eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. Plasmodium infection disrupts the T follicular helper cell response to heterologous immunization

   This article has 3 authors:

   1. Mary F Fontana
   2. Erica Ollmann Saphire
   3. Marion Pepper

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     Malaria is still one of the world's most deadly diseases because our bodies cannot make appropriate acquired immunity upon Plasmodium infection (the causative agent of malaria). By using animal models of malaria infection and vaccination, this important work shows that Dendritic cells (DCs) have a lower ability to uptake Plasmodium-infected RBCs (particle antigen). This DC dysfunction could be an important reason behind T cell dysfunction in Plasmodium infection. The data presented here convincingly supports the conclusions.

   Reviewed by eLife

2. Future COVID19 surges prediction based on SARS-CoV-2 mutations surveillance

   This article has 7 authors:

   1. Fares Z Najar
   2. Evan Linde
   3. Chelsea L Murphy
   4. Veniamin A Borin
   5. Huan Wang
   6. Shozeb Haider
   7. Pratul K Agarwal

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     Najar et al., present a method for the identification of the emergence of new variants prior to the accompanying surge in cases by examining the trend of accumulated non-synonymous mutations from the original Wuhan 2020 SARS-CoV-2 strain. This is an interesting idea but requires additional evidence to establish this as a robust tool for predictions.

   Reviewed by eLife

3. Dynamics of pulsatile activities of arcuate kisspeptin neurons in aging female mice

   This article has 3 authors:

   1. Teppei Goto
   2. Mitsue Hagihara
   3. Kazunari Miyamichi

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This interesting manuscript assesses calcium dynamics in the kisspeptin neurons of the arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus during the estrous cycle and during reproductive aging in female mice. In particular, the authors succeed in tracking arcuate kisspeptin calcium activity in the same mice over 10 months, which is quite impressive and provides novel findings that will be of interest to the field.

   Reviewed by eLife

4. Mechanism of Ca2+ transport by ferroportin

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Jiemin Shen
   2. Azaan Saalim Wilbon
   3. Ming Zhou
   4. Yaping Pan

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This study makes an important contribution to the function of the iron transporter Ferroportin (Fpn). By using a combination of proteoliposome assays, mutagenesis and structural studies by cryo EM, the authors are able to demonstrate that the H+-driven transporter for Fe2+-efflux is also capable of passive Ca2+ influx. The evidence supporting the conclusions is convincing, but the rate of Ca2+ influx and the physiological relevance of Ca2+ entry is yet to be established. The work will be of broad interest to cell biologists and biochemists.

   Reviewed by eLife

5. A tradeoff between acoustic and linguistic feature encoding in spoken language comprehension

   This article has 3 authors:

   1. Filiz Tezcan
   2. Hugo Weissbart
   3. Andrea E Martin

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This study provides convincing evidence supporting the important finding that acoustic and linguistic features contribute to brain responses as people listen to speech. However, the innovation of the methodological advance relative to other papers in the subfield is not entirely clear.

   Reviewed by eLife

6. The Arabidopsis SHORTROOT network coordinates shoot apical meristem development with auxin-dependent lateral organ initiation

   This article has 9 authors:

   1. Elmehdi Bahafid
   2. Imke Bradtmöller
   3. Ann M Thies
   4. Thi TON Nguyen
   5. Crisanto Gutierrez
   6. Bénédicte Desvoyes
   7. Yvonne Stahl
   8. Ikram Blilou
   9. Rüdiger GW Simon

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This is a valuable study of Arabidopsis shoot apical meristem maintenance and organ initiation, defining the expression, interactions and functions of four transcription factors (SHR, SCR, JKD, and SCL23) whose roles were initially described in the root apical meristem. The imaging, genetics and FRET-FLIM evidence supporting the claims of the authors is comprehensive, extensive, and solid, although similar mechanisms, protein interactions, and gene regulatory interactions were previously reported in the root. The work will be of interest and importance for plant developmental biologists.

   Reviewed by eLife

7. Pan-cancer association of DNA repair deficiencies with whole-genome mutational patterns

   This article has 8 authors:

   1. Simon Grund Sørensen
   2. Amruta Shrikhande
   3. Gustav Alexander Poulsgaard
   4. Mikkel Hovden Christensen
   5. Johanna Bertl
   6. Britt Elmedal Laursen
   7. Eva R Hoffmann
   8. Jakob Skou Pedersen

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This paper will be of interest to researchers in the field of genomic medicine and cancer mutagenesis. It presents predictive models with potential clinical applications that can identify patients with specific gene dysfunction based on characteristic patterns of mutation. The key findings are well supported.

   Reviewed by eLife

8. Nationwide participation in FIT-based colorectal cancer screening in Denmark during the COVID-19 pandemic: An observational study

   This article has 6 authors:

   1. Tina Bech Olesen
   2. Henry Jensen
   3. Henrik Møller
   4. Jens Winther Jensen
   5. Berit Andersen
   6. Morten Rasmussen

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     The authors convincingly demonstrate that, in the absence of any shutdowns, the Danish colorectal cancer screening program experienced only minor decreases in program participation during the COVID-19 pandemic period. This likely ensured ongoing program effectiveness in detecting early colorectal cancers and precancerous polyps. The evidence is solid, as the national screening database was used and only a small proportion of participants were excluded.

   Reviewed by eLife

9. Munc13 supports fusogenicity of non-docked vesicles at synapses with disrupted active zones

   This article has 7 authors:

   1. Chao Tan
   2. Giovanni de Nola
   3. Claire Qiao
   4. Cordelia Imig
   5. Richard T Born
   6. Nils Brose
   7. Pascal S Kaeser

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     Tan and colleagues studied synaptic transmission, presynaptic protein levels, and synaptic ultra-structure in hippocampal cultures of mice lacking the key active-zone proteins RIM (1, 2), ELKS (1, 2), and Munc13 (1, 2). Compared to cultures lacking only RIM and ELKS, additional deletion of Munc13 results in a further decrease of synaptic Munc13-1 levels, a similar reduction of the number of docked synaptic vesicles, and a more pronounced decrease of total synaptic vesicle number. At the physiological level, these RIM-ELKS-Munc13 hextuple knockout cultures display a further decrease in the pool of release-ready synaptic vesicles with largely unchanged release probability compared with RIM-ELKS quadruple KO cultures. The results support the conclusion of the nonredundant role of Munc13 in synaptic vesicle priming. On the other hand, while the genetic removal of all six genes involved clearly require the use of conditional KO mice, the resulting outcome of the experimental design is a hypomorphic phenotype, as neurotransmitter release is still detected and this complicates the interpretation of the findings. Overall, this study reinforces the notion that synapse formation is a remarkably resilient process that occurs even under strong perturbation of presynaptic function.

   Reviewed by eLife

10. Cellular reprogramming with ATOH1, GFI1, and POU4F3 implicate epigenetic changes and cell-cell signaling as obstacles to hair cell regeneration in mature mammals

    This article has 16 authors:

    1. Amrita A Iyer
    2. Ishwar Hosamani
    3. John D Nguyen
    4. Tiantian Cai
    5. Sunita Singh
    6. Melissa M McGovern
    7. Lisa Beyer
    8. Hongyuan Zhang
    9. Hsin-I Jen
    10. Rizwan Yousaf
    11. Onur Birol
    12. Jenny J Sun
    13. Russell S Ray
    14. Yehoash Raphael
    15. Neil Segil
    16. Andrew K Groves

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      eLife assessment

      Overall, this is an interesting paper that explains molecular underpinnings of hair cell reprogramming. This paper could have significant implications for our understanding of how different cellular programs can dictate phenotypic outcomes such as hearing.

    Reviewed by eLife