eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. BUB-1 and CENP-C recruit PLK-1 to control chromosome alignment and segregation during meiosis I in C. elegans oocytes

   This article has 6 authors:

   1. Samuel JP Taylor
   2. Laura Bel Borja
   3. Flavie Soubigou
   4. Jack Houston
   5. Dhanya K Cheerambathur
   6. Federico Pelisch

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This fundamental work addresses the role of the mitotic kinase PLK-1 in meiosis, using C. elegans as a model system. The valuable findings are convincing and combine beautiful cell biology and biochemical assays. The work will be of broad interest to people working on Plk1 and/or in meiosis in many different systems.

   Reviewed by eLife

2. Bidirectional promoter activity from expression cassettes can drive off-target repression of neighboring gene translation

   This article has 7 authors:

   1. Emily Nicole Powers
   2. Charlene Chan
   3. Ella Doron-Mandel
   4. Lidia Llacsahuanga Allcca
   5. Jenny Kim Kim
   6. Marko Jovanovic
   7. Gloria Ann Brar

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     Powers and colleagues reveal that commonly used "genetic markers" (selectable cassettes that allow for genome modification) may lead to unintended consequences and unanticipated phenotypes. These consequences arise from cryptic expression directed from within the cassettes into adjacent genomic regions. In this work, they identify a particularly strong example of marker interference with a neighboring gene's expression and develop and test next-generation tools that circumvent the problem. The work will be primarily of interest to yeast biologists using these types of tools and interpreting these types of data.

   Reviewed by eLife

3. Bidirectional promoter activity from expression cassettes can drive off-target repression of neighboring gene translation

   This article has 7 authors:

   1. Emily Nicole Powers
   2. Charlene Chan
   3. Ella Doron-Mandel
   4. Lidia Llacsahuanga Allcca
   5. Jenny Kim Kim
   6. Marko Jovanovic
   7. Gloria Ann Brar

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     Powers and colleagues reveal that commonly used "genetic markers" (selectable cassettes that allow for genome modification) may lead to unintended consequences and unanticipated phenotypes. These consequences arise from cryptic expression directed from within the cassettes into adjacent genomic regions. In this work, they identify a particularly strong example of marker interference with a neighboring gene's expression and develop and test next-generation tools that circumvent the problem. The work will be primarily of interest to yeast biologists using these types of tools and interpreting these types of data.

   Reviewed by eLife

4. Calcium dependence of both lobes of calmodulin is involved in binding to a cytoplasmic domain of SK channels

   This article has 3 authors:

   1. David B Halling
   2. Ashley E Philpo
   3. Richard W Aldrich

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This manuscript provides compelling evidence that in response to calcium, the C-lobe of calmodulin changes its interaction with the C-terminal domain of an SK2 small-conductance calcium-activated potassium channel. These findings will be of interest to those in the field of ion channels and calcium signaling as they are valuable to understanding the molecular mechanics by which calcium activates SK2 channels, which are important for a wide variety of physiological signaling processes.

   Reviewed by eLife

5. Coordinated cadherin functions sculpt respiratory motor circuit connectivity

   This article has 11 authors:

   1. Alicia N Vagnozzi
   2. Matthew T Moore
   3. Minshan Lin
   4. Elyse M Brozost
   5. Ritesh KC
   6. Aambar Agarwal
   7. Lindsay A Schwarz
   8. Xin Duan
   9. Niccolò Zampieri
   10. Lynn T Landmesser
   11. Polyxeni Philippidou

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This is an extremely thorough investigation of the role of cadherins in generating a functional motor circuit. The presented data support a model whereby combinations of redundant adhesion molecules create a code to wire the breathing circuit. This study advances understanding of the molecular basis of circuit wiring in the brain.

   Reviewed by eLife

6. Cortical activity during naturalistic music listening reflects short-range predictions based on long-term experience

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Pius Kern
   2. Micha Heilbron
   3. Floris P de Lange
   4. Eelke Spaak

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This study models the predictions a listener makes in music in two ways: how different model algorithms compare in their performance at predicting the upcoming notes in a melody, and how well they predict listeners' brain responses to these notes. The study will be valuable to the field as it implements three contemporary models of music prediction. In a set of solid analyses, the authors find that musical melodies are best predicted by models taking into account long-term experience of musical melodies, whereas brain responses are best predicted by applying these models to only a few most recent notes.

   Reviewed by eLife

7. Mechanisms and functions of respiration-driven gamma oscillations in the primary olfactory cortex

   This article has 3 authors:

   1. Joaquin Gonzalez
   2. Pablo Torterolo
   3. Adriano BL Tort

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This fundamental study employs a publicly available dataset to examine the role of gamma oscillations in the coding of olfactory information in the mouse piriform cortex. The authors convincingly show that gamma originates in the piriform cortex, is driven by feedback inhibition, and that the time course of odour decoding is most accurate when gamma oscillations are strongest. This work is relevant to a wide audience interested in the mechanisms and role of oscillations in the brain, and nicely demonstrates the benefits of well-curated, publicly available datasets.

   Reviewed by eLife

8. Derivation and external validation of clinical prediction rules identifying children at risk of linear growth faltering

   This article has 10 authors:

   1. Sharia M Ahmed
   2. Ben J Brintz
   3. Patricia B Pavlinac
   4. Lubaba Shahrin
   5. Sayeeda Huq
   6. Adam C Levine
   7. Eric J Nelson
   8. James A Platts-Mills
   9. Karen L Kotloff
   10. Daniel T Leung

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This work would be of interest to global health scientists, particularly in low- and middle-income countries where childhood stunting is an ongoing challenge, and to statisticians interested in building clinical prediction rules. The authors leveraged large, rich datasets from multi-center studies to build and validate predictive models. But by using change in growth, rather than absolute growth, as the only outcome, it may be missing children of concern who are already experiencing growth failure and require intervention but have reached a growth faltering floor.

   Reviewed by eLife

9. NPAS4 in the medial prefrontal cortex mediates chronic social defeat stress-induced anhedonia-like behavior and reductions in excitatory synapses

   This article has 14 authors:

   1. Brandon W Hughes
   2. Benjamin M Siemsen
   3. Evgeny Tsvetkov
   4. Stefano Berto
   5. Jaswinder Kumar
   6. Rebecca G Cornbrooks
   7. Rose Marie Akiki
   8. Jennifer Y Cho
   9. Jordan S Carter
   10. Kirsten K Snyder
   11. Ahlem Assali
   12. Michael D Scofield
   13. Christopher W Cowan
   14. Makoto Taniguchi

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This is a very interesting manuscript that will be of interest to the field of stress neurobiology and neuropsychiatry. Claims about the interactions between stress and medial prefrontal cortex NPAS4 on anhedonia and motivation remain to be firmly established, yet clear evidence is provided for NPAS4 function on medial prefrontal cortex pyramidal neuron dendritic morphology and gene expression.

   Reviewed by eLife

10. Molecular mechanism underlying desensitization of the proton-activated chloride channel PAC

    This article has 7 authors:

    1. James Osei-Owusu
    2. Zheng Ruan
    3. Ljubica Mihaljević
    4. Daniel S Matasic
    5. Kevin Hong Chen
    6. Wei Lü
    7. Zhaozhu Qiu

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      eLife assessment

      This valuable work, of interest to ion channel physiologists, identifies regions involved in the desensitization of the proton-activated chloride channel (PAC), a widely expressed ion channel involved in organelle pH homeostasis and acid-induced cell death. At the present stage the data only incompletely support the interpretations, and further experiments will be required to consolidate some of the authors' claims.

    Reviewed by eLife