eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. A class-specific effect of dysmyelination on the excitability of hippocampal interneurons

   This article has 7 authors:

   1. Delphine Pinatel
   2. Edouard Pearlstein
   3. Giulia Bonetto
   4. Laurence Goutebroze
   5. Domna Karagogeos
   6. Valérie Crepel
   7. Catherine Faivre-Sarrailh

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This important study identifies the functional consequence of myelination of interneuronal axons on circuit function by showing that 4.1B deletion leads to altered myelination in a subset of interneurons and altered intrinsic and synaptic physiological parameters. The authors' conclusions about how myelination of inhibitory axons affects physiological properties are based on solid evidence using a combination of imaging and electrophysiological approaches.

   Reviewed by eLife

2. Temporally specific gene expression and chromatin remodeling programs regulate a conserved Pdyn enhancer

   This article has 7 authors:

   1. Robert A Phillips
   2. Ethan Wan
   3. Jennifer J Tuscher
   4. David Reid
   5. Olivia R Drake
   6. Lara Ianov
   7. Jeremy J Day

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This is an important study that uses chromatin accessibility as a measure to determine the impact of neuronal activity on the state of chromatin regulatory elements in striatal neurons. The authors provide convincing evidence of how Pdyn gene expression is highly dependent on a distal regulatory genomic region both at basal and upon neuronal activation in this particular system, a mechanism conserved as well in human neuronal cells. Although the basic idea of accessibility changes have been studied before, this paper ties previous findings all together in one place and uses the analysis to identify a functionally relevant and conserved enhancer for the prodynorphin gene with potential relevance for neuropsychiatric disorders beyond basic cellular neuroscience. The study will be of interest to neuroscientists studying the striatum, neuronal plasticity, or related neuropsychiatric disorders.

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3. Memory-specific encoding activities of the ventral tegmental area dopamine and GABA neurons

   This article has 2 authors:

   1. Vasileios Glykos
   2. Shigeyoshi Fujisawa

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This study characterized the activity of optogenetically identified dopaminergic and GABAergic neurons in the ventral tegmental area in mice performing a memory-guided T-maze task, and shows that subpopulations of dopaminergic and GABAergic neurons exhibited choice-related activity during the delay period, consistent with some previous studies (e.g. Morris et al., 2006, Parker et al., 2016). The authors demonstrate that these delay-period activities were enhanced when the task requires short-term memory. The results are convincing and this study provides important results regarding the nature of delay-period activity in the task.

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4. BOUNTI: Brain vOlumetry and aUtomated parcellatioN for 3D feTal MRI

   This article has 20 authors:

   1. Alena U. Uus
   2. Vanessa Kyriakopoulou
   3. Antonios Makropoulos
   4. Abi Fukami-Gartner
   5. Daniel Cromb
   6. Alice Davidson
   7. Lucilio Cordero-Grande
   8. Anthony N. Price
   9. Irina Grigorescu
   10. Logan Z. J. Williams
   11. Emma C. Robinson
   12. David Lloyd
   13. Kuberan Pushparajah
   14. Lisa Story
   15. Jana Hutter
   16. Serena J. Counsell
   17. A. David Edwards
   18. Mary A. Rutherford
   19. Joseph V. Hajnal
   20. Maria Deprez

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This study proposes a deep learning-based segmentation pipeline of fetal brain MRI, with parcellation based on a newly implemented atlas. This represents an important contribution to the field of developmental neuroscience and pediatric neuroimaging, especially as the pipeline and atlas are publicly available. The evidence for the pipeline robustness and atlas relevance is convincing given the extensive validations provided and the very high-quality ground truth dataset. Although beyond the state of the art, the study would benefit from further comparisons with existing methods and additional evaluations of the framework generalizability according to image quality, subject age or brain abnormalities.

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5. Dynamic control of sequential retrieval speed in networks with heterogeneous learning rules

   This article has 2 authors:

   1. Maxwell Gillett
   2. Nicolas Brunel

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     The authors provide a valuable analysis of what neural circuit mechanisms enable varying the speed of retrieval of sequences, which is needed in situations such as reproducing motor patterns. Their use of heterogeneous plasticity rules to allow external currents to control speed of sequence recall is a novel alternative to other mechanisms proposed in the literature. They perform a convincing characterization of relevant properties of recall via simulations and theory, though a better mapping to biologically plausible mechanisms is left for future work.

   Reviewed by eLife

6. Age-associated changes in lineage composition of the enteric nervous system regulate gut health and disease

   This article has 18 authors:

   1. Subhash Kulkarni
   2. Monalee Saha
   3. Jared Slosberg
   4. Alpana Singh
   5. Sushma Nagaraj
   6. Laren Becker
   7. Chengxiu Zhang
   8. Alicia Bukowski
   9. Zhuolun Wang
   10. Guosheng Liu
   11. Jenna M Leser
   12. Mithra Kumar
   13. Shriya Bakhshi
   14. Matthew J Anderson
   15. Mark Lewandoski
   16. Elizabeth Vincent
   17. Loyal A Goff
   18. Pankaj Jay Pasricha

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This paper identifies a subset of neurons within adult mouse myenteric ganglia that are not labeled via canonical neural-crest labeling, and argues, based on extensive lineage tracing, imaging and genomic data that these neurons are derived from mesoderm. There is convincing evidence for the existence of an unusual cell type in the gut that expresses neuronal markers, but which is derived from cells expressing markers of the mesoderm rather than the expected neural crest, which is an intriguing and important observation. While the data do not definitively establish the molecular taxonomy of this lineage, there is sufficient evidence to support the provocative and paradigm-shifting hypothesis of the non-ectodermal origin for enteric neurons to warrant further deeper investigation.

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7. Is competition for cellular resources a driver of complex trait heritability?

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Olivier Naret
   2. Yuval Simons
   3. Jacques Fellay
   4. Jonathan K Pritchard

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This solid study addresses the unresolved question of why many thousands of small-effect loci contribute more to the heritability of a trait than the large-effect lead variants. The authors explore resource competition within the transcriptional machinery as one possible explanation with a simple theoretical model, concluding that the effects of resource competition would be too small to explain the heritability effects. The topic and approximation of the problem are important and offer an intuitive way to think about polygenic variation, but there are concerns on the derivation of the equations with respect to dropping vs. including certain terms that deal inherently with small numbers.

   Reviewed by eLife

8. E3 ubiquitin ligase Deltex facilitates the expansion of Wingless gradient and antagonizes Wingless signaling through a conserved mechanism of transcriptional effector Armadillo/β-catenin degradation

   This article has 5 authors:

   1. Vartika Sharma
   2. Nalani Sachan
   3. Bappi Sarkar
   4. Mousumi Mutsuddi
   5. Ashim Mukherjee

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This is a useful study of the connection between the ubiquitin ligase protein deltex and the wingless signaling pathway. Two different links are inferred from genetic interactions in vivo between loss-of-function mutations and overexpression. While the genetic data are solid, the precise mechanism underlying either effect remains to be established.

   Reviewed by eLife

9. Deciphering deep-sea chemosynthetic symbiosis by single-nucleus RNA-sequencing

   This article has 14 authors:

   1. Hao Wang
   2. Kai He
   3. Huan Zhang
   4. Quanyong Zhang
   5. Lei Cao
   6. Jing Li
   7. Zhaoshan Zhong
   8. Hao Chen
   9. Li Zhou
   10. Chao Lian
   11. Minxiao Wang
   12. Kai Chen
   13. Pei-Yuan Qian
   14. Chaolun Li

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This study provides an important cell type atlas of the gill of the mussel Gigantidas platifrons using a single nucleus RNA-seq dataset, a resource for the community of scientists studying deep sea physiology and metabolism and intracellular host-symbiont relationships. The evidence supporting the conclusions is convincing with high-quality single-nucleus RNA sequencing and transplant experiments. This work will be of broad relevance for scientists interested in host-symbiont relationships across ecosystems.

   Reviewed by eLife

10. Digital wearable insole-based identification of knee arthropathies and gait signatures using machine learning

    This article has 26 authors:

    1. Matthew F Wipperman
    2. Allen Z Lin
    3. Kaitlyn M Gayvert
    4. Benjamin Lahner
    5. Selin Somersan-Karakaya
    6. Xuefang Wu
    7. Joseph Im
    8. Minji Lee
    9. Bharatkumar Koyani
    10. Ian Setliff
    11. Malika Thakur
    12. Daoyu Duan
    13. Aurora Breazna
    14. Fang Wang
    15. Wei Keat Lim
    16. Gabor Halasz
    17. Jacek Urbanek
    18. Yamini Patel
    19. Gurinder S Atwal
    20. Jennifer D Hamilton
    21. Samuel Stuart
    22. Oren Levy
    23. Andreja Avbersek
    24. Rinol Alaj
    25. Sara C Hamon
    26. Olivier Harari

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      eLife assessment

      This study presents a valuable dataset and tool that can aid in arthropathies' assessment, potentially enabling such evaluation to be done outside the lab. There is solid evidence supporting the comparison between the force plate and insole data, which can be strengthened by improvements in cross-validation, but the evidence for distinguishing disease signatures and elimination of walking speed as a factor is inconclusive and would need further analysis. This work will be of interest to physical therapists, clinicians, and researchers in the field of ankle/knee/hip osteoporosis and other lower limb joint diseases.

    Reviewed by eLife