eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. Firing patterns of ventral hippocampal neurons predict the exploration of anxiogenic locations

   This article has 3 authors:

   1. Hugo Malagon-Vina
   2. Stéphane Ciocchi
   3. Thomas Klausberger

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This paper is expected to be of interest to systems neuroscientists in the fields of emotion, hippocampal function, and anxiety-related behavior. The authors performed recordings in ventral hippocampus and show that 1) place fields become concentrated near the open areas of a maze, 2) direction-dependent coding decreases in these open areas, and 3) ventral hippocampal population activity in the closed area can be used to predict how mice explore the open area in the immediate future. These valuable findings support a potential role for the ventral hippocampus in the exploration of anxiety-provoking environments, however, the manuscript in its current form is incomplete, with some support for the main findings but also some limitations.

   Reviewed by eLife

2. Community composition shapes microbial-specific phenotypes in a cystic fibrosis polymicrobial model system

   This article has 7 authors:

   1. Fabrice Jean-Pierre
   2. Thomas H Hampton
   3. Daniel Schultz
   4. Deborah A Hogan
   5. Marie-Christine Groleau
   6. Eric Déziel
   7. George A O'Toole

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This article establishes a model experimental bacterial community to represent the microbiome found in ~1/3 of patients with cystic fibrosis (CF) with the goal of understanding why these infections do not respond to treatments that are effective in single-species infections. The authors show that susceptibility to the most common antibiotic used against the dominant pathogen P. aeruginosa is different when grown in this mixed community, and a mutant of this pathogen (lasR) that frequently occurs during infections alters this sensitivity. This study is significant for producing an experimental resource for the microbiology of CF, and it could be strengthened by more detailed measures of interactions between species and how the phenotypes produced by lasR alter species interactions.

   Reviewed by eLife

3. Multimodal brain age estimates relate to Alzheimer disease biomarkers and cognition in early stages: a cross-sectional observational study

   This article has 18 authors:

   1. Peter R Millar
   2. Brian A Gordon
   3. Patrick H Luckett
   4. Tammie LS Benzinger
   5. Carlos Cruchaga
   6. Anne M Fagan
   7. Jason J Hassenstab
   8. Richard J Perrin
   9. Suzanne E Schindler
   10. Ricardo F Allegri
   11. Gregory S Day
   12. Martin R Farlow
   13. Hiroshi Mori
   14. Georg Nübling
   15. The Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer Network
   16. Randall J Bateman
   17. John C Morris
   18. Beau M Ances

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This is a useful study exploring multi-modality brain age (structural plus resting state MRI) in people in the early stages or at risk of Alzheimer's disease. They found solid evidence that people with cognitive impairment had older-appearing brains and that older-appearing brains were related to Alzheimer's risk factors such as amyloid and tau deposition. They claim to show that the multi-modality brain age model is more accurate than a unimodal structural MRI model, though the evidence for that is incomplete.

   Reviewed by eLife

4. Differential axonal trafficking of Neuropeptide Y-, LAMP1-, and RAB7-tagged organelles in vivo

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Joris P Nassal
   2. Fiona H Murphy
   3. Ruud F Toonen
   4. Matthijs Verhage

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This is an important and fundamental, well-written and easily comprehended quantitative imaging study, analyzing the motion of endo-lysosomal compartments within axons in vivo using simultaneous multiphoton imaging in the mammalian brain. Taken together, this is a significant technical advance with interesting observations that substantively move the field forward.

   Reviewed by eLife

5. THINGS-data, a multimodal collection of large-scale datasets for investigating object representations in human brain and behavior

   This article has 9 authors:

   1. Martin N Hebart
   2. Oliver Contier
   3. Lina Teichmann
   4. Adam H Rockter
   5. Charles Y Zheng
   6. Alexis Kidder
   7. Anna Corriveau
   8. Maryam Vaziri-Pashkam
   9. Chris I Baker

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     Hebart et al., present a new massive multi-model dataset to support the study of visual object representation, including data measured from functional magnetic resonance imaging, magnetoencephalography, and behavioral similarity judgments. The general, condition-rich design, conducted over a thoughtfully curated and sampled set of object concepts will be highly valuable to the cognitive/computational/neuroscience community, yielding data that will be amenable to many empirical questions beyond the field of visual object recognition. The dataset is accompanied by quality control evaluations as well as examples of analyses that the community can re-run and further explore for building new hypotheses that can be tested with such a rich dataset.

   Reviewed by eLife

6. High genetic diversity in the pelagic deep-sea fauna of the Atacama Trench revealed by environmental DNA

   This article has 9 authors:

   1. Salvador Ramírez-Flandes
   2. Carolina E. González
   3. Montserrat Aldunate
   4. Julie Poulain
   5. Patrick Wincker
   6. Ronnie N. Glud
   7. Rubén Escribano
   8. Sophie Arnaud Haond
   9. Osvaldo Ulloa

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This manuscript from Ramírez-Flandes will be of interest to marine biologists, deep ocean ecologists, conservation biologists, and biogeographers. At times, the comparison of merely a pair of samples or sampling locales can substantially widen our view of biological and ecological systems and processes. In the case of this study, the pattern of metazoan diversity from eDNA samples from across the water columns in comparable series from two deep trench systems (to below 8000 m) is markedly different, including evidence of substantial biological diversity deep in the Atacama Trench (to a much greater extent than observed in the Kermadec Trench), contradicting existing paradigms about biodiversity potential in abyssal-hadal regions.

   Reviewed by eLife

7. Trisomy 21 induces pericentrosomal crowding delaying primary ciliogenesis and mouse cerebellar development

   This article has 14 authors:

   1. Cayla E Jewett
   2. Bailey L McCurdy
   3. Eileen T O'Toole
   4. Alexander J Stemm-Wolf
   5. Katherine S Given
   6. Carrie H Lin
   7. Valerie Olsen
   8. Whitney Martin
   9. Laura Reinholdt
   10. Joaquín M Espinosa
   11. Kelly D Sullivan
   12. Wendy B Macklin
   13. Rytis Prekeris
   14. Chad G Pearson

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This work investigates the cellular and cerebellar origins of trisomy 21 (Down syndrome) phenotypes. One human chromosome 21 gene is Pericentrin (PCNT), encoding a component of the centrosome. The authors use several models with 3 or 4 copies of human chromosome 21 (or mouse equivalents) to reveal how increasing PCNT gene dosage alters ciliogenesis and ciliary signaling.

   Reviewed by eLife

8. An automated feeding system for the African killifish reveals the impact of diet on lifespan and allows scalable assessment of associative learning

   This article has 11 authors:

   1. Andrew McKay
   2. Emma K Costa
   3. Jingxun Chen
   4. Chi-Kuo Hu
   5. Xiaoshan Chen
   6. Claire N Bedbrook
   7. Rishad C Khondker
   8. Mike Thielvoldt
   9. Param Priya Singh
   10. Tony Wyss-Coray
   11. Anne Brunet

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     McKay, et al. describe development of a new wireless, network-enabled automated feeder system with which diet amount and schedule can be controlled across individually housed killifish. The system is constructed using open-source components and software and is amenable to manufacture by individual research groups and is highly scalable. The authors then use this system to explore dietary restriction effects on killifish lifespan and to develop an associative learning assay, two important goals in the KF /longevity field. The authors demonstrate that precise control of food allows automated investigation of lifespan extension under calorie restriction conditions. Secondly, they show an exciting modification of the system that involves only addition of a simple LED light. This modification allows use of the system in an associative learning / conditioning paradigm. Finally, using this paradigm, they demonstrate an age-dependent decline in learning.

   Reviewed by eLife

9. Cell circuits between leukemic cells and mesenchymal stem cells block lymphopoiesis by activating lymphotoxin beta receptor signaling

   This article has 9 authors:

   1. Xing Feng
   2. Ruifeng Sun
   3. Moonyoung Lee
   4. Xinyue Chen
   5. Shangqin Guo
   6. Huimin Geng
   7. Marcus Müschen
   8. Jungmin Choi
   9. Joao Pedro Pereira

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This study describes a previously unrecognized positive feedback loop between leukemic cells and stromal cells impeding normal hematopoiesis mediated by lymphotoxin produced by cancer cells and its receptor expressed in stromal cells. These valuable findings will guide future research in both basic and clinical medicine. However, additional experimental evidence including more comparator groups would have further substantiated the authors' conclusions.

   Reviewed by eLife

10. Opposite polarity programs regulate asymmetric subsidiary cell divisions in grasses

    This article has 10 authors:

    1. Dan Zhang
    2. Roxane P Spiegelhalder
    3. Emily B Abrash
    4. Tiago DG Nunes
    5. Inés Hidalgo
    6. M Ximena Anleu Gil
    7. Barbara Jesenofsky
    8. Heike Lindner
    9. Dominique C Bergmann
    10. Michael T Raissig

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      eLife assessment

      This manuscript characterizes the localization and function of two proteins promoting division asymmetry in developing stomata of the grass Brachypodium distachyon. The authors demonstrate that the opposing polarity domains of these proteins are linked to cell division orientation. While both proteins have been studied previously in other systems, there was no prior evidence of cooperative functions in a single cell type, as shown here. With further clarification of some of the localization findings, this study will be of strong interest to plant cell biologists and those interested in asymmetric cell division generally.

    Reviewed by eLife