eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. Neural attentional filters and behavioural outcome follow independent individual trajectories over the adult lifespan

   This article has 2 authors:

   1. Sarah Tune
   2. Jonas Obleser

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This study provides a valuable contribution to understanding the neural mechanisms underlying age-related changes in attention and speech understanding. The large dataset (N=105) provides convincing evidence for how speech recognition behaviour and neural tracking of speech separately evolve in about 2 years. The work would be of interest to psychologists, neuroscientists, and audiologists.

   Reviewed by eLife

2. Reactivation strength during cued recall is modulated by graph distance within cognitive maps

   This article has 9 authors:

   1. Simon Kern
   2. Juliane Nagel
   3. Martin F Gerchen
   4. Çağatay Gürsoy
   5. Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg
   6. Peter Kirsch
   7. Raymond J Dolan
   8. Steffen Gais
   9. Gordon B Feld

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This magnetoencephalography study reports important new findings regarding the nature of memory reactivation during cued recall. It replicates previous work showing that such reactivation can be sequential or clustered, with sequential reactivation being more prevalent in low performers. It adds convincing evidence, even though based on limited amounts of data, that high memory performers tend to show simultaneous (i.e., clustered) reactivation, varying in strength with item distance in the learned graph structure. The study will be of interest to scientists studying memory replay.

   Reviewed by eLife

3. Multiple origins of dorsal ecdysial sutures in trilobites and their relatives

   This article has 6 authors:

   1. Kun-sheng Du
   2. Jin Guo
   3. Sarah R Losso
   4. Stephen Pates
   5. Ming Li
   6. Ai-lin Chen

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     The authors present 16 new well-preserved specimens from the early Cambrian Chengjiang biota. These specimens potentially represent a new taxon which could be useful in sorting out the problematic topology of artiopodan arthropods - a topic of interest to specialists in Cambrian arthropods. The authors provide solid anatomical and phylogenetic evidence in support of a new interpretation of the homology of dorsal sutures in trilobites and their relatives.

   Reviewed by eLife

4. Deciphering the genetic code of neuronal type connectivity through bilinear modeling

   This article has 1 author:

   1. Mu Qiao

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This is an important computational study that applies the machine learning method of bilinear modeling to the problem of relating gene expression to connectivity. Specifically, the author attempts to use transcriptomic data from mouse retinal neurons to predict their known connectivity with promising results. On revision, the approach was tested against a second data set from C. elegans. A limited number of genes studied in this second dataset may have resulted in performance that matched but did not exceed prior models. However, taken together, the results were felt to provide solid evidence for the value of the approach.

   Reviewed by eLife

5. Evolutionary trade-offs in dormancy phenology

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Théo Constant
   2. F Stephen Dobson
   3. Caroline Habold
   4. Sylvain Giroud

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This valuable and ambitious review examines seasonal dormancy in various species, including hibernating mammals (excluding bats and bears) and ectotherms. It provides a solid test of hypotheses on dormancy timing, considering energetic constraints and life history as alternative drivers. The review will be of interest to evolutionary biologists.

   Reviewed by eLife

6. LRMP inhibits cAMP potentiation of HCN4 channels by disrupting intramolecular signal transduction

   This article has 8 authors:

   1. Colin H Peters
   2. Rohit K Singh
   3. Avery A Langley
   4. William G Nichols
   5. Hannah R Ferris
   6. Danielle A Jeffrey
   7. Catherine Proenza
   8. John R Bankston

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This study identifies the molecular determinants of LRMP co-regulation of HCN 4 activity. The evidence supporting the conclusions, which is compelling, is backed by rigorous electrophysiological and spectroscopic analysis. The work is important because it greatly enhances our understanding of the mechanisms of HCN channel regulation in a tissue-specific manner and highlights a functional role for more disordered regions that have yet to be structurally resolved.

   Reviewed by eLife

7. High-throughput tracking enables systematic phenotyping and drug repurposing in C. elegans disease models

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Thomas J O'Brien
   2. Ida L Barlow
   3. Luigi Feriani
   4. André EX Brown

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This important study provides proof of principle that C. elegans models can be used to accelerate the discovery of candidate treatments for human Mendelian diseases by detailed high-throughput phenotyping of strains harboring mutations in orthologs of human disease genes. The data are compelling and support an approach that enables the potential rapid repurposing of FDA-approved drugs to treat rare diseases for which there are currently no effective treatments. The work will be of interest to all geneticists.

   Reviewed by eLife, Arcadia Science

8. The trunk replaces the longer mandible as the main feeding organ in elephant evolution

   This article has 11 authors:

   1. Chunxiao Li
   2. Tao Deng
   3. Yang Wang
   4. Fajun Sun
   5. Burt Wolff
   6. Qigao Jiangzuo
   7. Jiao Ma
   8. Luda Xing
   9. Jiao Fu
   10. Ji Zhang
   11. Shiqi Wang

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This study presents fundamental findings on the evolution of extremely elongated mandibular symphysis and tusks in longirostrine gomphotheres from the Early and Middle Miocene of northern China. The integration of multiple methods provides compelling results in the eco-morphology, behavioral ecology, and co-evolutionary biology of these taxa. In doing so, the authors elucidate the diversification of fossil proboscideans and their likely evolutionary responses to late Cenozoic global climatic changes.

   Reviewed by eLife, PREreview

9. Intramolecular feedback regulation of the LRRK2 Roc G domain by a LRRK2 kinase-dependent mechanism

   This article has 7 authors:

   1. Bernd K Gilsbach
   2. Franz Y Ho
   3. Benjamin Riebenbauer
   4. Xiaojuan Zhang
   5. Giambattista Guaitoli
   6. Arjan Kortholt
   7. Christian Johannes Gloeckner

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This valuable manuscript reports on the relationship between GTP hydrolysis parameters and kinase activity of LRRK2, which is associated with Parkinson's disease. The authors provide a detailed accounting of the catalytic efficiency of the ROC GTPase domain of pathogenic variants of LRRK2, in comparison with the wild-type enzyme. The authors propose that phosphorylation of T1343 inhibits kinase activity and influences monomer-dimer transitions, but the experimental evidence is currently incomplete.

   Reviewed by eLife

10. Universal length fluctuations of actin structures found in cells

    This article has 5 authors:

    1. Aldric Rosario
    2. Shane G McInally
    3. Predrag R Jelenkovic
    4. Bruce L Goode
    5. Jane Kondev

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      eLife Assessment

      This is a theoretical analysis that gives compelling evidence that length control of bundles of actin filaments undergoing assembly and disassembly emerges even in the absence of a length control mechanism at the individual filament level. Furthermore, the length distribution should exhibit a variance that grows quadratically with the average bundle length. The experimental data are compatible with these fundamental theoretical findings, but further investigations are necessary to make the work conclusive concerning the validity of the inferences for filamentous actin structures in cells.

    Reviewed by eLife