eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. Isobaric crosslinking mass spectrometry technology for studying conformational and structural changes in proteins and complexes

   This article has 2 authors:

   1. Jie Luo
   2. Jeff Ranish

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This manuscript presents a valuable new quantitative crosslinking mass spectrometry approach using novel isobaric crosslinkers. The data are solid and the method has potential for a broad application in structural biology if more isobaric crosslinking channels are available and the quantitative information of the approach is exploited in more depth.

   Reviewed by eLife

2. Aberrant FGF signaling promotes granule neuron precursor expansion in SHH subgroup infantile medulloblastoma

   This article has 6 authors:

   1. Odessa R. Yabut
   2. Hector Gomez
   3. Jessica Arela
   4. Jesse Garcia Castillo
   5. Thomas Ngo
   6. Samuel J. Pleasure

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This study provides potentially highly valuable new insight into the role of Fgf signalling in SUFU mutation-linked cerebellar tumors and indicates novel therapeutic interventions via inhibition of Fgf signalling. The evidence supporting the major claims, however, is at this point currently incomplete. A more robust analysis of gene expression patterns and deeper mechanistic insight would significantly enhance this study, which could have wide-ranging implications for the treatment of specific cerebellar tumors.

   Reviewed by eLife

3. Unveiling the Crucial Role of Pro-inflammatory Macrophages in the Immune Network Imbalance of the maternal-fetal interface with Preeclampsia

   This article has 13 authors:

   1. Haiyi Fei
   2. Xiaowen Lu
   3. Zhan Shi
   4. Xiu Liu
   5. Cuiyu Yang
   6. Xiaohong Zhu
   7. Yuhan Lin
   8. Ziqun Jiang
   9. Jianmin Wang
   10. Dong Huang
   11. Liu Liu
   12. Songying Zhang
   13. Lingling Jiang

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This valuable study investigates the immune system's role in pre-eclampsia. The authors map the immune cell landscape of the human placenta and find an increase in macrophages and Th17 cells in patients with pre-eclampsia. Following mouse studies, the authors suggest that the IGF1-IGF1R pathway might play a role in how macrophages influence T cells, potentially driving the pathology of pre-eclampsia. There is solid evidence in this study that will be of interest to immunologists and developmental biologists, however, some of the conclusions require additional detail and/or more appropriate statistical tests.

   Reviewed by eLife

4. Contraction-induced endocardial id2b plays a dual role in regulating myocardial contractility and valve formation

   This article has 13 authors:

   1. Shuo Chen
   2. Jie Yin
   3. Jinxiu Liang
   4. Weijia Zhang
   5. Peijun Jiang
   6. Wenyuan Wang
   7. Xiaoying Chen
   8. Yuanhong Zhou
   9. Peng Xia
   10. Fan Yang
   11. Ying Gu
   12. Ruilin Zhang
   13. Peidong Han

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This important work advances our understanding of how mechanical forces transmitted by blood flow contribute to cardiac development by identifying id2b as a flow-responsive factor that is required for valve development and calcium-mediated cardiac contractility and its downstream mechanism of action. However, the evidence supporting the conclusions is incomplete and would benefit from more rigorous approaches. With additional support of the main conclusions, the work will be of interest to those working on developmental biology, heart development, and congenital heart disease.

   Reviewed by eLife

5. Effective population size does not explain long-term variation in genome size and transposable element content in animals

   This article has 5 authors:

   1. Alba Marino
   2. Gautier Debaecker
   3. Anna-Sophie Fiston-Lavier
   4. Annabelle Haudry
   5. Benoit Nabholz

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This important study offers a powerful empirical test of a highly influential hypothesis in population genetics. It incorporates a large number of animal genomes spanning a broad phylogenetic spectrum and treats them in a rigorous unified pipeline, providing the convincing negative result that effective population size scales neither with the content of transposable elements nor with overall genome size. These observations demonstrate that there is still no simple, global hypothesis that can explain the observed variation in transposable element content and genome size in animals.

   Reviewed by eLife

6. Efficacy and mechanism of actions of cipargamin as an antibabesial drug candidate

   This article has 9 authors:

   1. Hang Li
   2. Shengwei Ji
   3. Nanang R Ariefta
   4. Eloiza May S Galon
   5. Shimaa AES El-Sayed
   6. Lijun Jia
   7. Yoshifumi Nishikawa
   8. Mingming Liu
   9. Xuenan Xuan

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This study presents valuable findings with practical and theoretical implications for drug discovery, particularly in the context of repurposing CIP for the treatment of Babesia spp. The evidence is convincing overall, as the data and analyses support the main claims. However, a few assertions are only partially substantiated. If the authors can strengthen these areas with additional evidence, the paper could attract greater interest from scientists in drug discovery, computational biology, and microbiology.

   Reviewed by eLife

7. A unifying account of replay as context-driven memory reactivation

   This article has 3 authors:

   1. Zhenglong Zhou
   2. Michael J Kahana
   3. Anna C Schapiro

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     Zhou et al. introduce cascading neural activations, known as 'replay', into a context-maintenance and retrieval model (CMR) that has been previously used to capture a range of memory phenomena. The proposed 'CMR-replay' model outperforms its CMR predecessor in a compelling way, and thus, the work makes important strides towards understanding the empirical memory literature as well as some of the cognitive functions of replay. Notable limitations include the scope of the model with respect to established aspects of memory consolidation, such as the stages and physiology of sleep, and the lack of integration with highly relevant associative and deep learning theories.

   Reviewed by eLife

8. Mechanistic Insights into MinD Regulation and Pattern Formation in Bacillus subtilis

   This article has 2 authors:

   1. Helge Feddersen
   2. Marc Bramkamp

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This useful study provides data suggesting that subcellular localization of the spatial regulator of cell division, MinD, is an intrinsic feature of the protein's ability to associate with the membrane as both a dimer and a monomer. These findings distinguish the behavior of MinD in B. subtilis from its counterpart in E. coli and suggest that there is not a need to invoke additional localization factors. However, all three reviewers agreed that the study is incomplete: experimentally, quantitation and assessment of MinD behavior in the presence of proteins previously implicated in its localization are missing, among other assays, and the molecular modeling necessary to support the authors' conclusion that their data support a reaction-diffusion model is completely absent. Finally, the manuscript itself is difficult to read with an overly long discussion and disorganized introduction and results sections, and it will require significant revision.

   Reviewed by eLife

9. Cyclical MinD membrane affinity differences are not necessary for MinD gradient formation in Bacillus subtilis

   This article has 6 authors:

   1. Laura C Bohorquez
   2. Henrik Strahl
   3. Davide Marenduzzo
   4. Martin J Thiele
   5. Frank Bürmann
   6. Leendert W Hamoen

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This important study provides solid mechanistic and modeling data suggesting that the polar localization of MinCD in Bacillus subtilis is largely due to differences in diffusion rates between monomeric and dimeric MinD. This finding is exciting as it negates the necessity for a third, localization determinant, in this system as has been previously proposed. The work is generally strong but is incomplete without some additional quantitative analysis, as well as clarification of the underlying assumptions and details used for the modeling experiments.

   Reviewed by eLife

10. From multiplicity of infection to force of infection for sparsely sampled Plasmodium falciparum populations at high transmission

    This article has 4 authors:

    1. Qi Zhan
    2. Kathryn E Tiedje
    3. Karen P Day
    4. Mercedes Pascual

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      eLife assessment

      The ability to estimate the force of infection for Plasmodium falciparum from other more directly measurable epidemiological quantities is a useful contribution to malaria epidemiology. The authors propose a method to accomplish this using genetic data from the var genes of the Pf genome and novel applications of existing methods from queueing theory. While the simulations are sophisticated, the real-world application of the method is incomplete in its analysis and would benefit from clearer articulation of the assumptions being made. Given the lack of clarity in the methods and presentation of results, it is difficult to fully assess the performance of their proposed estimation procedure.

    Reviewed by eLife