eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. Microhomology-mediated circular DNA formation from oligonucleosomal fragments during spermatogenesis

   This article has 10 authors:

   1. Jun Hu
   2. Zhe Zhang
   3. Sai Xiao
   4. Yalei Cao
   5. Yinghong Chen
   6. Jiaming Weng
   7. Hui Jiang
   8. Wei Li
   9. Jia-Yu Chen
   10. Chao Liu

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This study provides important information on the biogenesis of eccDNAs during spermatogenesis. The data presented are solid and supportive of the concussion that eccDNAs in spermatogenic cells are not derived from miotic recombination hotspots but rather represent oligonucleosomal DNA fragments from apoptotic male germ cells, whose ends are ligated through microhomology-mediated end-joining. This work is of interest to researchers working on germ cell biology and cancer biology.

   Reviewed by eLife

2. Spindle assembly checkpoint-dependent mitotic delay is required for cell division in absence of centrosomes

   This article has 3 authors:

   1. KC Farrell
   2. Jennifer T Wang
   3. Tim Stearns

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This work explores how centrosomes, which function as the primary microtubule organizing center in animal cells, regulate cell division by examining the process in cells in which centrosome formation has been inhibited. The carefully conducted experiments provide convincing support for the important observation that elongated, but successful, mitosis observed in cells lacking centrosomes is due to delays in cell cycle progression.

   Reviewed by eLife

3. Remapping in a recurrent neural network model of navigation and context inference

   This article has 3 authors:

   1. Isabel IC Low
   2. Lisa M Giocomo
   3. Alex H Williams

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This important work provides evidence that artificial recurrent neural networks can be used to investigate neural mechanisms underlying reversible remapping of spatial representations. Authors perform convincing state of the art analyses showing how population activity preserves the encoding of spatial position despite remappings due to the tracking of an internal variable. This paper will be of interest to neuroscientists studying contextual computations, neural representation of space and links between artificial neural networks and the brain.

   Reviewed by eLife

4. Judging the difficulty of perceptual decisions

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Anne Löffler
   2. Ariel Zylberberg
   3. Michael N Shadlen
   4. Daniel M Wolpert

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This behavioral modeling study investigates how humans make decisions on the difficulty of perceptual categorization tasks. The study finds that such judgments are best described by an evidence-accumulation model that includes a dynamic comparison of difficulty-related evidence, which terminates when the difference in evidence between two tasks reaches a predetermined bound – a valuable finding for research in perceptual decision-making. The paper provides compelling behavioral evidence for the proposed model through: 1) quantitative model selection/validation procedures, and 2) qualitative analyses of the relation between the optimal model of the task and the human data (and the proposed model).

   Reviewed by eLife

5. Styxl2 regulates de novo sarcomere assembly by binding to non-muscle myosin IIs and promoting their degradation

   This article has 13 authors:

   1. Xianwei Chen
   2. Yanfeng Li
   3. Jin Xu
   4. Yong Cui
   5. Qian Wu
   6. Haidi Yin
   7. Yuying Li
   8. Chuan Gao
   9. Liwen Jiang
   10. Huating Wang
   11. Zilong Wen
   12. Zhongping Yao
   13. Zhenguo Wu

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This paper presents an important finding: that Styxl2, a poorly characterized pseudo-phosphatase, plays a role in the sarcomere assembly by promoting the degradation of non-muscle myosins. The genetic evidence supporting the conclusions is compelling, although future work will be needed to elucidate the functional role and biochemical mechanism of autophagic degradation of non-muscle myosins. This work will be of interest to biologists studying muscle development, cell biology, and proteolysis.

   Reviewed by eLife

6. Gene regulatory patterning codes in early cell fate specification of the C. elegans embryo

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Alison G Cole
   2. Tamar Hashimshony
   3. Zhuo Du
   4. Itai Yanai

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This valuable work fills a gap in the mapping of gene expression patterns in the early embryo of C. elegans. The presented data are solid and provides a resource for future analysis.

   Reviewed by eLife

7. Bacterial DNA on the skin surface overrepresents the viable skin microbiome

   This article has 9 authors:

   1. Ellen M Acosta
   2. Katherine A Little
   3. Benjamin P Bratton
   4. Jaime G Lopez
   5. Xuming Mao
   6. Aimee S Payne
   7. Mohamed Donia
   8. Danelle Devenport
   9. Zemer Gitai

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     In this important study, the authors provide convincing evidence that current DNA-based microbial genomics for skin bacteria cannot always detect the source of sequenced DNA and whether it originated from viable or non-viable bacteria. Additionally, the authors demonstrated in humans and mice that most of the viable bacteria reside inside hair follicles rather than the surface of the skin per se. Overall, the work has significance beyond a single discipline and will be of interest to those studying microbiomes.

   Reviewed by eLife

8. Mitochondrial electron transport chain, ceramide, and coenzyme Q are linked in a pathway that drives insulin resistance in skeletal muscle

   This article has 18 authors:

   1. Alexis Diaz-Vegas
   2. Søren Madsen
   3. Kristen C Cooke
   4. Luke Carroll
   5. Jasmine XY Khor
   6. Nigel Turner
   7. Xin Y Lim
   8. Miro A Astore
   9. Jonathan C Morris
   10. Anthony S Don
   11. Amanda Garfield
   12. Simona Zarini
   13. Karin A Zemski Berry
   14. Andrew P Ryan
   15. Bryan C Bergman
   16. Joseph T Brozinick
   17. David E James
   18. James G Burchfield

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This important study highlights a potential connection between fatty acid intrusion into myocytes and increases in mitochondrial ceramide that cause deficits in coenzyme Q and consequent insulin resistance. The authors primarily use the L6 myocyte model, which may not fully recapitulate in vivo conditions, however, the manuscript shows compelling data in mice that substantially supports the L6 cell results. Overall, this study provides a strong framework for a compelling pathway of myocyte dysfunction and for continued efforts to test the important hypotheses that are presented.

   Reviewed by eLife

9. Pynapple, a toolbox for data analysis in neuroscience

   This article has 10 authors:

   1. Guillaume Viejo
   2. Daniel Levenstein
   3. Sofia Skromne Carrasco
   4. Dhruv Mehrotra
   5. Sara Mahallati
   6. Gilberto R Vite
   7. Henry Denny
   8. Lucas Sjulson
   9. Francesco P Battaglia
   10. Adrien Peyrache

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This paper introduces the python software package Pynapple and a separate package of more advanced routines (Pynacollada) to the Neuroscience/Neural Engineering community. Pynapple provides a set of data objects and methods that have the potential to simplify data analysis for neural and behavioral data types. This represents a valuable contribution to the field. With more examples and as a live coding notebook, the evidence was judged to be compelling.

   Reviewed by eLife

10. Sex, strain, and lateral differences in brain cytoarchitecture across a large mouse population

    This article has 5 authors:

    1. David Elkind
    2. Hannah Hochgerner
    3. Etay Aloni
    4. Noam Shental
    5. Amit Zeisel

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      eLife assessment

      The authors provide a new powerful tool as well as a large database that should be useful to the neuroscience community, but not only. The authors developed and applied a methodology to automatically estimate the volume, cell number, and density of mice brains from multiple regions, by detecting the native fluorescence of the cell nuclei. Using this platform, they analyzed an existing dataset containing multiple mouse brains, available in the Allen Mouse Connectivity project. The data provides a comprehensive neuroanatomical comparison of brain nuclei between males and females, between hemispheres, and between 2 strains of lab mice.

    Reviewed by eLife