Latest preprint reviews

1. Disrupted Hippocampal Theta-Gamma Coupling and Spike-Field Coherence Following Experimental Traumatic Brain Injury

   This article has 8 authors:

   1. Christopher D Adam
   2. Ehsan Mirzakhalili
   3. Kimberly G Gagnon
   4. Carlo Cottone
   5. John D Arena
   6. Alexandra V Ulyanova
   7. Victoria E Johnson
   8. John A Wolf

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This is an important paper that reports in vivo physiological abnormalities in the hippocampus of a rat model of traumatic brain injury (TBI). In this study, authors focused on changes in theta-gamma phase coupling and action potential entrainment to theta, phenomena hypothesized to be critical for cognition. While the authors provide solid evidence of deficits in both features post-TBI, the study would have been stronger with a more hypothesis-driven approach and consideration of alterations of the animal's behavioral state or sensorimotor deficits beyond memory processes.

   Reviewed by eLife

2. Pathogenic LRRK2 causes age-dependent and region-specific deficits in ciliation, innervation and viability of cholinergic neurons

   This article has 5 authors:

   1. Besma Brahmia
   2. Yahaira Naaldijk
   3. Pallabi Sarkar
   4. Loukia Parisiadou
   5. Sabine Hilfiker

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This valuable contribution follows past descriptions of ciliation defects, potentially linked to cholinergic neuronal dysfunction, associated with mutated G2019S Lrrk2 expression. The strength of evidence is considered solid and broadly supportive of the claims concerning well-characterized cilia changes in cholinergic neurons over time in the model; however, additional work may be required to define the specificity of the pRab12 antibody in the IHC technique, dependence on LRRK2, and clarification of the cilia phenotype in sporadic PD brains that exists (for the moment) only in a non-peer-reviewed pre-print, despite the prominence of these (preliminary) results highlighted in the abstract and text of the current manuscript. It is hoped that the authors will begin to address the feedback provided by the expert reviewers to help provide a more mechanistic basis for the audience interested in cholinergic defects associated with Parkinson's disease.

   Reviewed by eLife

3. Glia-mediated gut-brain cytokine signaling couples sleep to intestinal inflammation

   This article has 10 authors:

   1. Alina Malita
   2. Olga Kubrak
   3. Xiaokang Chen
   4. Takashi Koyama
   5. Elizabeth C Connolly
   6. Nadja Ahrentløv
   7. Ditte S Andersen
   8. Michael J Texada
   9. Kenneth V Halberg
   10. Kim Rewitz

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This important work by Malita et al. describes a mechanism by which an intestinal infection causes an increase in daytime sleep through signaling from the gut to the blood-brain barrier. Their findings suggest that cytokines upd3 and upd2 produced by the intestine following infection act on the glia of the blood-brain barrier to regulate sleep by modulating Allatostatin A signaling. The evidence supporting the claims of the authors is solid. Further verification of certain critical tools, and addressing a few discrepancies from data previously published, would improve this work.

   Reviewed by eLife

4. Integration of sensory and fear memories in the rat medial temporal lobe: advancing research by Wong et al. (2019)

   This article has 6 authors:

   1. Francesca S Wong
   2. Alina B Thomas
   3. Simon Killcross
   4. Vincent Laurent
   5. R Frederick Westbrook
   6. Nathan M Holmes

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This important study by Wong et al. addresses a longstanding question in the field of associative learning regarding how a motivationally relevant event can be inferred from prior learning based on neutral stimulus-stimulus associations. The research provides convincing behavioral and neurophysiological evidence to address this important question. The manuscript will be interesting for researchers in behavioral and cognitive neuroscience.

   Reviewed by eLife

5. Normative evidence weighting and accumulation in correlated environments

   This article has 3 authors:

   1. Nathan Tardiff
   2. Jiwon Kang
   3. Joshua I Gold

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This important work combines theory and experiment to assess how humans make decisions about sequences of pairs of correlated observations. The normative theory for evidence integration in correlated environments will be informative for future investigations. However, the developed theory and data analysis seem currently incomplete: it remains to be seen if the derived decision strategy is indeed normative, or only an approximation thereof, and behavioral modelling would benefit from the assessment of alternative models.

   Reviewed by eLife

6. Supralinear dendritic integration in murine dendrite-targeting interneurons

   This article has 3 authors:

   1. Simonas Griesius
   2. Amy Richardson
   3. Dimitri M Kullmann

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     In this manuscript, Griesius et al analyze the dendritic integration properties of NDNF and OLM interneurons, and the current dataset suggests that even though both cell types display supralinear NMDA receptor-dependent synaptic integration, this may be associated with dendritic calcium transients only in NDNF interneurons. These findings are important because they could shed light on the functional diversity of different classes of interneurons in the mouse neocortex and hippocampus, which in turn can have major implications for understanding information flow in complex neural circuits. They are considered as being currently incomplete, however, due to: (i) the large variability and small sample size of multiple datasets, which prevents a finer evaluation of cellular and molecular mechanisms accounting for the difference in the integrative properties of different interneuron types; (ii) lack of control experiments to rule out that the effect of the NMDA antagonist AP5 on synaptic integration is not confounded by potential phototoxicity damage; (iii) lack of a precise control of the uncaging location.

   Reviewed by eLife

7. Serotonin modulates infraslow oscillation in the dentate gyrus during Non-REM sleep

   This article has 9 authors:

   1. Gergely F. Turi
   2. Sasa Teng
   3. Xinyue Chen
   4. Emily CY Lim
   5. Carla Dias
   6. Ruining Hu
   7. Ruizhi Wang
   8. Fenghua Zhen
   9. Yueqing Peng

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This study used electrophysiology and imaging to show that the majority of excitatory cells in the dentate gyrus of adult mice have very slow oscillations during non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep. The oscillations were influenced by serotonin when it was released during NREM sleep. Moreover, the serotonin receptor type 1a mediated the effect, and reducing these receptors impaired a type of memory. The significance of the study is important and the strength of the evidence is solid, but revisions to the figures and making conclusions more consistent with the data could improve the significance and strength of evidence.

   Reviewed by eLife

8. Reactive oxygen species suppress phagocyte surveillance by oxidizing cytoskeletal regulators

   This article has 8 authors:

   1. Iuliia Ferling
   2. Steffen Pfalzgraf
   3. Lea Moutounet
   4. Lanhui Qiu
   5. Iris Li
   6. Yuhuan Zhou
   7. Sergio Grinstein
   8. Spencer A Freeman

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     In this study, Ferling and colleagues provide convincing evidence demonstrating that myeloid cells exert distinct, cargo-dependent responses during and after phagocytosis. These important findings establish previously unrecognized insights into the function(s) of myeloid cells in immunosurveillance and are thus likely to be broadly impactful across the spectrum of biomedical disciplines including immunology and cell biology. Notwithstanding these clear strengths of the article, some minor issues were noted pertinent to the relative opaqueness of the mechanisms underpinning context-specific RhoA activation.

   Reviewed by eLife

9. Inclusive, Exclusive and Hierarchical Atlas of NFATc1+/PDGFR-α+ Cells in Dental and Periodontal Mesenchyme

   This article has 7 authors:

   1. Xue Yang
   2. Chuyi Han
   3. Changhao Yu
   4. Bin Zhou
   5. Ling Ye
   6. Feifei Li
   7. Fanyuan Yu

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     Utilizing transgenic lineage tracing techniques and tissue clearing-based advanced imaging and three-dimensional slices reconstruction, the authors comprehensively mapped the distribution atlas of NFATc1+ and PDGFR-α+ cells in dental and periodontal mesenchyme and tracked their in vivo fate trajectories. This important work extends our understanding of NFATc1+ and PDGFR-α+ cells in dental and periodontal mesenchyme homeostasis, and should provide impact on clinical application and investigation. The strength of this work is compelling in employing CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene editing to generate two dual recombination systems, and mapped gNFATc1+ and PDGFR-α+cells residing in dental and periodontal mesenchyme, their capacity for progeny cell generation, and their inclusive, exclusive and hierarchical relations in homeostasis, generating a spatiotemporal atlas of these skeletal stem cell population.

   Reviewed by eLife

10. Simply crushed Zizyphi spinosi semen prevents neurodegenerative diseases and reverses age-related cognitive decline in mice

    This article has 7 authors:

    1. Tomohiro Umeda
    2. Ayumi Sakai
    3. Rumi Uekado
    4. Keiko Shigemori
    5. Ryota Nakajima
    6. Kei Yamana
    7. Takami Tomiyama

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      eLife assessment

      The authors made a useful finding that Zizyphi spinosi semen, a traditional Chinese medicine, has demonstrated excellent biological activity and potential therapeutic effects against Alzheimer's disease (AD). The researchers presented the effects, but the research evidence for the mechanism was incomplete. The main claims were only partially supported.

    Reviewed by eLife