eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. The recombination landscape of introgression in yeast

   This article has 3 authors:

   1. Enrique J. Schwarzkopf
   2. Nathan Brandt
   3. Caiti Smukowski Heil

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This study aims to analyse the effect of polymorphism on meiotic recombination in subspecies of Saccharomyces. The detection of reciprocal and non-reciprocal events is based on sequencing the haploid products of meiosis, and frequencies are compared between strains having introgressed genomic segments and strains lacking such segments. Unfortunately, the method used are inadequate for quantifying the non-reciprocal events.

   Reviewed by eLife

2. Identifying images in the biology literature that are problematic for people with a color-vision deficiency

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Harlan P Stevens
   2. Carly V Winegar
   3. Arwen F Oakley
   4. Stephen R Piccolo

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     In this important study, the authors manually assessed randomly selected images published in eLife between 2012 and 2022 to determine whether they were accessible for readers with deuteranopia, the most common form of color vision deficiency. They then developed an automated tool designed to classify figures and images as either "friendly" or "unfriendly" for people with deuteranopia. Such a tool could be used by journals or researchers to monitor the accessibility of figures and images, and the evidence for its utility was solid: it performed well for eLife articles, but performance was weaker for a broader dataset of PubMed articles, which were not included in the training data. The authors also provide code that readers can download and run to test their own images, and this may be of most use for testing the tool, as there are already several free, user-friendly recoloring programs that allow users to see how images would look to a person with different forms of color vision deficiency. Automated classifications are of most use for assessing many images, when the user does not have the time or resources to assess each image individually.

   Reviewed by eLife

3. Maintenance of cell wall remodeling and vesicle production are connected in Mycobacterium tuberculosis

   This article has 22 authors:

   1. Vivian C Salgueiro-Toledo
   2. Jorge Bertol
   3. Claude Gutierrez
   4. Jose L Serrano-Mestre
   5. Noelia Ferrer-Luzon
   6. Lucia Vázquez-Iniesta
   7. Ainhoa Palacios
   8. Laia Pasquina-Lemonche
   9. Akbar Espaillat
   10. Laura Lerma
   11. Brian Weinrick
   12. Jose L Lavin
   13. Felix Elortza
   14. Mikel Azkargorta
   15. Alicia Prieto
   16. Pilar Buendía-Nacarino
   17. Jose L Luque-García
   18. Olivier Neyrolles
   19. Felipe Cava
   20. Jamie K Hobbs
   21. Joaquín Sanz
   22. Rafael Prados-Rosales

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     In this important study, the authors investigate the biogenesis of extracellular vesicles in mycobacteria and provide several observations to link VirR with vesiculogenesis, peptidoglycan metabolism, lipid metabolism, and cell wall permeability. The authors have done a commendable job of comprehensively examining the phenotypes associated with the VirR mutant using various techniques. The evidence presented in the revised manuscript is convincing and creates several avenues for further research.

   Reviewed by eLife

4. Machine Learning Based Modelling of Human and Insect Olfaction Screens Millions of compounds to Identify Pleasant Smelling Insect Repellents

   This article has 5 authors:

   1. Joel Kowalewski
   2. Sean M. Boyle
   3. Ryan Arvidson
   4. Jadrian Ejercito
   5. Anandasankar Ray

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This useful study uses a chemoinformatics pipeline to identify a list of candidate mosquito repellants that may be pleasant to smell and safe for humans. The computational methodology is solid, but insufficiently benchmarked against other leading models. At the high concentrations tested, there may also be off-target effects of the repellents on the mosquitoes that are not considered. This paper may be of interest to specialists interested in the discovery of new mosquito repellents.

   Reviewed by eLife

5. The title and authors for this article are not available from our external data provider yet:
   10.48550/arxiv.2307.07654v2

6. Learned response dynamics reflect stimulus timing and encode temporal expectation violations in superficial layers of mouse V1

   This article has 3 authors:

   1. Scott G Knudstrup
   2. Catalina Martinez
   3. Jeffrey P Gavornik

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This paper presents useful results that extend our understanding of how the visual cortex encodes temporal structure, providing new information about sequence representations in the upper layers of the visual cortex. The evidence for prediction errors is solid, however, support for other claims regarding sparsification and simplification of activity following training is incomplete. The main concerns pertain to the confounds associated with restricted ordering within blocks that does not allow for separate plasticity mechanisms operating on different time scales.

   Reviewed by eLife

7. Gliogenesis from the subventricular zone modulates the extracellular matrix at the glial scar after brain ischemia

   This article has 10 authors:

   1. Maria Ardaya
   2. Marie-Catherine Tiveron
   3. Harold Cremer
   4. Esther Rubio-López
   5. Abraham Martín
   6. Benjamin Dehay
   7. Fernando Pérez-Cerdá
   8. Carlos Matute
   9. Federico N Soria
   10. Fabio Cavaliere

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     The authors show that a middle carotid artery occlusion (MCAO) hypoxia lesion leads to hyaluronan-mediated chemoattraction to the lesion penumbra of Thbs-4-expressing astrocytes of the sub-ventricular zone (SVZ). These findings are valuable because they shed light on the function of astrocytes from the adult SVZ in pathological states like brain ischemic injury. The results are convincing, as they rely on a comprehensive analysis of experimental data.

   Reviewed by eLife

8. Indistinguishable network dynamics can emerge from unalike plasticity rules

   This article has 5 authors:

   1. Poornima Ramesh
   2. Basile Confavreux
   3. Pedro J. Gonçalves
   4. Tim P. Vogels
   5. Jakob H. Macke

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This work presents a valuable data-driven method to extract the "true" synaptic plasticity rule (or learning rule) operating in a neural circuit from empirical measurements of neural activity. The approach aims to train a generative adversarial network (GAN) to match neural activity measurements in terms of statistics, learning them from the data, rather than being pre-determined by the experimenter. The main conclusion is that the extracted learning rules are not unique, but rather degenerate, meaning that multiple plasticity rules can produce the same neural activity. Although the paper presents a thorough investigation using one learning rule as a case study (the Oja rule), the evidence that the results can be inferred beyond the specific numerical experiments presented in the paper is incomplete.

   Reviewed by eLife

9. Wound-Induced Syncytia Outpace Mononucleate Neighbors during Drosophila Wound Repair

   This article has 6 authors:

   1. James S. White
   2. Jasmine J. Su
   3. Elizabeth M. Ruark
   4. Junmin Hua
   5. M. Shane Hutson
   6. Andrea Page-McCaw

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This work addresses an important biological question: what is the cellular basis of wound healing? Using the Drosophila pupal notum as a model, the paper provides an elegant, thorough, descriptive characterisation of syncytia-driven wound closure using state-of-the-art confocal live imaging of the pupal notum. The authors meticulously characterize the cell-cell fusion events during wound healing, but without any mechanisms to inhibit cell fusion, it is incomplete, since it remains unclear whether cell fusion is required or not for speeding wound healing and/ or increasing the level of actin resources at the leading edge.

   Reviewed by eLife

10. PI3K/HSCB axis facilitates FOG1 nuclear translocation to promote erythropoiesis and megakaryopoiesis

    This article has 10 authors:

    1. Gang Liu
    2. Yunxuan Hou
    3. Xin Jin
    4. Yixue Zhang
    5. Chaoyue Sun
    6. Chengquan Huang
    7. Yujie Ren
    8. Jianmin Gao
    9. Xiuli Wang
    10. Xiumei Jiang

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      eLife assessment

      This fundamental work significantly advances our understanding of how FOG1 nuclear localization is regulated during erythropoiesis and megakaryopoiesis, including the role of EPO and MPL/TPO signaling in this process. The authors provide compelling evidence using both K562 and CD34+ cells that heat shock cognate B (HSCB) can promote the proteasomal degradation of TACC3 to regulate the nuclear localization of FOG1, and that this function is independent of its role in iron-sulfur cluster (ISC) biogenesis. Together these data will be of interest to the fields of hematopoiesis and cell biology.

    Reviewed by eLife