eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. Head before heart? Cognitive empathy may emerge before affective empathy in the developing brain

   This article has 5 authors:

   1. Chiara Bulgarelli
   2. Paola Pinti
   3. Tessel Bazelmans
   4. Antonia Hamilton
   5. Emily J Jones

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     The authors have presented a study which addresses a recognised gap in the literature, the emergence of the neural correlates of cognitive and affective empathy in children; they introduce a task for measuring both positive and negative empathy in a relatively large group of children aged 3-5. Using functional near infrared spectroscopy they found different brain region activation in cognitive versus affective empathy tasks, as well as age-related changes in the activation of right MPFC and right TPJ. The study represents a valuable contribution to understanding the development of cognitive function with solid evidence for the claims about brain regions and ageing.

   Reviewed by eLife

2. The cistrome response to hypoxia in human umbilical vein endothelial cells

   This article has 9 authors:

   1. Ayush Singh
   2. Viktor Pastukh
   3. Justin T Roberts
   4. Zachary M Turpin
   5. Zehta S Fazler
   6. Grant T Daly
   7. Jane M Benoit
   8. Mark N Gillespie
   9. Hank W Bass

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This is an important study that applies a new chromatin profiling technique to the study of cellular responses to low oxygen. The authors provide convincing evidence for distinct kinetic phases of the response and identify many new putative regulators of the response. This work will be of broad interest to those studying low oxygen responses and transcriptional regulation.

   Reviewed by eLife

3. The Par complex regulates apical-basal cell polarity through modulation of FAK signaling homeostasis

   This article has 21 authors:

   1. Meiai He
   2. Lining Liang
   3. Yulu Wang
   4. Yongyu Chen
   5. Hao Sun
   6. Lin Guo
   7. Changpeng Li
   8. Jingcai He
   9. Yanhua Wu
   10. Shiyu Chen
   11. Tingting Yang
   12. Fei Meng
   13. Qiwen Ren
   14. Linna Dong
   15. Lin Liu
   16. Qianqian Zou
   17. Tianya Zhang
   18. Xinyue Hou
   19. Qing Guo
   20. Dajiang Qin
   21. Hui Zheng

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This study presents a valuable finding that the Par polarity complex, but not Crumbs or Scrib, regulates morphological remodeling during the naive-to-primed transition of pluripotent stem cells, with later effects on differentiation and neural tube organoid lumen formation. The evidence is incomplete, as the developmental significance of the PAR KO phenotype requires clearer framing and deeper characterization, and the proposed signaling pathway is currently presented more strongly than the data support. The work will be of interest to developmental and stem cell biologists studying polarity, pluripotent-state transitions, epithelialization, and lumen formation.

   Reviewed by eLife

4. Story about honest mistakes: The cyanobacterium Synechocystis has a promiscuous Entner-Doudoroff (ED) aldolase but no functional ED pathway

   This article has 11 authors:

   1. Ravi Shankar Ojha
   2. Marius Theune
   3. Ruben Fritsche
   4. Alexander Makowka
   5. Marko Boehm
   6. Carmen Peraglie
   7. Christopher Bräsen
   8. Jacky L Snoep
   9. Martin Hagemann
   10. Bettina Siebers
   11. Kirstin Gutekunst

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This study presents fundamental results on questions related to the presence/absence of the Entner-Doudoroff pathway in cyanobacteria. In contrast to an earlier study, compelling evidence is given that Synechocystis PCC 6803 lacks both an Entner-Doudoroff pathway and a related bypass but contains a promiscuous aldolase. This study successfully reconciles data from different studies and lessons learned from a previous misconception.

   Reviewed by eLife

5. SqueakPose Studio, an end-to-end platform for pose estimation and real-time edge-AI deployment

   This article has 3 authors:

   1. David L Haggerty
   2. Caleb Browning Darden
   3. David Lovinger

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This important work introduces an integrated open-source platform for behavioral acquisition and pose estimation that substantially improves the accessibility and speed of real-time animal tracking workflows. The evidence supporting the utility and usability of SqueakPose Studio is compelling, particularly the substantial inference speed gains, intuitive graphical interface, flexible pose configuration, and successful testing on independent datasets, although the evidence supporting broader benchmarking claims and the hardware ecosystem surrounding MouseHouse and SqueakView remains somewhat incomplete. The study will be of broad interest to neuroscientists and behavioural researchers seeking scalable and user-friendly approaches for real-time behavioral analysis, and the work would be further strengthened by more rigorous benchmarking, expanded installation and hardware documentation, formal software release practices, and clearer delineation between demonstrated capabilities and future applications.

   Reviewed by eLife

6. Dendritic delay lines shape the computation of sound location in neurons of the gerbil medial superior olive

   This article has 5 authors:

   1. Jared Casarez
   2. Rebecca I. Voglewede
   3. Bradley D. Winters
   4. Ken Ledford
   5. Nace L. Golding

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This is a fundamental study that clarifies the cellular mechanism of sound localization in the horizontal plane. The analysis of medial superior olivary neurons provides experimental and computational evidence for a new mechanism in which a range of asymmetric dendritic delays permits individual MSO neurons to represent the full range of biologically relevant ITDs. Using elegant 2-photon guided simultaneous recordings from distal dendrites and soma, along with compartmental modeling on anatomically reconstructed neurons, the authors provide compelling evidence that this mechanism contributes to microsecond-level tuning.

   Reviewed by eLife

7. Benefit Transfer Loops Turn Cheating into a Scaffold for Microbial Diversity

   This article has 7 authors:

   1. Jiqi Shao
   2. Yinxiang Li
   3. Shaohua Gu
   4. Xiaoyi Zhang
   5. Shaopeng Wang
   6. Xueming Liu
   7. Zhiyuan Li

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This manuscript provides a valuable perspective on microbial community diversity and how this is shaped by the presence of cheaters. The evidence provided is solid, and the methods used to assess the research question are convincing. However, a major weakness is the general framing (or lack of embedding in recent literature), reducing the usefulness of the paper for a broad audience.

   Reviewed by eLife

8. Development of a genetically encoded fluorescent indicator for monitoring GPR52 activation

   This article has 9 authors:

   1. Guangyi Lan
   2. Huan Wang
   3. Tongrui Qian
   4. Shu Xie
   5. Cheng Qian
   6. Daniel Ursu
   7. Klaus D. Bornemann
   8. Bastian Hengerer
   9. Yulong Li

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     GPR52 is an orphan receptor implicated in neuropsychiatric disorders, and this study addresses the lack of real-time monitoring tools by developing GPR52-1.0, a genetically encoded fluorescent sensor built on the GRAB platform. The design of the sensor is elegant and the validation is thorough. The authors also utilized the sensor to discover that striatal neuron excitation may activate the sensor, providing exciting new biological insights into GPR52 functional mechanisms. The work could be useful to the field if presented in the correct context, but as it stands, the work remains incomplete as it overlooks GPR52's well-documented high constitutive activity (PMID: 32076264, PMID: 26384023), which raises major questions about the sensor's physiological relevance.

   Reviewed by eLife

9. Myristoylation licenses disordered viral VP4 protein to anchor to and perforate the membrane through phase separation

   This article has 12 authors:

   1. Sichao Huang
   2. Fengzhen Deng
   3. Te Liu
   4. Wenjian Li
   5. Peiying Wang
   6. Jiahuan Song
   7. Jingjing Huang
   8. Shiyu Zhang
   9. Jiaxin Liu
   10. Yan Wang
   11. Manjie Zhang
   12. Bin Sun

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This valuable study combines multiscale molecular simulations with supporting biophysical experiments to investigate how the myristoylated VP4 peptide of non-enveloped viruses interacts with host membranes during viral entry. The authors show that myristoylation facilitates VP4 membrane anchoring, condensate formation, and membrane remodeling events linked to early stages of membrane breaching. The work provides a convincing biophysical framework for understanding myristoylation-dependence in membrane-penetrating proteins.

   Reviewed by eLife

10. More than just a passive brick in the wall: the nucleosome facilitates DNA polymerase β activity in linker DNA and its PARP-dependent regulation in the BER sub-pathway choice

    This article has 7 authors:

    1. Danil M. Shtanov
    2. Tatyana A. Kurgina
    3. Mikhail M. Kutuzov
    4. Konstantin N. Naumenko
    5. Alexander A. Ukraintsev
    6. Nina A. Moor
    7. Olga I. Lavrik

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      eLife Assessment

      This valuable study presents evidence that DNA Polymerase β strand displacement synthesis within linker DNA is stimulated by the presence of an adjacent nucleosome core particle. The biochemical analyses of the strand displacement synthesis by the DNA polymerase on a reconstituted nucleosome substrate with a linker DNA provided incomplete evidence to support the authors' conclusion. The results in the paper are of interest to researchers in DNA repair and nucleosome biology.

    Reviewed by eLife