eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. Longitudinal map of transcriptome changes in the Lyme pathogen Borrelia burgdorferi during tick-borne transmission

   This article has 12 authors:

   1. Anne L Sapiro
   2. Beth M Hayes
   3. Regan F Volk
   4. Jenny Y Zhang
   5. Diane M Brooks
   6. Calla Martyn
   7. Atanas Radkov
   8. Ziyi Zhao
   9. Margie Kinnersley
   10. Patrick R Secor
   11. Balyn W Zaro
   12. Seemay Chou

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     In this Tools and Resources article, the authors overcome the challenge of low Borrelia burgdorferi numbers during infection for analyses such as RNA-sequencing or mass spectrometry. They do so by physically enriching for spirochetes, which is important, as it provides technical advances for the study of global transcriptomic changes of B. burgdorferi during tick feeding, helping to build on the knowledge already collected by the field. The evidence presented is compelling, and the strategy described here could benefit researchers in the field and possibly also support broader applications.

   Reviewed by eLife

2. Identification of candidate mitochondrial inheritance determinants using the mammalian cell-free system

   This article has 5 authors:

   1. Dalen Zuidema
   2. Alexis Jones
   3. Won-Hee Song
   4. Michal Zigo
   5. Peter Sutovsky

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This important work reports the identification of a list of proteins that may participate in the clearance of paternal mitochondria during fertilization, which is known as essential for normal fertilization and embryonic and fetal development. The main method used is state-of-the-art and the supporting data are solid. This work will be of interest to developmental and reproductive biologists working on fertilization.

   Reviewed by eLife

3. Cylicins are a structural component of the sperm calyx being indispensable for male fertility in mice and human

   This article has 15 authors:

   1. Simon Schneider
   2. Andjela Kovacevic
   3. Michelle Mayer
   4. Ann-Kristin Dicke
   5. Lena Arévalo
   6. Sophie A Koser
   7. Jan N Hansen
   8. Samuel Young
   9. Christoph Brenker
   10. Sabine Kliesch
   11. Dagmar Wachten
   12. Gregor Kirfel
   13. Timo Strünker
   14. Frank Tüttelmann
   15. Hubert Schorle

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This study provides valuable insights into the role of two under-researched sperm-specific proteins (Cylicin 1 and Cylicin 2). The authors provide convincing evidence that they have an essential role in sperm head structure during spermatogenesis, and that their loss leads to subfertility or infertility, with a dose-dependent phenotype. Importantly, the authors identify infertile males with mutations in both Cylicin1 and Cylicin2. Thus, the findings from the mouse models might be applicable to understanding human male infertility with similar structural defects.

   Reviewed by eLife

4. An open-source platform for head-fixed operant and consummatory behavior

   This article has 9 authors:

   1. Adam Gordon-Fennell
   2. Joumana M Barbakh
   3. MacKenzie T Utley
   4. Shreya Singh
   5. Paula Bazzino
   6. Raajaram Gowrishankar
   7. Michael R Bruchas
   8. Mitchell F Roitman
   9. Garret D Stuber

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     Gordon-Fennell et al. present a low-cost, open-source platform for measuring action elicitation and consummatory behavior in head-fixed animals. The findings are important because they allow animals to perform a truly voluntary action whilst their head is held still, and the evidence supporting them is both comprehensive and compelling (in some cases even exceptional). The results have the potential to have a broad impact in the field as many labs start to move towards measuring head-fixed behavior effectively, although this is said with the caveat that such behavior will never be an ideal replication of naturalistic behavior.

   Reviewed by eLife

5. Aggregating in vitro-grown adipocytes to produce macroscale cell-cultured fat tissue with tunable lipid compositions for food applications

   This article has 13 authors:

   1. John Se Kit Yuen Jr
   2. Michael K Saad
   3. Ning Xiang
   4. Brigid M Barrick
   5. Hailey DiCindio
   6. Chunmei Li
   7. Sabrina W Zhang
   8. Miriam Rittenberg
   9. Emily T Lew
   10. Kevin Lin Zhang
   11. Glenn Leung
   12. Jaymie A Pietropinto
   13. David L Kaplan

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This manuscript describes an approach to creating fat tissue in culture for food applications. Specifically, the efforts of growing cultivated meat focus mostly on growing skeletal muscle. However, the taste component of such artificial meat would be determined by fat content. There is a significant desire and motivation to cultivate fat tissues in vitro for the purpose of the replacement of animal products. This paper provides new technological approaches to expand adipocytes and aggregate them into structures that resemble fat.

   Reviewed by eLife

6. Endoparasitoid lifestyle promotes endogenization and domestication of dsDNA viruses

   This article has 11 authors:

   1. Benjamin Guinet
   2. David Lepetit
   3. Sylvain Charlat
   4. Peter N Buhl
   5. David G Notton
   6. Astrid Cruaud
   7. Jean-Yves Rasplus
   8. Julia Stigenberg
   9. Damien M de Vienne
   10. Bastien Boussau
   11. Julien Varaldi

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This important manuscript employs a rigorous and multi-pronged comparative genomics approach to unravel how lifestyle modulates the acquisition and domestication of viral genetic elements in the genomes of hymenopteran insects. Using an extensive dataset of over 120 hymenopteran genomes, the authors provide convincing evidence that endoparasitism (where parasite development occurs within hosts) facilitates the uptake and domestication of double-stranded DNA viral elements.

   Reviewed by eLife

7. Axonal T3 uptake and transport can trigger thyroid hormone signaling in the brain

   This article has 8 authors:

   1. Federico Salas-Lucia
   2. Csaba Fekete
   3. Richárd Sinkó
   4. Péter Egri
   5. Kristóf Rada
   6. Yvette Ruska
   7. Balázs Gereben
   8. Antonio C Bianco

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This valuable paper examines the effect of deiodinase polymorphism on thyroid hormone signaling in the brain by employing a transgenic animal model and then switching to studying T3 axonal transport using microfluid devices. Although methodologically extensive this paper has several claims that are not convincingly supported by the current experiments and furthermore some disjoint is observed between the two halves of the study. The therapeutic implications of understanding T3 signaling in the brain makes it a potentially important manuscript.

   Reviewed by eLife

8. Patterning precision under non-linear morphogen decay and molecular noise

   This article has 3 authors:

   1. Jan Andreas Adelmann
   2. Roman Vetter
   3. Dagmar Iber

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     The authors use analytic calculations and numerical simulations to convincingly show that the purported benefits of nonlinear decay in morphogen gradients may be marginal in some cases and completely reversed in others (far from the concentration source). This is a valuable contribution to the field, as it questions common assumptions about the biological function of non-linear morphogen decays during development.

   Reviewed by eLife

9. Enterobacterales plasmid sharing amongst human bloodstream infections, livestock, wastewater, and waterway niches in Oxfordshire, UK

   This article has 15 authors:

   1. William Matlock
   2. Samuel Lipworth
   3. Kevin K Chau
   4. Manal AbuOun
   5. Leanne Barker
   6. James Kavanagh
   7. Monique Andersson
   8. Sarah Oakley
   9. Marcus Morgan
   10. Derrick W Crook
   11. Daniel S Read
   12. Muna Anjum
   13. Liam P Shaw
   14. Nicole Stoesser
   15. REHAB Consortium

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This important study presents valuable findings on the dissemination of plasmids. In an analysis of five major Enterobacterales genera, the authors convincingly demonstrate that similar plasmids are shared between genera, species, and clones, both within and between ecological niches. Given the size of the dataset and the very detailed level of analysis this study importantly contributes to insights into to the flow of plasmids, including those carrying antimicrobial resistance genes, across niches.

   Reviewed by eLife

10. Increased public health threat of avian-origin H3N2 influenza virus caused by its evolution in dogs

    This article has 15 authors:

    1. Mingyue Chen
    2. Yanli Lyu
    3. Fan Wu
    4. Ying Zhang
    5. Hongkui Li
    6. Rui Wang
    7. Yang Liu
    8. Xinyu Yang
    9. Liwei Zhou
    10. Ming Zhang
    11. Qi Tong
    12. Honglei Sun
    13. Juan Pu
    14. Jinhua Liu
    15. Yipeng Sun

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      eLife assessment

      The authors characterize an H3N2 influenza A virus that jumped from birds into dogs in 2006. Through its evolutionary adaptation to dogs, the virus is now gaining properties that are increasingly consistent with the potential to infect humans. Using experiments with canine H3N2 influenza isolates, the authors found that more recent viruses have acquired receptor specificity for both avian- and human-like receptors, enhanced low-pH stability and in vitro growth, as well as improved replication and transmission in the dog and ferret models.

    Reviewed by eLife