eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. Essential function reflected in the phylodynamics of a multigene family – the pir genes of malaria parasites

   This article has 14 authors:

   1. Andrew P Jackson
   2. Deirdre A Cunningham
   3. Lin Lin
   4. Naomi Mara Claro de Oliveira
   5. Séverine C Chevalley-Maurel
   6. Giulia Pianta
   7. Franziska Morhing
   8. Abigail K Renfree
   9. Timothy S Little
   10. Robert W Moon
   11. Jean Langhorne
   12. Chris J Janse
   13. Blandine MD Franke-Fayard
   14. Christiaan van Ooij

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This valuable study provides the first broad cross-species evolutionary analysis of the pir multigene family in malaria parasites, showing that the family evolved through rapid duplication and loss while retaining a small number of conserved orthologs with essential functions. The authors identify pirC1 as a key determinant of parasite growth across multiple Plasmodium species. However, the work remains incomplete because the mechanistic role of PIRCl and its precise subcellular localization are not directly resolved.

   Reviewed by eLife

2. We couldn't get details of this article at this time:
   10.64898/2026.04.28.721505

3. Somatic Programmed DNA Elimination is widespread in free-living Rhabditidae nematodes

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Caroline Launay
   2. Eva Wenger
   3. Brice Letcher
   4. Marie Delattre

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     In this manuscript, the authors investigate programmed DNA elimination (PDE) across nematodes using a large-scale cytological approach. This work is potentially significant because it expands PDE beyond a few known nematodes to a much broader set of Rhabditidae species, providing an important resource for investigating PDE's evolutionary origins and functions. The strength of evidence, however, is incomplete; the technique used to evaluate PDE is insufficient to provide unambiguous support for the phenomenon, so additional methods, such as genomic sequencing from a few species spanning the range of elimination levels, would be required to confirm these findings. This research would be of interest to geneticists, evolutionary biologists, and those working on the regulation of genome integrity.

   Reviewed by eLife

4. We couldn't get details of this article at this time:
   10.1101/2024.08.30.610528

5. Atomistic simulations reveal sub-µs contact dynamics in MUT-16 condensates

   This article has 5 authors:

   1. Kumar Gaurav
   2. Lucia Baltz
   3. Diego Javier Páez-Moscoso
   4. René F Ketting
   5. Lukas S Stelzl

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This study presents valuable findings on phase-separated condensate formation by the MUT-16 protein, which plays a key role in small RNA biogenesis. A detailed analysis of the interactions governing condensate formation was carried out using coarse-grained and all-atom molecular dynamics simulations, complemented by in vitro phase separation experiments. While many of the results appear solid, a number of technical details are lacking, the computational part appears incomplete and would benefit from additional analyses and clarifications, and the novelty of the study should also be clarified, particularly in comparison with the authors' previous work on MUT-16. Overall, the work will be of interest to biophysicists and molecular biologists studying phase separation and biomolecular condensates.

   Reviewed by eLife

6. A validated antibody toolbox for ALS research

   This article has 34 authors:

   1. Riham Ayoubi
   2. Emma J MacDougall
   3. Ian McDowell
   4. Michael S Biddle
   5. Bárbara T Ferreira
   6. CongYao Zha
   7. Marie-France Dorion
   8. Jay P Ross
   9. Sara González Bolívar
   10. Vera Ruiz Moleón
   11. Charles Alende
   12. Vincent Francis
   13. Maryam Fotouhi
   14. Mathilde Chaineau
   15. Carol X.-Q Chen
   16. Valerio EC Piscopo
   17. Vincent Soubannier
   18. Tracy Keates
   19. Wen Hwa Lee
   20. Brian D Marsden
   21. Leonidas Koukouflis
   22. Edvard Wigren
   23. Carolyn A Marks
   24. Luke M Healy
   25. Patrick A Dion
   26. Guy A Rouleau
   27. Edward A Fon
   28. Harvinder S Virk
   29. Susanne Gräslund
   30. Opher Gileadi
   31. Aled M Edwards
   32. Thomas M Durcan
   33. Peter S McPherson
   34. Carl Laflamme

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     Overall, this is a manuscript with solid evidence that delivers an important community resource for those performing experimental research in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The authors address the lack of validated tools for the detection and quantification of proteins associated with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) through an extensive screening of 303 commercially available antibodies to 33 protein targets. The effort invested in generating the knockout lines for validation experiments is a clear strength of the study.

   Reviewed by eLife

7. Divergent spatiotemporal integration of whole-field visual motion in medaka and zebrafish larvae

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Yasuko Isoe
   2. Yasmine Fatima Mabene
   3. Marie-Abèle Bind
   4. Florian Engert

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This important study provides a quantitative comparison of how zebrafish and medaka larvae process visual motion, revealing clear differences in how they integrate information across space and time. The evidence is convincing, combining a broad set of behavioral assays with response decomposition and mechanistic modeling that together support the central conclusions. Some aspects remain incomplete, particularly the link between the spatial and temporal findings, the extent to which the model accounts for the full range of behavioral results, and the framing of broader evolutionary or social interpretations. Overall, the work offers a careful and informative analysis that should be of broad interest to researchers studying visual processing, sensorimotor computation, and comparative neuroscience.

   Reviewed by eLife

8. Modality-Specific and Amodal Language Processing by Single Neurons

   This article has 8 authors:

   1. Yair Lakretz
   2. Naama Friedmann
   3. Jean-Rémi King
   4. Emily Mankin
   5. Anthony Rangel
   6. Ariel Tankus
   7. Stanislas Dehaene
   8. Itzhak Fried

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This study presents a large-scale characterization of single-neuron responses during reading and listening, enabling examination of both 'low-level' (orthographic/phonological) and 'higher-level' (syntactic) features, as well as links between single-neuron activity and multi-scale field potentials, making it a valuable resource for bridging micro- and macroscale accounts of language processing. The analyses identify modality-specific and putatively modality-independent responses across distributed brain regions, offering an intriguing framework for understanding how sensory-specific and abstract representations may relate. However, the evidence supporting the central claims is currently incomplete, due to limited population-level quantification, insufficient statistical characterization of how many neurons encode the relevant features, ambiguity in the interpretation of encoding model results, and a lack of rigorous tests of cross-modal generalization and alternative accounts, which together weaken the conclusions about amodal representations and hierarchical processing.

   Reviewed by eLife

9. Contrasting walking styles map to discrete neural substrates in the mouse brainstem

   This article has 8 authors:

   1. Audrey Worley
   2. Alana Kirby
   3. Sophie Luks
   4. Tamara Samardzic
   5. Brian Ellison
   6. Lauren Broom
   7. Alban Latremoliere
   8. Veronique G VanderHorst

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This is a valuable survey of movements and locomotor patterns produced by circuits in the medial reticular formation (MRF) of the brainstem. The authors provide solid evidence that activation of GABAergic MRF neurons slowed down walking, activation of glutamatergic neurons induced a specific "shuffle" limb trajectory, and the activation of serotonergic neurons increased locomotor speed without affecting walking signature. This study adds to the growing body of knowledge about the effects of brainstem circuits on specific aspects of locomotor function.

   Reviewed by eLife

10. We couldn't get details of this article at this time:
    10.64898/2026.04.07.717004