. Rahul Satija

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     Hartman et al.'s important research examines six commonly utilized imaging-based multiplexed transcriptomic techniques and introduces a novel specificity metric, "MECR," to streamline platform evaluations. The authors highlight the crucial influence of cell segmentation methodologies on outcomes, offering insight into the field. Nonetheless, the substantiation for the principal assertions remains incomplete, as the comparisons across platforms seem uneven due to variations in gene panels.

   Reviewed by eLife

4. Rate of brain aging associates with future executive function in Asian children and older adults

   This article has 19 authors:

   1. Susan F Cheng
   2. Wan Lin Yue
   3. Kwun Kei Ng
   4. Xing Qian
   5. Siwei Liu
   6. Trevor WK Tan
   7. Kim-Ngan Nguyen
   8. Ruth LF Leong
   9. Saima Hilal
   10. Ching-Yu Cheng
   11. Ai Peng Tan
   12. Evelyn C Law
   13. Peter D Gluckman
   14. Christopher Li-Hsian Chen
   15. Yap Seng Chong
   16. Michael J Meaney
   17. Michael WL Chee
   18. BT Thomas Yeo
   19. Juan Helen Zhou

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This valuable study marks a significant advancement in brain aging research by centering on Asian populations (Chinese, Malay, and Indian Singaporeans), a group frequently underrepresented in such studies. It unveils solid evidence for anatomical differences in brain aging predictors between the young and old age groups. Overall, this study broadens our understanding of brain aging across diverse ethnicities.

   Reviewed by eLife

5. Diffusion MRS tracks distinct trajectories of neuronal development in the cerebellum and thalamus of rat neonates

   This article has 6 authors:

   1. Clémence Ligneul
   2. Lily Qiu
   3. William T Clarke
   4. Saad Jbabdi
   5. Marco Palombo
   6. Jason P Lerch

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This study presents a valuable investigation into cell-specific microstructural development in the neonatal rat brain using diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance spectroscopy. The evidence supporting the core claims is solid, with innovative in vivo data acquisition and modeling, noting residual caveats with regard to the limitations of diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance spectroscopy for strict validation of cell-type-specific metabolite compartmentation. In addition, the study provides community resources that will benefit researchers in this field. The work will be of interest to researchers studying brain development and biophysical imaging methods.

   Reviewed by eLife

6. Establishing synthetic ribbon-type active zones in a heterologous expression system

   This article has 8 authors:

   1. Rohan Kapoor
   2. Thanh Thao Do
   3. Niko Schwenzer
   4. Arsen Petrovic
   5. Thomas Dresbach
   6. Stephan E Lehnart
   7. Rubén Fernández-Busnadiego
   8. Tobias Moser

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     The authors take a synthetic approach by introducing synaptic ribbon proteins into HEK cells to analyze how these assemblies cluster calcium channels at the active zone. Using a synapse-naive heterologous expression system and overexpression-based strategy is valuable, as it establishes a promising model for studying molecular interactions at the active zone. The study is built on a solid combination of super-resolution microscopy and electrophysiology, though it currently falls short of replicating the full functional properties of native ribbon synapses and instead resembles a multiprotein complex that partially mimics ribbon-type active zones.

   Reviewed by eLife

7. CCDC113 stabilizes sperm axoneme and head-tail coupling apparatus to ensure male fertility

   This article has 11 authors:

   1. Bingbing Wu
   2. Chenghong Long
   3. Yuzhuo Yang
   4. Zhe Zhang
   5. Shuang Ma
   6. Yanjie Ma
   7. Huafang Wei
   8. Jinghe Li
   9. Hui Jiang
   10. Wei Li
   11. Chao Liu

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This study presents an important finding on sperm flagellum and HTCA stabilization. The evidence supporting the authors' claims is convincing. The work will be of broad interest to cell and reproductive biologists working on cilium and sperm biology.

   Reviewed by eLife

8. Mechanical forces pattern endocardial Notch activation via mTORC2-PKC pathway

   This article has 6 authors:

   1. Yunfei Mu
   2. Shijia Hu
   3. Xiangyang Liu
   4. Xin Tang
   5. Jiayi Lin
   6. Hongjun Shi

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     Notch1 is expressed uniformly throughout the mouse endocardium during the initial stages of heart valve formation, yet it remains unclear how Notch signaling is activated specifically in the AVC region to induce valve formation. To answer this question, the authors used a combination of in vivo and ex vivo experiments in mice to demonstrate ligand-independent activation of Notch1 by circulation induced-mechanical stress and provide evidence for stimulation of a novel mechanotransduction pathway involving post-translational modification of mTORC2 and Protein Kinase C (PKC) upstream of Notch1. These findings represent an important advance in our understanding of valve formation and the conclusions are supported by convincing data.

   Reviewed by eLife

9. Regulatory genome annotation of 33 insect species

   This article has 8 authors:

   1. Hasiba Asma
   2. Ellen Tieke
   3. Kevin D Deem
   4. Jabale Rahmat
   5. Tiffany Dong
   6. Xinbo Huang
   7. Yoshinori Tomoyasu
   8. Marc S Halfon

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     In the revised version of this important study, the authors present a convincing pipeline for insect genome regulatory annotation across 33 insect genomes spanning 5 orders. Despite technical limitations in the field owing to the lack of comprehensive knowledge of enhancer content in any system, the authors employ several independent downstream analyses to support the validity of their enhancer predictions for a subset of these genomes. Taken together, the revised results suggest that this prediction pipeline may have uses in identifying functional enhancers across large phylogenetic distances. Reviewers note caveats that an experimental validation is not yet available in the field to validate a large class of newly identified enhancers across such evolutionary distances, and other pipelines might be of use to compare. This work will be of interest to the computational genomics, evolutionary biology, and gene regulation fields.

   Reviewed by eLife

10. Unraveling the power of NAP-CNB’s machine learning-enhanced tumor neoantigen prediction

    This article has 11 authors:

    1. Almudena Mendez-Perez
    2. Andres M Acosta-Moreno
    3. Carlos Wert-Carvajal
    4. Pilar Ballesteros-Cuartero
    5. Ruben Sánchez-García
    6. Jose R Macias
    7. Rebeca Sanz-Pamplona
    8. Ramon Alemany
    9. Carlos Oscar Sorzano
    10. Arrate Munoz-Barrutia
    11. Esteban Veiga

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      eLife Assessment

      Veiga et al demonstrate the importance of incorporating RNAseq and machine learning approaches for neoantigen prediction. The evidence is convincing, and these findings contribute important information towards the selection of neoantigens for personalized antitumor vaccination.

    Reviewed by eLife