eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. Inhibition of Slc17a7 expressing neurons in the basolateral amygdala which project to the nucleus accumbens shapes the fidelity of motivated behavior

   This article has 7 authors:

   1. William D Mercer
   2. Iltan Aklan
   3. Nathaniel E Connolly
   4. Shivangi M Inamdar
   5. Benjamin L Fisher
   6. Chase M Larsson
   7. Kyle H Flippo

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This useful study uses in vitro electrophysiology, projection-specific chemogenetics, and different behavioural tasks to investigate the role of Vglut1-expression in basolateral amygdala neurons projecting to the nucleus accumbens in aspects of motivated behaviour. Although the manuscript is clearly written, the strength of the evidence supporting claims about the role of this pathway is incomplete. Currently, the work may be of interest to some behavioural neuroscientists, but additional controls and further clarification of specific analyses would strengthen their broader significance.

   Reviewed by eLife

2. Cortex-wide Dynamics of Internal Decisions About Behavioral Context

   This article has 5 authors:

   1. Joshua Calder-Travis
   2. Ruud L van den Brink
   3. Saanchi Thawani
   4. Lars Schwabe
   5. Tobias H Donner

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     In this study, the authors investigated how inference about the current task context, by weighting evidence based on surprise and uncertainty in the environment, is encoded in the cortex. Using MEG imaging and an impressive amount of analytic work based on normative decision modeling, they provided solid evidence for the involvement of the visual and parietal cortex. These results are a valuable complement to and extension of a previous study using fMRI measurements, by identifying the candidate regions that are of importance for the inference process, not just for encoding the end product.

   Reviewed by eLife

3. Blood-derived dietary protein promotes sleep in the mosquito Aedes aegypti

   This article has 5 authors:

   1. Jiwei Zhang
   2. Hitoshi Tsujimoto
   3. Samaneh Biglari
   4. Zach N Adelman
   5. Alex C Keene

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This important study links blood-derived dietary content to sustained increases in sleep in the mosquito Aedes aegypti. Using multiple independent approaches, the authors provide convincing evidence for blood-induced changes in sleep. These findings have broad implications for understanding how specialized diets regulate sleep across species and for mosquito vector biology.

   Reviewed by eLife

4. Early Sleep-Dependent Sensory Gating in the Olfactory System

   This article has 8 authors:

   1. Diego Serantes
   2. Diego Gallo
   3. Anttonella García
   4. Joaquín González
   5. Mateo Mendoza
   6. Patricia Lagos
   7. Pablo Torterolo
   8. Matías Cavelli

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This study presents a well-executed investigation into how the olfactory system disconnects from the environment during sleep and anesthesia, identifying a potential gating mechanism at the earliest synaptic stages of the olfactory bulb. The findings are important, as they challenge current theories by demonstrating that sensory gating occurs in non-thalamic pathways even under controlled airflow conditions. The strength of evidence is solid, supported by rigorous multimodal recordings, although the reliance on anesthetic models to draw conclusions about natural sleep is a limitation that requires further contextualization.

   Reviewed by eLife

5. Polo-like kinase phosphorylation of the orphan kinesin KIN-G negatively regulates centrin arm biogenesis in Trypanosoma brucei

   This article has 5 authors:

   1. Yasuhiro Kurasawa
   2. Qing Zhou
   3. Kyu Joon Lee
   4. Huiqing Hu
   5. Ziyin Li

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This important study provides new insight into the regulation of cell organization and division in Trypanosoma brucei through the control of a kinesin motor protein by a polo-like kinase. The authors present solid evidence from rigorous biochemical and imaging analyses showing that phosphorylation modulates kinesin function and cellular organization. However, direct in vivo evidence that PLK phosphorylates kinesin-G is lacking.

   Reviewed by eLife

6. The targeted cytosolic degradation of class I histone deacetylases is essential for efficient alphaherpesvirus replication

   This article has 9 authors:

   1. Sheng-Li Ming
   2. Meng-Hua Du
   3. Jia-Ming Yang
   4. Ya-Di Guo
   5. Jia-Jia Pan
   6. Wei-Fei Lu
   7. Jiang Wang
   8. Lei Zeng
   9. Bei-Bei Chu

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This valuable study presents convincing data demonstrating that alpha herpesvirus triggers nuclear export of HDACs, which are then degraded in an MDM2-dependent manner. This virus-driven process leads to histone hyperacetylation and activation of the DNA damage response, which promotes viral replication.

   Reviewed by eLife

7. Large scale prospective evaluation of co-folding across 557 Mac1-ligand complexes and three virtual screens

   This article has 20 authors:

   1. Jongbin Kim
   2. Galen J Correy
   3. Brendan W Hall
   4. Moira M Rachman
   5. Olivier Mailhot
   6. Takaya Togo
   7. Ryan L Gonciarz
   8. Priyadarshini Jaishankar
   9. R Jeffrey Neitz
   10. Eric R Hantz
   11. Yagmur U Doruk
   12. Maisie GV Stevens
   13. Morgan E Diolaiti
   14. Rashad Reid
   15. Saumya Gopalkrishnan
   16. Nevan J Krogan
   17. Adam R Renslo
   18. Alan Ashworth
   19. Brian K Shoichet
   20. James S Fraser

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This study addresses an important gap in drug discovery by delivering a rigorous, large-scale evaluation of widely used co-folding methods for predicting ligand-bound protein complexes and virtual screening. A key strength is the comprehensive benchmarking framework, which leverages structures and chemical compounds that were absent from the AI models training set, thereby providing particularly compelling and unbiased evidence of co-folding performance. The findings clearly delineate the complementary roles of deep learning-based co-folding and physics-based docking, offering practical guidance for their rational integration into drug discovery workflows. Overall, the conclusions are well supported by thorough analyses across a representative set of cases and are highly convincing.

   Reviewed by eLife, PREreview

8. Latent gene network expression underlies partial re-evolution of a polyphenic trait in the worker caste of ants

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Angelly Vasquez-Correa
   2. Johanna Arnet
   3. Travis Chen
   4. Ehab Abouheif

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This important study explores whether complex structures that are lost during evolution can re-evolve, which is a long-standing debate in evolutionary and developmental biology. The authors demonstrate that re-evolution can occur if the gene regulatory network that underlies the development of complex traits is maintained. The evidence supporting its conclusions is solid and the work will be of interest to those studying the evolution and development of complex traits.

   Reviewed by eLife

9. Policy-Gradient Reinforcement Learning as a General Theory of Practice-Based Motor Skill Learning

   This article has 1 author:

   1. Adrian M Haith

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This valuable computational study presents a conceptually simple and biologically plausible reinforcement-learning framework for motor learning based on policy-gradient methods. The evidence supporting the conclusions is convincing, including rigorous mathematical derivations of learning rules for the mean and variance of motor commands and simulation results for three sets of experimental data, based on three different motor learning tasks from the literature. However, there is a lack of a clear description of the specific conditions under which this framework yields unique mechanistic insights or predictive values, hence falling short of qualifying as a "general theory of motor learning". The work will be of interest to researchers in computational motor learning and motor neuroscience.

   Reviewed by eLife

10. Mosaic of somatic mutations in one of Earth’s largest organisms, Pando

    This article has 8 authors:

    1. Rozenn M Pineau
    2. Karen E Mock
    3. Jesse Morris
    4. Vachel Kraklow
    5. Andrea Brunelle
    6. Aurore Pageot
    7. William C Ratcliff
    8. Zachariah Gompert

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      eLife Assessment

      This useful study examines patterns of clonal reproduction and somatic mutations in 'Pando', a massive, quaking aspen clone consisting of ~47000 stems. Because the study relies on relatively low-coverage, reduced-representation genomic resequencing data for the detection of somatic mutations, the evidence provided for several of the primary conclusions about clone age and the relationship between mutation accumulation and geographic distance is incomplete.

    Reviewed by eLife