eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. Senataxin and RNase H2 act redundantly to suppress genome instability during class switch recombination

   This article has 10 authors:

   1. Hongchang Zhao
   2. Stella R Hartono
   3. Kirtney Mae Flores de Vera
   4. Zheyuan Yu
   5. Krishni Satchi
   6. Tracy Zhao
   7. Roger Sciammas
   8. Lionel Sanz
   9. Frédéric Chédin
   10. Jacqueline Barlow

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This paper will be of interest to the audience in the fields of genome stability and B lymphocyte biology for highlighting the role of R loop metabolism in maintaining genome integrity during antigen gene diversification. Although RNA:DNA hybrids and R loops have been described at the immunoglobulin (Ig) loci long ago, their contribution to Ig heavy chain (Igh) class switch recombination and Igh locus integrity have not been fully elucidated yet. Overall, the experiments and results generally support this conclusion; however, several aspects of the model put forward are highly speculative in the current form.

   Reviewed by eLife

2. Mature parvalbumin interneuron function in prefrontal cortex requires activity during a postnatal sensitive period

   This article has 8 authors:

   1. Sarah E Canetta
   2. Emma S Holt
   3. Laura J Benoit
   4. Eric Teboul
   5. Gabriella M Sahyoun
   6. R Todd Ogden
   7. Alexander Z Harris
   8. Christoph Kellendonk

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     Canetta et al. explored the time-dependent effects of inhibition of parvalbumin-positive interneurons in the mouse prefrontal cortex on task learning and cognition. Overall, the study shows that prefrontal cortex PV cell activity during a sensitive period strongly modulates cognitive flexibility and network activity in the adult mouse. This study could progress our understanding of cell behavior in mouse prefrontal cortex.

   Reviewed by eLife

3. Quantifying changes in the T cell receptor repertoire during thymic development

   This article has 8 authors:

   1. Francesco Camaglia
   2. Arie Ryvkin
   3. Erez Greenstein
   4. Shlomit Reich-Zeliger
   5. Benny Chain
   6. Thierry Mora
   7. Aleksandra M Walczak
   8. Nir Friedman

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This paper addresses an important question within adaptive immunity, namely whether the T cell receptor (TCR) repertoire of negatively selected thymocytes shares common features. The authors analyze T cell receptor sequences from mice as they progress through positive selection, CD4/CD8 lineage commitment, and negative selection, to find small but consistent differences between the repertoires at these selection stages. They argue that their findings do not indicate any sequence-specific selection; however, some of the conclusions drawn are currently incompletely supported by the performed analyses.

   Reviewed by eLife

4. SARS-CoV-2-specific CD4+ and CD8+ T cell responses can originate from cross-reactive CMV-specific T cells

   This article has 11 authors:

   1. Cilia R Pothast
   2. Romy C Dijkland
   3. Melissa Thaler
   4. Renate S Hagedoorn
   5. Michel GD Kester
   6. Anne K Wouters
   7. Pieter S Hiemstra
   8. Martijn J van Hemert
   9. Stephanie Gras
   10. JH Frederik Falkenburg
   11. Mirjam HM Heemskerk

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This is a very elegant study which clearly demonstrates the existence of CMV specific memory T cells in CMV+ pre-pandemic individuals that are capable of recognising epitopes from SARS-CoV-2. It provides new insights into the development of cross-reactive immune cells that was not anticipated. The study has been elegantly performed and presents important findings. In particular, the discovery of a public TCR which mediates the crossreactivity described is an important finding.

   Reviewed by eLife

5. Osteocytes regulate senescence of bone and bone marrow

   This article has 11 authors:

   1. Peng Ding
   2. Chuan Gao
   3. Youshui Gao
   4. Delin Liu
   5. Hao Li
   6. Jun Xu
   7. Xiaoyi Chen
   8. Yigang Huang
   9. Changqing Zhang
   10. Minghao Zheng
   11. Junjie Gao

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This paper is of potential interest for skeletal biologist studying osteocytes and skeletal aging. Using a mouse model of partial osteocyte deletion, the authors provide new understanding on the role of osteocytes in regulating other lineage cells in bone, bone marrow, and skeletal muscle. This is an important and logically presented study that offers new insight into the biology of osteocytes. The set of data from the genetic mouse model, bone phenotypic analyses, and scRNA-seq analysis largely support the conclusion.

   Reviewed by eLife

6. Insight into the evolutionary assemblage of cranial kinesis from a Cretaceous bird

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Min Wang
   2. Thomas A Stidham
   3. Jingmai K O'Connor
   4. Zhonghe Zhou

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     Most birds today can lift the upper beak independently of the brain case, enabled by a series of mobile joints and bending zones in the skull. The computed tomography of the skull of a 120-million-year-old toothed bird produced by the authors shows for the first time that the joints were still absent, but also hints at how they may have evolved later. This compelling, important paper is of high interest to evolutionary biologists, vertebrate paleontologists (especially, but by no means only, those working on bird origins) and specialists in biomechanics.

   Reviewed by eLife

7. The missing link between genetic association and regulatory function

   This article has 9 authors:

   1. Noah J Connally
   2. Sumaiya Nazeen
   3. Daniel Lee
   4. Huwenbo Shi
   5. John Stamatoyannopoulos
   6. Sung Chun
   7. Chris Cotsapas
   8. Christopher A Cassa
   9. Shamil R Sunyaev

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     A commonly held hypothesis about how genetic variants predispose to common diseases and other human traits is that variants have phenotypic effects by altering transcript accumulation. The authors question this view by showing some evidence for shared genetic control of transcript abundance for genes believed to be involved in the traits, and for the traits themselves.

   Reviewed by eLife

8. Improving the accuracy of single-trial fMRI response estimates using GLMsingle

   This article has 6 authors:

   1. Jacob S Prince
   2. Ian Charest
   3. Jan W Kurzawski
   4. John A Pyles
   5. Michael J Tarr
   6. Kendrick N Kay

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) yields a notoriously noisy and autocorrelated signal, and the GLMsingle method presented here by Prince and colleagues demonstrably improves the estimation of responses evoked by single trials. This open source toolbox is implemented in a user-friendly manner and will be of interest to researchers using human neuroimaging to study neural responses in condition-rich designs, as is increasingly common in cognitive neuroscience experiments.

   Reviewed by eLife

9. Complementary evolution of coding and noncoding sequence underlies mammalian hairlessness

   This article has 3 authors:

   1. Amanda Kowalczyk
   2. Maria Chikina
   3. Nathan Clark

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     Several mammal species, including dolphins, have evolved to be relatively "hairless". Kowalczyk and colleagues scan the genomes of multiple species to identify genomic regions that appear to have evolved at a faster or slower evolutionary rate along hairless lineages. They identify a number of protein-coding genes as well as noncoding regions that might explain how hairlessness evolved in mammals. This study is of interest to those investigating the development of the skin and its appendages as well as evolutionary biologists, especially those investigating instances of convergent evolution and those developing phylogenomic methods for genome comparisons.

   Reviewed by eLife

10. Critical roles for ‘housekeeping’ nucleases in type III CRISPR-Cas immunity

    This article has 2 authors:

    1. Lucy Chou-Zheng
    2. Asma Hatoum-Aslan

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      eLife assessment

      CRISPR-Cas systems are essential components of an adaptive immune system that protects bacteria and archaea from infection by foreign genetic elements like phages and plasmids. The work presented here demonstrates that some CRISPR systems (i.e., type III-A) rely on host nucleases (i.e., RNase R and PNPase) for faithful processing of CRISPR RNAs. Collectively, this work expands the fundamental understanding of how nucleases involved in RNA metabolism contribute to the adaptive immune response in bacteria.

    Reviewed by eLife