eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. Dynamic estimation of the attentional field from visual cortical activity

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Ilona M. Bloem
   2. Leah Bakst
   3. Joseph T. McGuire
   4. Sam Ling

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This valuable study addresses a gap in our understanding of how the size of the attentional field is represented within the visual cortex. The evidence supporting the role of visual cortical activity is solid, based on a novel modeling analysis of fMRI data. The results will be of interest to psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists.

   Reviewed by eLife

2. Planar cell polarity coordination in a cnidarian embryo provides clues to animal body axis evolution

   This article has 8 authors:

   1. Julie Uveira
   2. Antoine Donati
   3. Marvin Léria
   4. Marion Lechable
   5. François Lahaye
   6. Christine Vesque
   7. Evelyn Houliston
   8. Tsuyoshi Momose

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This analysis of the formation of the oral-aboral body axis in cnidarians, the sister group of bilaterians, is a significant and fundamental contribution to the field of Wnt signalling and planar cell polarity. The evidence supporting the conclusions is compelling and has the potential to contribute to a deeper understanding of the origin and evolution of Wnt signalling in metazoans. These findings will be of broad interest to developmental and evolutionary biologists.

   Reviewed by eLife

3. Myristoylated Neuronal Calcium Sensor-1 captures the preciliary vesicle at distal appendages

   This article has 7 authors:

   1. Tomoharu Kanie
   2. Roy Ng
   3. Keene L Abbott
   4. Niaj Mohammad Tanvir
   5. Esben Lorentzen
   6. Olaf Pongs
   7. Peter K Jackson

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     The identification of NCS1 as a distal appendage protein that captures preciliary vesicles has important implications for understanding the early steps of ciliary assembly. Furthermore, the work has important implications for the broader understanding of NCS1, which prior to this work was focused on roles in neurotransmission, but now must be considered in a broader context. The investigators used a variety of state-of-the-art methodologies, and the conclusions are convincingly supported by the experimental data. This work will be of interest to cell biologists studying ciliary assembly, human geneticists exploring the pathology of cilia as well as neurobiologists studying NCS1.

   Reviewed by eLife

4. A hierarchical pathway for assembly of the distal appendages that organize primary cilia

   This article has 6 authors:

   1. Tomoharu Kanie
   2. Beibei Liu
   3. Julia F Love
   4. Saxton D Fisher
   5. Anna-Karin Gustavsson
   6. Peter K Jackson

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This important and detailed study presents the most comprehensive view of the functional organization and requirements for a mother centriole's distal appendage in primary cilia assembly published to date. Crispr-knockouts and super-resolution microscopy analysis of the distal appendage proteins provides convincing evidence to support the claims of the authors. This work will be of high value to cell biologists and biophysicists working on the structure and function of the centrosome as well as human geneticists exploring ciliary pathology.

   Reviewed by eLife

5. Online reinforcement learning of state representation in recurrent network: the power of random feedback and biological constraints

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Takayuki Tsurumi
   2. Ayaka Kato
   3. Arvind Kumar
   4. Kenji Morita

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This work models reinforcement-learning experiments using a recurrent neural network. It examines if the detailed credit assignment necessary for back-propagation through time can be replaced with random feedback. In this useful study the authors show that it yields a satisfactory approximation but the evidence to support that it holds in general is incomplete. As only short temporal delays are used and the examples simulated are overly simple, the approximation would need to be tested on more complex task and with larger networks.

   Reviewed by eLife

6. Chronic RNA G-quadruplex accumulation in aging and Alzheimer’s disease

   This article has 6 authors:

   1. Lena Kallweit
   2. Eric Daniel Hamlett
   3. Hannah Saternos
   4. Anah Gilmore
   5. Ann-Charlotte Granholm
   6. Scott Horowitz

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     The current human tissue-based study provides compelling evidence correlating hippocampal expressions of RNA guanine-rich G-quadruplexes with aging and with Alzheimer's Disease presence and severity. The results are fundamental and will rejuvenate our understanding of aging and AD's pathogenesis.

     [Editors' note: this paper was reviewed by Review Commons.]

   Reviewed by eLife, Review Commons

7. The Primate Major Histocompatibility Complex: An Illustrative Example of Gene Family Evolution

   This article has 2 authors:

   1. Alyssa Lyn Fortier
   2. Jonathan K Pritchard

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This valuable manuscript presents a thorough analysis of the evolution of Major Histocompatibility Complex gene families across Primates. A key strength of this analysis is the use of state-of-the-art phylogenetic methods to estimate rates of gene gain and loss, but estimates of gene loss may suffer from the issue of genes entirely or partially missing from genome assemblies represented in the public databases used, given the notorious difficulty to properly assemble MHC gene genomic regions. Overall the evidence provided is still convincing, but the manuscript may benefit from discussing approaches that can address the issue of entirely or partially missing genes, in particular how the use of long reads to completely re-assemble complex loci might improve the assessment of the complex evolutionary processes at play in MHC gene families.

   Reviewed by eLife

8. Regulatory networks of KRAB zinc finger genes and transposable elements changed during human brain evolution and disease

   This article has 3 authors:

   1. Yao-Chung Chen
   2. Arnaud Maupas
   3. Katja Nowick

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     The authors present new expression analysis software (TEKRABber) to help analyze expression correlations between transposable elements (TEs) and KRAB zinc finger (KRAB-ZNF) genes in experimentaly validated datasets. The authors use this method to decipher the regulatory networks of KRAB-ZNFs and TEs during human brain evolution and in Alzheimer's disease. The direction of the work is important, with potentially significant interest from others looking for a tool for correlative gene expression analysis across individual genomes and species. However, identified biases and shortcomings in the current analysis pipeline could lead to an unacceptable number of false positive and negative signals and thus impact the conclusions, leaving this work in its current form incomplete.

   Reviewed by eLife

9. B cell expression of the enzyme PexRAP, an intermediary in ether lipid biosynthesis, promotes antibody responses and germinal center size

   This article has 9 authors:

   1. Sung Hoon Cho
   2. Marissa A Jones
   3. Kaylor Meyer
   4. David M Anderson
   5. Sergei Chetyrkin
   6. M Wade Calcutt
   7. Richard M Caprioli
   8. Clay F Semenkovich
   9. Mark R Boothby

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This study provides useful insights into the ways in which germinal center B cell metabolism, particularly lipid metabolism, affects cellular responses. The authors use sophisticated mouse models to demonstrate that ether lipids are relevant for B cell homeostasis and efficient humoral responses. Although the data were collected from in vitro and in vivo experiments and analyzed using solid and validated methodology, more careful experiments and extensive revision of the manuscript will be required to strengthen the authors' conclusions.

   Reviewed by eLife

10. Humans adapt rationally to approximate estimates of uncertainty

    This article has 2 authors:

    1. Erdem Pulcu
    2. Michael Browning

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      eLife Assessment

      This study is important, advancing our understanding of how humans adapt to uncertainty in dynamic environments by investigating the interplay between two types of uncertainty-volatility (systematic changes in outcomes) and noise (random variability in outcomes). Using an innovative experimental task, reinforcement learning (RL) models, and Bayesian Observer Models (BOM), the authors demonstrate that humans exhibit approximate rationality, often misattributing noise as volatility and adopting suboptimal learning rates in noisy conditions. The evidence is compelling, supported by a well-designed experimental task that independently manipulates noise and volatility, robust behavioral data, and computational modeling; the inclusion of BOM lesioning and physiological validation through pupillometry provides a nuanced understanding of suboptimal human learning. While the study could benefit from expanding the model space (e.g., by including latent state models) and offering greater clarity in task instructions and raw behavioral data, these limitations do not undermine the strength of the findings.

    Reviewed by eLife