eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. Sensitivity to vocal emotions emerges in newborns at 37 weeks gestational age

   This article has 5 authors:

   1. Xinlin Hou
   2. Peng Zhang
   3. Licheng Mo
   4. Cheng Peng
   5. Dandan Zhang

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This is an important study on changes in newborns' neural abilities to distinguish auditory signals at 37 weeks of gestation. The evidence of change in neural discrimination as a function of gestational age is convincing, but, as the authors acknowledge, further control of the acoustic signals and infants' language environment is necessary for the results to be used in clinical applications. The work contributes to the field of neurodevelopment.

   Reviewed by eLife

2. A metabolic modeling-based framework for predicting trophic dependencies in native rhizobiomes of crop plants

   This article has 13 authors:

   1. Alon Avraham Ginatt
   2. Maria Berihu
   3. Einam Castel
   4. Shlomit Medina
   5. Gon Carmi
   6. Adi Faigenboim-Doron
   7. Itai Sharon
   8. Ofir Tal
   9. Samir Droby
   10. Tracey Somera
   11. Mark Mazzola
   12. Hanan Eizenberg
   13. Shiri Freilich

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     By developing a framework to integrate metagenomic and metabolomic data with genome-scale metabolic models, this study establishes a toolkit to investigate trophic interactions between microbiota members in situ. The authors apply this method to the native rhizosphere bacterial communities of apple rootstocks, producing solid evidence and numerous detailed hypotheses on specific trophic exchanges and resource dependencies. The framework represents a valuable method to disentangle features of microbial interaction networks and will be of interest to microbiome scientists as well as plant and computational biologists.

   Reviewed by eLife

3. Single-cell eQTL mapping in yeast reveals a tradeoff between growth and reproduction

   This article has 8 authors:

   1. James Boocock
   2. Noah Alexander
   3. Leslie Alamo Tapia
   4. Laura Walter-McNeill
   5. Shivani Prashant Patel
   6. Chetan Munugala
   7. Joshua S Bloom
   8. Leonid Kruglyak

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This manuscript describes the mapping of natural DNA sequence variants that affect gene expression and its noise, as well as cell cycle timing, using as input single-cell RNA-sequencing of progeny from crosses between wild yeast strains. The method represents an important advance in the study of natural genetic variation. The findings, especially given the follow-up validation of the phenotypic impact of a mapped locus of major effect, provide convincing support for the rigor and utility of the method.

   Reviewed by eLife, Arcadia Science

4. N-cadherin directs the collective Schwann cell migration required for nerve regeneration through Slit2/3-mediated contact inhibition of locomotion

   This article has 10 authors:

   1. Julian JA Hoving
   2. Elizabeth Harford-Wright
   3. Patrick Wingfield-Digby
   4. Anne-Laure Cattin
   5. Mariana Campana
   6. Alex Power
   7. Toby Morgan
   8. Erica Torchiaro
   9. Victor Quereda
   10. Alison C Lloyd

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This study presents an interesting set of findings that connects N-cadherin and glypican-4 to Slit signaling during the regulation of contact inhibition of locomotion of Schwann cells in culture. Solid evidence is provided showing that N-cadherin not only regulates cell recognition but also proper trafficking of Slit to the cell surface. An ex-vivo model demonstrates the importance of Slit signaling during cell migration but the molecular details of how N-cadherin traffics Slit to the surface and role of glypican are unclear. The data would have been strengthened with a similar interrogation of N-cadherin in this system. The work will be of interest to cell biologists studying the mechanisms behind peripheral nervous system regeneration.

   Reviewed by eLife

5. Cbfβ regulates Wnt/β-catenin, Hippo/Yap, and Tgfβ signaling pathways in articular cartilage homeostasis and protects from ACLT surgery-induced osteoarthritis

   This article has 12 authors:

   1. Wei Chen
   2. Yun Lu
   3. Yan Zhang
   4. Jinjin Wu
   5. Abigail McVicar
   6. Yilin Chen
   7. Siyu Zhu
   8. Guochun Zhu
   9. You Lu
   10. Jiayang Zhang
   11. Matthew McConnell
   12. Yi-Ping Li

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This fundamental work advances our understanding of the role of Cbfβ in maintaining articular cartilage homeostasis and the underlying mechanisms. The evidence supporting the conclusion is mostly convincing, although including additional experiments and discussions would have strengthened the study. This paper is of potential interest to skeletal biologists and orthopaedic surgeons who study the pathogenesis and the therapeutics of osteoarthritis.

   Reviewed by eLife

6. Combining mutation and recombination statistics to infer clonal families in antibody repertoires

   This article has 5 authors:

   1. Natanael Spisak
   2. Gabriel Athènes
   3. Thomas Dupic
   4. Thierry Mora
   5. Aleksandra M Walczak

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This important study provides a new, apparently high-performance algorithm for B cell clonal family inference. The new algorithm is highly innovative and based on a rigorous probabilistic analysis of the relevant biological processes and their imprint on the resulting sequences, however, the strength of evidence regarding the algorithm's performance is incomplete, due to (1) a lack of clarity regarding how different data sets were used for different steps during algorithm development and validation, resulting in concerns of circularity, (2) a lack of detail regarding the settings for competitor programs during benchmarking, and (3) method development, data simulation for method validation, and empirical analyses all based on the B cell repertoire of a single subject. With clarity around these issues and application to a more diverse set of real samples, this paper could be fundamental to immunologists and important to any researcher or clinician utilizing B cell receptor repertoires in their field (e.g., cancer immunology).

   Reviewed by eLife

7. CYRI-B-mediated macropinocytosis drives metastasis via lysophosphatidic acid receptor uptake

   This article has 9 authors:

   1. Savvas Nikolaou
   2. Amelie Juin
   3. Jamie A Whitelaw
   4. Nikki R Paul
   5. Loic Fort
   6. Colin Nixon
   7. Heather J Spence
   8. Sheila Bryson
   9. Laura M Machesky

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This important study combines in vivo and in vitro models to characterise the role of CYRI-B, an interactor of the small GTPase Rac1, in controlling pancreatic cancer progression towards a higher proliferative and metastatic stage. The evidence supporting the claims of the authors is convincing in characterizing a novel Rac1 binding protein, CYRI-B, as a regulator of metastatic potential in vivo, with distinct functions at different stages of tumour progression. CYRI-B reduces the typical hyperactivation of Rac1 in the early stages of tumour progression; subsequently, CYRI-B mediates internalization of lysophosphatidic acid receptor 1 (LPAR1) uptake through macropinocytosis, thus regulating chemotactic migration of cancer cells towards lysophosphatidic acid (LPA). Although the inclusion of human pancreatic cancer cell lines would have strengthened the study, the work will be of broad interest to cell biologists and the signalling research communities.

   Reviewed by eLife

8. Perceptual learning improves discrimination while distorting appearance

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Sarit F.A. Szpiro
   2. Charlie S. Burlingham
   3. Eero P. Simoncelli
   4. Marisa Carrasco

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This work presents a potentially important behavioral finding: that perceptual learning may not only improve but also distort the appearance of visual stimuli. The strength of the presented evidence in support of the main claim is however incomplete, and requires further analyses to confirm that perceptual learning does increase overestimation bias, and clarify why a very large baseline overestimation bias is present in the data.

   Reviewed by eLife

9. RETRACTED: Biases of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) in Physical Anthropology Studies Require a Reevaluation of Evolutionary Insights

   This article has 2 authors:

   1. Nima Mohseni
   2. Eran Elhaik

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     The authors present a critique of current usage of principal component analysis in geometric morphometrics, making a compelling case with benchmark data that standard techniques perform poorly. The work is an important contribution to the field and will hopefully lead to a reassessment of the methodology most scientists in morphometrics currently use. This work challenges a very commonly used analytical approach and is bound to raise some controversy in the community, but the authors' critique is based on a well-founded and well-thought out analysis.

   Reviewed by eLife

10. A ‘torn bag mechanism’ of small extracellular vesicle release via limiting membrane rupture of en bloc released amphisomes (amphiectosomes)

    This article has 15 authors:

    1. Tamás Visnovitz
    2. Dorina Lenzinger
    3. Anna Koncz
    4. Péter M Vizi
    5. Tünde Bárkai
    6. Krisztina V Vukman
    7. Alicia Galinsoga
    8. Krisztina Németh
    9. Kelsey Fletcher
    10. Zsolt I Komlósi
    11. Csaba Cserép
    12. Ádám Dénes
    13. Péter Lőrincz
    14. Gábor Valcz
    15. Edit I Buzas

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      eLife Assessment

      In this study, the authors present compelling data illustrating a potential mechanism for a hitherto not described form of extracellular vesicle biogenesis. Their model suggests that small extracellular vesicles are secreted from cells within larger vesicles, termed amphiectosomes, which subsequently rupture to release their smaller vesicle contents. This discovery represents an important advancement in the field.

    Reviewed by eLife