eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. Metformin protects trabecular meshwork against oxidative injury via activating integrin/ROCK signals

   This article has 11 authors:

   1. Lijuan Xu
   2. Xinyao Zhang
   3. Yin Zhao
   4. Xiaorui Gang
   5. Tao Zhou
   6. Jialing Han
   7. Yang Cao
   8. Binyan Qi
   9. Shuning Song
   10. Xiaojie Wang
   11. Yuanbo Liang

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This manuscript proposes that metformin protects against elevated intraocular pressure and oxidative injury by regulating cytoskeleton remodeling through the integrin/ROCK pathway, thus providing a new direction for further exploration toward the treatment of primary open-angle glaucoma as well as investigation of oxidative injury in multiple settings.

   Reviewed by eLife

2. Cellular compartmentalisation and receptor promiscuity as a strategy for accurate and robust inference of position during morphogenesis

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Krishnan S Iyer
   2. Chaitra Prabhakara
   3. Satyajit Mayor
   4. Madan Rao

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This work is of high relevance to developmental and quantitative biologists with an interest in morphogen-mediated position decoding. A general mathematical model formulation is presented that is nevertheless accessible to a broad audience. Model tests via perturbation experiments in the Drosophila wing disc look promising and inspire a new round of data generation.

   Reviewed by eLife

3. Kap-β2/Transportin mediates β-catenin nuclear transport in Wnt signaling

   This article has 5 authors:

   1. Woong Y Hwang
   2. Valentyna Kostiuk
   3. Delfina P González
   4. C Patrick Lusk
   5. Mustafa K Khokha

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     Using a heterologous model system of budding yeast, authors find that nuclear translocation of beta-catenin is mediated by Kap104, the ortholog of Transportin (TNPO)1/2. A TNPO1 binding motif was identified in the C-terminal region of beta-catenin, which serves as a nuclear localization signal, and mutation of the motif inhibits beta-catenin mediated transcription. The manuscript serves as a staring point to study how much this motif contributes to nuclear localization of full-length beta-catenin in mammalian cells and to assess whether inhibiting TNPO1 interaction can reduce hyperactivation of beta-catenin signaling.

   Reviewed by eLife

4. Signal denoising through topographic modularity of neural circuits

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Barna Zajzon
   2. David Dahmen
   3. Abigail Morrison
   4. Renato Duarte

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This manuscript puts forward a new idea that topography in neural networks helps to remove noise from inputs. The authors show that there is a critical level of topography that is needed for network to denoise inputs. At present, the analysis is limited to inputs that are constant in time.

   Reviewed by eLife

5. m6A modification of U6 snRNA modulates usage of two major classes of pre-mRNA 5’ splice site

   This article has 12 authors:

   1. Matthew T Parker
   2. Beth K Soanes
   3. Jelena Kusakina
   4. Antoine Larrieu
   5. Katarzyna Knop
   6. Nisha Joy
   7. Friedrich Breidenbach
   8. Anna V Sherwood
   9. Geoffrey J Barton
   10. Sebastian M Fica
   11. Brendan H Davies
   12. Gordon G Simpson

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This is an important paper reporting that an adenosine methyltransferase in the model plant Arabidopsis functions to target a key RNA component of the spliceosome, as in fission yeast, and thereby contributes to intron recognition. By contrast, the authors report no major role for the methyltransferase in targeting mRNAs, as reported in previous studies in Arabidopsis. While some of the evidence is convincing, other evidence is incomplete. The conclusions that mRNAs are not a significant target and that specific intronic sequences define sensitivity to the methyltransferase require additional support.

   Reviewed by eLife

6. Neuroendocrinology of the lung revealed by single-cell RNA sequencing

   This article has 8 authors:

   1. Christin S Kuo
   2. Spyros Darmanis
   3. Alex Diaz de Arce
   4. Yin Liu
   5. Nicole Almanzar
   6. Timothy Ting-Hsuan Wu
   7. Stephen R Quake
   8. Mark A Krasnow

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This study delineates the transcriptomics of lung neuroendocrine cells and provides important new information on the nature of these cells in normal mouse lungs and in a sample of a human lung carcinoid. It will inform future studies investing the roles of PNECs in health and disease.

   Reviewed by eLife

7. Expansive linguistic representations to predict interpretable odor mixture discriminability

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Amit Dhurandhar
   2. Hongyang Li
   3. Guillermo A Cecchi
   4. Pablo Meyer

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     Dhurhandar and colleagues developed a computational method that predicts discriminability of odor mixtures based on chemical structures of component molecules. The model first transforms chemical structures into natural language descriptions of odor, and then perform Lasso regressions to obtain a compact transformation into discriminability. The results suggest that the model performs better compared to that without transformation to language descriptions, yet, there are some issues that need to be addressed to make strong conclusions.

   Reviewed by eLife

8. Structure-guided isoform identification for the human transcriptome

   This article has 9 authors:

   1. Markus J Sommer
   2. Sooyoung Cha
   3. Ales Varabyou
   4. Natalia Rincon
   5. Sukhwan Park
   6. Ilia Minkin
   7. Mihaela Pertea
   8. Martin Steinegger
   9. Steven L Salzberg

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This study applies AlphaFold to the CHESS selection of transcripts with the goal of generating predicted 3D protein structures and a quality measure of folding, the pLDDT score. From these data, the authors build a database for result exploration, documented by several examples, including proteins, where the authors propose the pLDDT score as a measure of presumed superior biological functionality over other isoforms. These results will be highly relevant for anyone working with proteins that occur in different isoforms.

   Reviewed by eLife

9. Polygenic risk scores for the prediction of common cancers in East Asians: A population-based prospective cohort study

   This article has 8 authors:

   1. Peh Joo Ho
   2. Iain BeeHuat Tan
   3. Dawn Qingqing Chong
   4. Chiea Chuen Khor
   5. Jian-Min Yuan
   6. Woon-Puay Koh
   7. Rajkumar Dorajoo
   8. Jingmei Li

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This important study reveals the role of polygenic scores for four commonly diagnosed cancers with high genetic predisposition (breast, prostate, colorectal, and lung) in East Asian populations, which is developed in participants of European descent. The data is convincing that is derived from a prospective cohort including 21,694 Singaporean participants of East Asian descent. The work will be of interest and provide great help to disease specialists in the field.

   Reviewed by eLife

10. Generating variability from motor primitives during infant locomotor development

    This article has 5 authors:

    1. Elodie Hinnekens
    2. Marianne Barbu-Roth
    3. Manh-Cuong Do
    4. Bastien Berret
    5. Caroline Teulier

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      eLife assessment

      In learning to walk, infants must balance the need to explore their movement repertoire with the need to establish regular movement patterns. Using a longitudinal approach, this paper suggests that while young infants generate high variability from a small number of regular patterns ('primitives'), older infants use a greater number of primitives with less variability. These interesting conclusions are not currently fully supported by the small and somewhat selective sample of data, and some alternative explanations need to be considered more thoroughly.

    Reviewed by eLife