eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. 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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. Nuclear m6A reader YTHDC1 promotes muscle stem cell activation/proliferation by regulating mRNA splicing and nuclear export

   This article has 9 authors:

   1. Yulong Qiao
   2. Qiang Sun
   3. Xiaona Chen
   4. Liangqiang He
   5. Di Wang
   6. Ruibao Su
   7. Yuanchao Xue
   8. Hao Sun
   9. Huating Wang

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This is a valuable study performing elegant experiments making identification of a specific regulator in skeletal muscle regeneration. It will form a foundation for further mechanistic investigation. The work is of importance in the clinical field of muscle injury and regeneration.

   Reviewed by eLife

8. Cerebrospinal fluid-contacting neuron tracing reveals structural and functional connectivity for locomotion in the mouse spinal cord

   This article has 11 authors:

   1. Yuka Nakamura
   2. Miyuki Kurabe
   3. Mami Matsumoto
   4. Tokiharu Sato
   5. Satoshi Miyashita
   6. Kana Hoshina
   7. Yoshinori Kamiya
   8. Kazuki Tainaka
   9. Hitoshi Matsuzawa
   10. Nobuhiko Ohno
   11. Masaki Ueno

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     The authors provide a new method to target mouse CSF-cNs via intracerebroventricular injection of adeno-associated virus (AAV) with a neuron-specific promoter, which enabled them to introduce any genes into CSF-cNs. By doing so, they established the structure, connectivity, and function of mouse CSF-cNs in locomotion, recapitulating the findings obtained in zebrafish and lamprey, and extending the recent observations in mice. This study is very conclusive and important for the sensorimotor field.

   Reviewed by eLife

9. Synergistic stabilization of microtubules by BUB-1, HCP-1, and CLS-2 controls microtubule pausing and meiotic spindle assembly

   This article has 12 authors:

   1. Nicolas Macaisne
   2. Laura Bellutti
   3. Kimberley Laband
   4. Frances Edwards
   5. Laras Pitayu-Nugroho
   6. Alison Gervais
   7. Thadshagine Ganeswaran
   8. Hélène Geoffroy
   9. Gilliane Maton
   10. Julie C Canman
   11. Benjamin Lacroix
   12. Julien Dumont

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This paper on the regulation of microtubule dynamics during C. elegans meiosis will be of interest to scientists in the broad field of microtubule function in both mitosis and meiosis. The experiments are beautifully conducted and presented and generally support the conclusions of the paper. The results are interesting and add to our understanding of the control of microtubule dynamics at the kinetochore and its functional consequences for meiosis.

   Reviewed by eLife

10. A cell wall synthase accelerates plasma membrane partitioning in mycobacteria

    This article has 9 authors:

    1. Takehiro Kado
    2. Zarina Akbary
    3. Daisuke Motooka
    4. Ian L Sparks
    5. Emily S Melzer
    6. Shota Nakamura
    7. Enrique R Rojas
    8. Yasu S Morita
    9. M Sloan Siegrist

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      eLife assessment

      This paper addresses an important question: the relationship between the cell wall and other, primarily lipid, based components of the cell envelope. Building on previous work, the authors provide data suggesting that the activity of a PonA2, non-essential peptidoglycan synthase, promotes membrane partitioning through its role in cell wall synthesis. While the data are consistent with this model, the reviewers felt additional experiments are necessary to fully support the authors' conclusions.

    Reviewed by eLife