eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. Nuclear SUN1 stabilizes endothelial cell junctions via microtubules to regulate blood vessel formation

   This article has 17 authors:

   1. Danielle B Buglak
   2. Pauline Bougaran
   3. Molly R Kulikauskas
   4. Ziqing Liu
   5. Elizabeth Monaghan-Benson
   6. Ariel L Gold
   7. Allison P Marvin
   8. Andrew Burciu
   9. Natalie T Tanke
   10. Morgan Oatley
   11. Shea N Ricketts
   12. Karina Kinghorn
   13. Bryan N Johnson
   14. Celia E Shiau
   15. Stephen Rogers
   16. Christophe Guilluy
   17. Victoria L Bautch

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     Endothelial cells mediate the growth of the vascular system, but they also need to prevent vascular leakage, which involves interactions with neighboring endothelial cells through junctional protein complexes. This important study provides a full mechanistic insight into how Sun1 is achieving its function, which supports the concept that nuclear anchoring is critical for proper mechanosensing and junctional organization. Although the evidence supporting the claims of the authors is solid and there are several merits and strengths in this study, a weakness is that some important controls are missing. The work will be of broad interest to cell biologists and vascular biologists.

   Reviewed by eLife

2. Reassessment of weak parent-of-origin expression bias shows it rarely exists outside of known imprinted regions

   This article has 6 authors:

   1. Carol A Edwards
   2. William MD Watkinson
   3. Stephanie B Telerman
   4. Lisa C Hulsmann
   5. Russell S Hamilton
   6. Anne C Ferguson-Smith

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This manuscript presents a useful meta-analysis of genes with parent-specific expression from mouse published RNA-seq datasets, focusing on genes with weak allelic bias. A combination of systematic bioinformatic analysis and experimental validation convincingly shows that the number of parentally biased genes has been overestimated and the few novel ones lie at the periphery of known imprinted loci. The work will be of interest to genomicists with an interest in imprinting and its mechanisms.

   Reviewed by eLife

3. Haploinsufficiency of the essential gene Rps12 causes defects in erythropoiesis and hematopoietic stem cell maintenance

   This article has 5 authors:

   1. Virginia Folgado-Marco
   2. Kristina Ames
   3. Jacky Chuen
   4. Kira Gritsman
   5. Nicholas E Baker

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This study will be of interest to scientists within the field of hematopoiesis and ribosome biology. The paper provides evidence that haploinsufficiency of the mouse ribosomal protein gene Rps12 results in a number of phenotypes including defects in the production of specific blood cells and loss of hematopoietic stem cell quiescence. This work adds to the growing body of evidence that specific cell populations are particularly sensitive to disruption of mRNA translation machinery.

   Reviewed by eLife

4. Behavioral dissection of hunger states in Drosophila

   This article has 6 authors:

   1. Kristina J Weaver
   2. Sonakshi Raju
   3. Rachel A Rucker
   4. Tuhin Chakraborty
   5. Robert A Holt
   6. Scott D Pletcher

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This important paper advances our ability to understand feeding behavior in fruit flies and begins to address the challenging question of motivation. With innovative methods based on the detailed monitoring of interactions between foods of different qualities at different hunger states, they present compelling evidence for non-homeostatic feeding not driven by metabolic need.

   Reviewed by eLife

5. High-throughput library transgenesis in Caenorhabditis elegans via Transgenic Arrays Resulting in Diversity of Integrated Sequences (TARDIS)

   This article has 6 authors:

   1. Zachary C Stevenson
   2. Megan J Moerdyk-Schauwecker
   3. Stephen A Banse
   4. Dhaval S Patel
   5. Hang Lu
   6. Patrick C Phillips

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This manuscript provides a description of an approach for efficiently integrating diverse libraries into the C. elegans genome and tools that enable researchers to use the method. It is a valuable contribution for researchers carrying out experiments that would benefit from easy generation of such libraries, and the data for the effectiveness of the method is solid. The advantages of this approach in terms of ease and effectiveness relative to others with similar aims will emerge as they are put to more general use in addressing biological problems.

   Reviewed by eLife, Arcadia Science

6. Biological brain age prediction using machine learning on structural neuroimaging data: Multi-cohort validation against biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease and neurodegeneration stratified by sex

   This article has 31 authors:

   1. Irene Cumplido-Mayoral
   2. Marina García-Prat
   3. Grégory Operto
   4. Carles Falcon
   5. Mahnaz Shekari
   6. Raffaele Cacciaglia
   7. Marta Milà-Alomà
   8. Luigi Lorenzini
   9. Silvia Ingala
   10. Alle Meije Wink
   11. Henk JMM Mutsaerts
   12. Carolina Minguillón
   13. Karine Fauria
   14. José Luis Molinuevo
   15. Sven Haller
   16. Gael Chetelat
   17. Adam Waldman
   18. Adam J Schwarz
   19. Frederik Barkhof
   20. Ivonne Suridjan
   21. Gwendlyn Kollmorgen
   22. Anna Bayfield
   23. Henrik Zetterberg
   24. Kaj Blennow
   25. Marc Suárez-Calvet
   26. Verónica Vilaplana
   27. Juan Domingo Gispert
   28. ALFA study
   29. EPAD study
   30. ADNI study
   31. OASIS study

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     The study has some significance for the field of dementia research and neurodegenerative diseases more broadly. Using the brain-age paradigm, the main findings are that having an older-appearing brain is associated with more advanced stages of amyloid and tau pathology, higher white matter hyperintensities, higher plasma NfL and carrying the APOE 34 allele. Findings were broadly similar in cognitively normal people and people with mild cognitive impairment and the evidence for these findings is convincing. Although sex differences are emphasized, the evidence for this is generally incomplete.

   Reviewed by eLife

7. Spatiotemporal tissue maturation of thalamocortical pathways in the human fetal brain

   This article has 18 authors:

   1. Siân Wilson
   2. Maximilian Pietsch
   3. Lucilio Cordero-Grande
   4. Daan Christiaens
   5. Alena Uus
   6. Vyacheslav R Karolis
   7. Vanessa Kyriakopoulou
   8. Kathleen Colford
   9. Anthony N Price
   10. Jana Hutter
   11. Mary A Rutherford
   12. Emer J Hughes
   13. Serena J Counsell
   14. Jacques-Donald Tournier
   15. Joseph V Hajnal
   16. A David Edwards
   17. Jonathan O’Muircheartaigh
   18. Tomoki Arichi

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This study presents important new findings regarding prenatal thalamocortical development. The authors present convincing evidence to overcome substantial methodological challenges in charting prenatal brain development in vivo. This work will be of interest to pediatric and developmental neuroscientists and neuroradiologists.

   Reviewed by eLife

8. Metabolic clogging of mannose triggers dNTP loss and genomic instability in human cancer cells

   This article has 19 authors:

   1. Yoichiro Harada
   2. Yu Mizote
   3. Takehiro Suzuki
   4. Akiyoshi Hirayama
   5. Satsuki Ikeda
   6. Mikako Nishida
   7. Toru Hiratsuka
   8. Ayaka Ueda
   9. Yusuke Imagawa
   10. Kento Maeda
   11. Yuki Ohkawa
   12. Junko Murai
   13. Hudson H Freeze
   14. Eiji Miyoshi
   15. Shigeki Higashiyama
   16. Heiichiro Udono
   17. Naoshi Dohmae
   18. Hideaki Tahara
   19. Naoyuki Taniguchi

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     The authors present valuable findings regarding the mechanism of high mannose induced cellular toxicity in cancer cells. The evidence supporting genomic instability as the anti-cancer activity of mannose is convincing with multiple orthogonal approaches showing consistent results, but the conclusions related to metabolic remodeling could be further strengthened by additional metabolomics data. While the findings are limited to genetically modified cancer cell lines cultured in vitro, this work will be of interest to cell biologists working on cancer metabolism.

   Reviewed by eLife

9. The effect of weight loss following 18 months of lifestyle intervention on brain age assessed with resting-state functional connectivity

   This article has 12 authors:

   1. Gidon Levakov
   2. Alon Kaplan
   3. Anat Yaskolka Meir
   4. Ehud Rinott
   5. Gal Tsaban
   6. Hila Zelicha
   7. Matthias Blüher
   8. Uta Ceglarek
   9. Michael Stumvoll
   10. Ilan Shelef
   11. Galia Avidan
   12. Iris Shai

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This potentially important study examines brain age based on resting state functional connectivity (RSFC) following an 18-month lifestyle intervention. The design of the intervention study is generally solid; the randomized controlled trial includes three intervention groups and assessments at two-time points of numerous health markers, however, the methodology for brain age prediction appears somewhat incomplete and would benefit from more rigorous approaches. The lack of control groups also prevents firm conclusions about the extent to which the observed RSFC changes are linked to the intervention. With these parts strengthened, the paper would be of broad interest to neuroscientists and biologists working on obesity, lifestyle interventions, and brain health.

   Reviewed by eLife

10. Neuroelectrophysiology-compatible electrolytic lesioning

    This article has 5 authors:

    1. Iliana E Bray
    2. Stephen E Clarke
    3. Kerriann M Casey
    4. Paul Nuyujukian
    5. for the Brain Interfacing Laboratory

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      eLife assessment

      This paper reports a valuable new method for creating localized damage to candidate brain regions for functional and behavioral studies. The authors present solid support for their ability to create long-term local lesions with mm spatial resolution. The paper is likely to be of broad interest to brain researchers working to establish causal links between neural circuits and behavior.

    Reviewed by eLife