eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. Movies reveal the fine-grained organization of infant visual cortex

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Cameron T Ellis
   2. Tristan S Yates
   3. Michael J Arcaro
   4. Nicholas Turk-Browne

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This study presents valuable evidence concerning the potential for naturalistic movie-viewing fMRI experiments to reveal some features that are correlated with the functional and topographical organization of the developing visual system in awake infants and toddlers. The data are compelling given the difficulty of studying this population, the methodology is original and validated, and the evidence supporting the conclusions is convincing and in line with prior research using resting-state and awake task-based fMRI. This study will be of interest to cognitive neuroscientists and developmental psychologists, and in particular those interested in using fMRI to investigate brain organisation in pediatric and clinical populations with limited tolerance to fMRI.

   Reviewed by eLife

2. Expanding the Drosophila toolkit for dual control of gene expression

   This article has 10 authors:

   1. Jonathan Zirin
   2. Barbara Jusiak
   3. Raphael Lopes
   4. Benjamin Ewen-Campen
   5. Justin A Bosch
   6. Alexandria Risbeck
   7. Corey Forman
   8. Christians Villalta
   9. Yanhui Hu
   10. Norbert Perrimon

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This important study reports the generation of genetic tools for manipulating several tissues at the same time in Drosophila. The authors provide convincing evidence that this allows for the generation of LexA and QF2 driver lines, which will be of great utility for understanding inter-organ communication. Making the tools available through the Drosophila stock center and plasmid depository will ensure that they are easily accessed by many researchers.

   Reviewed by eLife

3. Conditional chemoconnectomics (cCCTomics) as a strategy for efficient and conditional targeting of chemical transmission

   This article has 8 authors:

   1. Renbo Mao
   2. Jianjun Yu
   3. Bowen Deng
   4. Xihuimin Dai
   5. Yuyao Du
   6. Sujie Du
   7. Wenxia Zhang
   8. Yi Rao

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This paper expands the genetic toolset that was previously developed by the Rao lab to introduce the conditional downregulation of neurotransmission components in Drosophila. As a proof of principle, the authors tested their new collection and provide evidence of the contribution of CNMamide (a neuropeptide) to the temporal control of locomotor activity patterns. These are overall important findings supported by compelling evidence.

   Reviewed by eLife

4. A modified BCG with depletion of enzymes associated with peptidoglycan amidation induces enhanced protection against tuberculosis in mice

   This article has 7 authors:

   1. Moagi Tube Shaku
   2. Peter K Um
   3. Karl L Ocius
   4. Alexis J Apostolos
   5. Marcos M Pires
   6. William R Bishai
   7. Bavesh D Kana

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     In this manuscript, the authors investigate whether the effects of the BCG vaccine on immunity to Mtb infection could be improved by inhibiting amidation of the peptidoglycan sidechains to allow for recognition by NOD-1. This is a very important area and an interesting new approach to improve vaccination for TB. The authors find that CRISPRi knockdown of murT-gatD causes rather dramatic cell wall defects, more accessible cell wall labeling, and results in attenuated growth in macrophages and mice. This forms a foundation for further study of whether an approach like that which is presented herein would improve vaccination responses in TB.

   Reviewed by eLife

5. Characterization of caffeine response regulatory variants in vascular endothelial cells

   This article has 8 authors:

   1. Carly Boye
   2. Cynthia A Kalita
   3. Anthony S Findley
   4. Adnan Alazizi
   5. Julong Wei
   6. Xiaoquan Wen
   7. Roger Pique-Regi
   8. Francesca Luca

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This important study combines disease-associated genetic variation with a massively parallel reporter assay and different cellular perturbations to identify context-specific genetic regulatory effects. The methods and analyses are solid and the proposed functional variants will be helpful for experimental and quantitative geneticists studying a wide range of complex traits.

   Reviewed by eLife

6. Ketamine induces multiple individually distinct whole-brain functional connectivity signatures

   This article has 26 authors:

   1. Flora Moujaes
   2. Jie Lisa Ji
   3. Masih Rahmati
   4. Joshua B Burt
   5. Charles Schleifer
   6. Brendan D Adkinson
   7. Aleksandar Savic
   8. Nicole Santamauro
   9. Zailyn Tamayo
   10. Caroline Diehl
   11. Antonija Kolobaric
   12. Morgan Flynn
   13. Nathalie Rieser
   14. Clara Fonteneau
   15. Terry Camarro
   16. Junqian Xu
   17. Youngsun Cho
   18. Grega Repovs
   19. Sarah K Fineberg
   20. Peter T Morgan
   21. Erich Seifritz
   22. Franz X Vollenweider
   23. John H Krystal
   24. John D Murray
   25. Katrin H Preller
   26. Alan Anticevic

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This study presents valuable findings regarding inter-individual variability in the neural and behavioral effects of ketamine. The methodological approach used to characterize this variability is compelling, but the evidence to support the specificity of the changes and their genetic correlates is incomplete. The study would benefit from a more thorough examination of the specificity of the pharmacological and genetic results.

   Reviewed by eLife

7. Collaborative hunting in artificial agents with deep reinforcement learning

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Kazushi Tsutsui
   2. Ryoya Tanaka
   3. Kazuya Takeda
   4. Keisuke Fujii

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     In this study, deep learning methods are deployed in the context of a group hunting scenario wherein two predators pursue a single prey. Through deep learning, the two predators achieve higher predation success than occurs with single predators. Much of the evidence in this important study is solid, with implications for future work on the ethology and simulation of cooperative behaviors.

   Reviewed by eLife

8. Discovering non-additive heritability using additive GWAS summary statistics

   This article has 7 authors:

   1. Samuel Pattillo Smith
   2. Gregory Darnell
   3. Dana Udwin
   4. Julian Stamp
   5. Arbel Harpak
   6. Sohini Ramachandran
   7. Lorin Crawford

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This study provides a valuable investigation into whether phenotypic variance due to interactions between genetic variants can be measured using genome-wide association summary statistics. The authors present a method, i-LDSC, that uses statistics on the correlations between genotypes at different loci (linkage disequilibrium) to estimate the phenotypic variance explained by both additive genetic effects and pairwise interactions. While the authors present extensive simulations on the performance of their method and empirical results indicating the presence of epistasis (as they define epistasis) it is unclear how their method and results relate to the traditional definitions of additive and non-additive genetic effects, which are different from the authors' definitions.

   Reviewed by eLife

9. The title and authors for this article are not available from our external data provider yet:
   10.31219/osf.io/preprints/osf

10. Enabling brain-wide mapping of layer-specific functional connectivity at 3T via layer-dependent fMRI with draining-vein suppression

    This article has 3 authors:

    1. Wei-Tang Chang
    2. Weili Lin
    3. Kelly S Giovanello

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      eLife Assessment

      This useful study presents a possible solution for a significant problem - that of draining vein sensitivity in functional MRI, which complicates the interpretability of laminar-fMRI results. The addition of a low diffusion-weighted gradient is presented to remove the draining vein signal and obtain functional responses with higher spatial fidelity. However, the strength of the evidence is incomplete, and most tests appear to have been done only in a single subject. Significance thresholds in presented maps are very low and most cortical depth-dependent response profiles do not differ from baseline, even in the BOLD data shown as reference. Curiously, even BOLD group data fails to replicate the well-known pattern of draining towards the cortical surface.

    Reviewed by eLife