eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. Deep learning-driven insights into super protein complexes for outer membrane protein biogenesis in bacteria

   This article has 3 authors:

   1. Mu Gao
   2. Davi Nakajima An
   3. Jeffrey Skolnick

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     In this valuable contribution, the authors apply an artificial intelligence method to predict the three-dimensional structure of complexes of outer membrane proteins of the Gram-negative bacterium E. coli. Some of the cases presented are compelling, as they explain previously published biochemical data and/or reproduce existing structural data.

   Reviewed by eLife

2. Mice and primates use distinct strategies for visual segmentation

   This article has 8 authors:

   1. Francisco J Luongo
   2. Lu Liu
   3. Chun Lum Andy Ho
   4. Janis K Hesse
   5. Joseph B Wekselblatt
   6. Frank F Lanfranchi
   7. Daniel Huber
   8. Doris Y Tsao

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     Primates perceive and detect stimuli differently depending on the stimulus context in which they are embedded, and have a remarkable ability to understand the way in which objects and parts of objects are embedded in natural scenes (scene segmentation). An example of this is figure-ground segmentation, a well documented phenomenon resulting in a "pop-out" of a figure region and corresponding enhanced neural firing rates in visual areas. It is unknown whether mice show similar behavioral and neural signatures as primates. The present study suggests that mice show different segmentation behavior than primates, lacking texture-invariant segmentation of figures and corresponding neural correlates. This reveals a fundamental difference between primates and mice important for researchers working on these species and researchers studying scene segmentation. The findings are further interpreted in terms of neural network architectures (feedforward networks) and are relevant for this field too.

   Reviewed by eLife

3. Fast rule switching and slow rule updating in a perceptual categorization task

   This article has 5 authors:

   1. Flora Bouchacourt
   2. Sina Tafazoli
   3. Marcelo G Mattar
   4. Timothy J Buschman
   5. Nathaniel D Daw

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This study modeled monkeys' behavior in a stimulus-response rule-learning task to show that animals can adopt mixed strategies involving inference for learning latent states and incremental updating for learning action-outcome associations. The task is cleverly designed, the modeling is rigorous, and importantly there are clear distinctions in the behavior generated by different models, which makes the authors' conclusions convincing. The study makes a strong contribution overall, however, there were aspects of the design that were unclear and some alternative accounts that were not considered.

   Reviewed by eLife

4. Glycine inhibits NINJ1 membrane clustering to suppress plasma membrane rupture in cell death

   This article has 12 authors:

   1. Jazlyn P Borges
   2. Ragnhild SR Sætra
   3. Allen Volchuk
   4. Marit Bugge
   5. Pascal Devant
   6. Bjørnar Sporsheim
   7. Bridget R Kilburn
   8. Charles L Evavold
   9. Jonathan C Kagan
   10. Neil M Goldenberg
   11. Trude Helen Flo
   12. Benjamin Ethan Steinberg

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     It's been widely known that the amino acid Glycine can work as a cytoprotectant and inhibit pyroptosis-associated plasma membrane rupture. However, a long-standing question has been: how does Glycine cytoprotection work? The authors observed that Glycine treatment phenocopied deficiency of NINJ1 (a recently reported cell surface molecule critical for plasma membrane rupture), and can inhibit aggregation of NINJ1. Understanding the intrinsic mechanism by which Glycine affects NINJ1 could provide a significant advance in the cell death field.

   Reviewed by eLife

5. Olfactory receptor neurons generate multiple response motifs, increasing coding space dimensionality

   This article has 9 authors:

   1. Brian Kim
   2. Seth Haney
   3. Ana P Milan
   4. Shruti Joshi
   5. Zane Aldworth
   6. Nikolai Rulkov
   7. Alexander T Kim
   8. Maxim Bazhenov
   9. Mark A Stopfer

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     The study by Kim et al. combines extracellular recordings from olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) in locusts with computational modelling approaches to investigate the dynamics of odour responses. The authors demonstrate that OSN responses can be grouped into four distinct response motifs, with OSNs showing different motifs in an odour-dependent manner. Using computational modelling the authors provide some evidence that these diverse response motifs expand the coding space and could facilitate odour discrimination and navigation. This study can be of high relevance to both experimental and theoretical neuroscientists investigating odour coding and odour-driven behaviours such as navigation. In its present form, while the experimental data and analysis are of the highest quality, the modelling part needs to be expanded to fully support the experimental measurements.

   Reviewed by eLife

6. Weakly migratory metastatic breast cancer cells activate fibroblasts via microvesicle-Tg2 to facilitate dissemination and metastasis

   This article has 14 authors:

   1. Samantha C Schwager
   2. Katherine M Young
   3. Lauren A Hapach
   4. Caroline M Carlson
   5. Jenna A Mosier
   6. Tanner J McArdle
   7. Wenjun Wang
   8. Curtis Schunk
   9. Anissa L Jayathilake
   10. Madison E Bates
   11. Francois Bordeleau
   12. Marc A Antonyak
   13. Richard A Cerione
   14. Cynthia A Reinhart-King

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     The interesting manuscript shows that breast cancer cells that are poorly migratory in culture can be more metastatic in mice. This is due, at least in part, to the secretion of extracellular vesicles containing the the crosslinking enzyme Transglutaminase-2, which can activate fibroblasts in the tumours. These fibroblasts can then promote metastatic phenotypes. This study demonstrates how cancer cells can manipulate the cells around them in order to disseminate.

   Reviewed by eLife

7. GluA3 subunits are required for appropriate assembly of AMPAR GluA2 and GluA4 subunits on cochlear afferent synapses and for presynaptic ribbon modiolar–pillar morphology

   This article has 6 authors:

   1. Mark A Rutherford
   2. Atri Bhattacharyya
   3. Maolei Xiao
   4. Hou-Ming Cai
   5. Indra Pal
   6. Maria Eulalia Rubio

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     Hearing is mediated by hair cells in the cochlea, which synapse onto the primary dendrites of the auditory nerve. This study shows how deletion of a postsynaptic glutamate receptor subtype strongly influences inner hair cell-spiral ganglion cell synapse formation. Thus pre- and post-synaptic changes are dynamically intertwined, providing insights into how pathological outcomes arise from synaptic perturbations.

   Reviewed by eLife

8. Geometric control of myosin II orientation during axis elongation

   This article has 5 authors:

   1. Matthew F Lefebvre
   2. Nikolas H Claussen
   3. Noah P Mitchell
   4. Hannah J Gustafson
   5. Sebastian J Streichan

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This paper should be of broad interest to developmental biologists who seek to understand spatiotemporal control of myosin-based force generation during tissue morphogenesis during early development. The central conclusions are well-grounded in rigorous quantitative data analysis and modeling. The results challenge current views of how gene expression patterns control myosin II anisotropies and provide new testable hypotheses on the role and importance of tissue geometry.

   Reviewed by eLife

9. Collateral deletion of the mitochondrial AAA+ ATPase ATAD1 sensitizes cancer cells to proteasome dysfunction

   This article has 17 authors:

   1. Jacob M Winter
   2. Heidi L Fresenius
   3. Corey N Cunningham
   4. Peng Wei
   5. Heather R Keys
   6. Jordan Berg
   7. Alex Bott
   8. Tarun Yadav
   9. Jeremy Ryan
   10. Deepika Sirohi
   11. Sheryl R Tripp
   12. Paige Barta
   13. Neeraj Agarwal
   14. Anthony Letai
   15. David M Sabatini
   16. Matthew L Wohlever
   17. Jared Rutter

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     The authors identify co-deletion of the mitochondrial AAA+ ATPase ATAD1 with the tumor suppressor PTEN as a factor modifying cancer prognosis, based on a new mechanism of increasing sensitivity to proteotoxic stress induced by proteasome inhibition. The authors also identify the mitochondrial E3 ubiquitin ligase MARCH5 as a gene whose deletion is synthetically lethal with ATAD1. These findings suggest that the use of proteasome-targeting agents may be useful in patients with tumors dually deleted for ATAD1 and PTEN. The study is based on convincing evidence, and makes an innovative contribution to the understanding of the biology of tumors with 10q23 deletions.

   Reviewed by eLife

10. Acetylation of a fungal effector that translocates host PR1 facilitates virulence

    This article has 11 authors:

    1. Jingtao Li
    2. Xiaoying Ma
    3. Chenyang Wang
    4. Sihui Liu
    5. Gang Yu
    6. Mingming Gao
    7. Hengwei Qian
    8. Mengjie Liu
    9. Ben F Luisi
    10. Dean W Gabriel
    11. Wenxing Liang

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      eLife assessment

      The authors provided strong evidence that the Fusarium oxysporum effector protein FolSpv1 enhances virulence by targeting tomato SlPR1 and preventing the generation of the SlPR1-derived phytocytokine CAPE1, which otherwise positively regulates disease resistance in tomato plants. Strikingly, they show that FolSpv1 translocates SlPR1 from the apoplast back into the nucleus of tomato cell, suggesting a previously unknown mechanism employed by pathogenic microbes.

    Reviewed by eLife