eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. Pan-Canadian survey on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on cervical cancer screening and management: cross-sectional survey of healthcare professionals

   This article has 6 authors:

   1. Mariam El-Zein
   2. Rami Ali
   3. Eliya Farah
   4. Sarah Botting-Provost
   5. Eduardo L Franco
   6. Survey Study Group

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This study explored practitioners' assessments of the impact of the pandemic on cervical cancer screening and follow-up. This is a very important topic that could continue to have implications for how this screening process is delivered now, after the pandemic. The authors need to more fully describe their methodology and temper conclusions to fit within those limitations.

   Reviewed by eLife

2. Zinc activation of OTOP proton channels identifies structural elements of the gating apparatus

   This article has 6 authors:

   1. Bochuan Teng
   2. Joshua P Kaplan
   3. Ziyu Liang
   4. Kevin Saejin Chyung
   5. Marcel P Goldschen-Ohm
   6. Emily R Liman

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This valuable study discovers that zinc ions can activate some OTOP proton channels, identifying a pharmacological tool for research, and further establishing that OTOP channels gate. The data presented provide convincing support for the conclusions made by the authors, and the study is expected to be of considerable interest to physiologists investigating OTOP and other proton channels.

   Reviewed by eLife

3. Early language exposure affects neural mechanisms of semantic representations

   This article has 3 authors:

   1. Xiaosha Wang
   2. Bijun Wang
   3. Yanchao Bi

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This study provides important evidence regarding the development of concept representations, using functional brain imaging to compare concept structure in people with different amounts of language experience. The analyses, which are overall solid, suggest that representations in the left lateral anterior temporal lobe differ as a function of childhood language experience.

   Reviewed by eLife

4. Model discovery to link neural activity to behavioral tasks

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Jamie D Costabile
   2. Kaarthik A Balakrishnan
   3. Sina Schwinn
   4. Martin Haesemeyer

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This useful paper describes a sensitive method for identifying the contributions of different behavioral and stimulus parameters to neural activity. The method has been convincingly validated using simulated data and applied to example state of the art data sets from mouse and zebrafish. The method could be productively applied to a wide range of experiments in behavioral and systems neuroscience, but it remained unclear how it relates to or improves on similar, existing methods.

   Reviewed by eLife

5. Instantaneous antidepressant effect of lateral habenula deep brain stimulation in rats studied with functional MRI

   This article has 12 authors:

   1. Gen Li
   2. Binshi Bo
   3. Puxin Wang
   4. Peixing Qian
   5. Mingzhe Li
   6. Yuyan Li
   7. Chuanjun Tong
   8. Kaiwei Zhang
   9. Baogui Zhang
   10. Tianzi Jiang
   11. Zhifeng Liang
   12. Xiaojie Duan

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     The authors present an important contribution to the field of deep brain stimulation (DBS) for depression by providing further evidence for the validity of the lateral habenula as a DBS target. The evidence provided is compelling and particularly strong in its use of fMRI to delineate target subregions best corresponding both to clinical and downstream fMRI response. This study provides information relevant to both surgical targeting and the mechanism of action for this DBS target.

   Reviewed by eLife

6. Hypermetabolism in mice carrying a near-complete human chromosome 21

   This article has 12 authors:

   1. Dylan C Sarver
   2. Cheng Xu
   3. Susana Rodriguez
   4. Susan Aja
   5. Andrew E Jaffe
   6. Feng J Gao
   7. Michael Delannoy
   8. Muthu Periasamy
   9. Yasuhiro Kazuki
   10. Mitsuo Oshimura
   11. Roger H Reeves
   12. G William Wong

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This important paper provides new insight into the effect of extra-copies of a chromosome, thus aneuploidy, on body metabolisms in mammals. The authors used various solid analyses on the metabolisms and physiology of the transgenic mouse with most of human chromosome 21 and presented convincing results to support the authors' claims. The work would be of interest to researchers who work on the physiology and biochemistry of body metabolisms in mammals.

   Reviewed by eLife

7. Spike-phase coupling patterns reveal laminar identity in primate cortex

   This article has 5 authors:

   1. Zachary W Davis
   2. Nicholas M Dotson
   3. Tom P Franken
   4. Lyle Muller
   5. John H Reynolds

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     The authors present a novel and precise method for determining boundaries of cortical layers from multi-electrode recordings in marmosets and macaques. Their method requires less data than current approaches to finding a systematic relationship between slow local field potentials and spiking across cortical columns. This approach may be broadly useful to those doing electrophysiological recordings in the primate brain.

   Reviewed by eLife

8. Endosomal trafficking of two-pore K+ efflux channel TWIK2 to plasmalemma mediates NLRP3 inflammasome activation and inflammatory injury

   This article has 8 authors:

   1. Long Shuang Huang
   2. Mohammad Anas
   3. Jingsong Xu
   4. Bisheng Zhou
   5. Peter T Toth
   6. Yamuna Krishnan
   7. Anke Di
   8. Asrar B Malik

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     In this important study, Di et al., examine the mechanism by which potassium channels are activated prior to NLRP3 inflammasome activation. The main strength of the study is that it uses a combination of cell culture work and a mouse model to address the cell biology of inflammasome activation. However, certain aspects of the study including the characterization of inflammasome activation and the evidence to support the role of Rab11a in the translocation of TWIK2 are incomplete.

   Reviewed by eLife

9. Contribution of linear and nonlinear mechanisms to predictive motion estimation

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Belle Liu
   2. Arthur Hong
   3. Fred Rieke
   4. Michael B. Manookin

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This paper will be of interest to sensory and computational neuroscientists. In it, the authors find maximally informative dimensions for primate retinal ganglion cells and use models based on these analyses to examine features of early visual processing that impact predictive coding of visual motion.

   Reviewed by eLife

10. The impact of local genomic properties on the evolutionary fate of genes

    This article has 2 authors:

    1. Yuichiro Hara
    2. Shigehiro Kuraku

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      eLife Assessment:

      This study is fundamental to understanding the intrinsic driving forces of gene losses during mammalian genome evolution, linking the propensity for gene losses to the local genomic features such as mutation rate and spatially restricted expression. In general, the study is methodologically convincing because independent gene losses in at least two mammalian lineages were identified as "elusive human genes". However, additional (comparative genomics and statistical) analyses would make the current study more rigorous. This manuscript will appeal to readers interested in the evolutionary fates of genes across the phylogenetic tree.

    Reviewed by eLife