eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. Transferred mitochondria accumulate reactive oxygen species, promoting proliferation

   This article has 14 authors:

   1. Chelsea U Kidwell
   2. Joseph R Casalini
   3. Soorya Pradeep
   4. Sandra D Scherer
   5. Daniel Greiner
   6. Defne Bayik
   7. Dionysios C Watson
   8. Gregory S Olson
   9. Justin D Lathia
   10. Jarrod S Johnson
   11. Jared Rutter
   12. Alana L Welm
   13. Thomas A Zangle
   14. Minna Roh-Johnson

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This manuscript provides compelling evidence that macrophages transfer mitochondria to cancer cells and that transferred mitochondria stimulate proliferation in recipient cells. The usage an array of clever cell biology-based tools provides compelling evidence for these claims despite the difficulties associated with studying a relatively low probability event. Solid evidence supports the proposed model that transferred mitochondria induce proliferation by stimulating ERK signaling in a ROS dependent manner, although at present some aspects of the proposed model are incomplete. The work has broad significance for both mitochondrial biology and cancer biology as the authors show clear evidence of mitochondrial transfer in mouse models of human tumors.

   Reviewed by eLife, ASAPbio crowd review

2. Opioid suppression of an excitatory pontomedullary respiratory circuit by convergent mechanisms

   This article has 2 authors:

   1. Jordan T Bateman
   2. Erica S Levitt

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     Opioid-induced respiratory depression is one of the side effects of opioid drugs. Although opioid overdose deaths are highly prevalent, our knowledge of the neural circuits underlying respiratory depression in the brainstem is far from complete. The present study used a variety of sophisticated experimental techniques to convincingly reveal the identity of brainstem components that are part of the neural circuits involved in the mediation of opioid respiratory effects, together with defining potential synaptic underlying mechanisms. They focused on two regions of the brainstem, namely the Kolliker-Fuse and the preBötzinger Complex, and proposed a combination of three complementary processes at pre- and post-synaptic sites in both KF and preBötC regions to explain respiratory depression linked to opioid exposure. This study provides very important findings on the circuitry involved in opioid-induced respiratory depression, and the present results are of broad interest to the respiratory control research community, as well as medically relevant.

   Reviewed by eLife

3. Intravital imaging-based genetic screen reveals the transcriptional network governing Candida albicans filamentation during mammalian infection

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Rohan S Wakade
   2. Laura C Ristow
   3. Melanie Wellington
   4. Damian J Krysan

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     Candida morphogenesis is important for virulence. This study provides important new information as to how C. albicans regulates the switch from budding to hyphal morphology. Their results identify transcription factors involved in the process of hyphal morphogenesis in the host. The results are convincing and will be interesting to scientists in the fields of medical mycology and cell biology.

   Reviewed by eLife

4. Mega-scale movie-fields in the mouse visuo-hippocampal network

   This article has 2 authors:

   1. Chinmay Purandare
   2. Mayank Mehta

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This manuscript analyzes large-scale Neuropixels recordings from visual areas and hippocampus of mice passively viewing repeated clips of a movie and reports that neurons respond with elevated firing activities to specific, continuous sequences of movie frames. The important results support a role of rodent hippocampal neurons in general episode encoding and advance understanding of visual information processing across different brain regions. The strength of evidence for the primary conclusion was found to be convincing.

   Reviewed by eLife

5. Arabidopsis transcriptome responses to low water potential using high-throughput plate assays

   This article has 10 authors:

   1. Stephen Gonzalez
   2. Joseph Swift
   3. Adi Yaaran
   4. Jiaying Xu
   5. Charlotte Miller
   6. Natanella Illouz-Eliaz
   7. Joseph R Nery
   8. Wolfgang Busch
   9. Yotam Zait
   10. Joseph R Ecker

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This work critically evaluates several widely-used assays of transcriptional responses to water limitation in Arabidopsis grown on defined agar-solidified media and, finding inconsistent responses in root transcriptome responses, introduces a new 'hard agar' assay with more consistent responses. The work is valuable as a simple and alternative experimental system that would enable high-throughput genetic screening (and GWAS) to assess the impacts of environmental perturbations on transcriptional responses in various genetic backgrounds. Within this scope, the work is solid, though the debate about whether field-level physiological inferences can be made from such assays remains.

   Reviewed by eLife

6. A stable, distributed code for cue value in mouse cortex during reward learning

   This article has 5 authors:

   1. David J Ottenheimer
   2. Madelyn M Hjort
   3. Anna J Bowen
   4. Nicholas A Steinmetz
   5. Garret D Stuber

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This study makes valuable observations about the representation of "value" in the mouse brain, by using a nice task design and recording from an impressive number of brain regions. The combination of state-of-the-art imaging and electrophysiology data offer solid support for the authors' conclusions. The paper will be of interest to a broad audience of neuroscientists interested in reward processing in the brain.

   Reviewed by eLife

7. Cellular and molecular dynamics in the lungs of neonatal and juvenile mice in response to E. coli

   This article has 9 authors:

   1. Sharon A McGrath-Morrow
   2. Jarrett Venezia
   3. Roland Ndeh
   4. Nigel Michki
   5. Javier Perez
   6. Benjamin David Singer
   7. Raffaello Cimbro
   8. Mark Soloski
   9. Alan L Scott

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This study examines the inflammatory and immune response to live E. coli bacterial infection in neonatal and juvenile mice. Important information is described on the roles of Class II MHC and interferon responsive genes in regulating the host response to infection. This study will inform future efforts to further elucidate the impact of bacterial infections on lung development.

   Reviewed by eLife

8. Neural population dynamics of computing with synaptic modulations

   This article has 2 authors:

   1. Kyle Aitken
   2. Stefan Mihalas

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This is a valuable study showing that fast, but transient, modifications of the synaptic efficacies, alone, can support the integration of information over time. Convincing supportive evidence is provided by showing that feed-forward networks, when equipped with such short-term synaptic modulations, can successfully perform a variety of temporal integration tasks at a performance level comparable with that of recurrent networks. These results will be of interest to both neuroscientists and researchers in machine learning.

   Reviewed by eLife

9. O-GlcNAc glycosylation orchestrates fate decision and niche function of bone marrow stromal progenitors

   This article has 11 authors:

   1. Zengdi Zhang
   2. Zan Huang
   3. Mohamed Awad
   4. Mohammed Elsalanty
   5. James Cray
   6. Lauren E Ball
   7. Jason C Maynard
   8. Alma L Burlingame
   9. Hu Zeng
   10. Kim C Mansky
   11. Hai-Bin Ruan

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment:

     Bone marrow stromal cells (BMSCs) can differentiate into a variety of cell types such as osteoblasts, chondrocytes, and adipocytes. The authors of this important study provide compelling and strong evidence that ablating O-GlcNAc transferase (OGT) in BMSCs impairs bone formation but promotes marrow adiposity. The results show that the balance of osteogenic and adipogenic differentiation of BMSCs is controlled by reciprocal O-GlcNAc regulation of lineage-specifying transcription factors, and highlights the importance of an intracellular glycosylation process of specific proteins in bone formation and bone marrow adipocytes.

   Reviewed by eLife

10. Physical basis of the cell size scaling laws

    This article has 3 authors:

    1. Romain Rollin
    2. Jean-François Joanny
    3. Pierre Sens

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      eLife assessment

      This theoretical work deals with the problem of homeostasis of protein density within cells, relying on the Pump and Leak model. The model makes predictions both for growing and senescent cells, which they compare to experimental data on budding yeast. The work extends previous works and makes biologically-relevant predictions, which will be of interest to both theorists and experimentalists interested in cell physiology.

    Reviewed by PREreview, eLife