eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. A tradeoff between acoustic and linguistic feature encoding in spoken language comprehension

   This article has 3 authors:

   1. Filiz Tezcan
   2. Hugo Weissbart
   3. Andrea E Martin

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This study provides convincing evidence supporting the important finding that acoustic and linguistic features contribute to brain responses as people listen to speech. However, the innovation of the methodological advance relative to other papers in the subfield is not entirely clear.

   Reviewed by eLife

2. The Arabidopsis SHORTROOT network coordinates shoot apical meristem development with auxin-dependent lateral organ initiation

   This article has 9 authors:

   1. Elmehdi Bahafid
   2. Imke Bradtmöller
   3. Ann M Thies
   4. Thi TON Nguyen
   5. Crisanto Gutierrez
   6. Bénédicte Desvoyes
   7. Yvonne Stahl
   8. Ikram Blilou
   9. Rüdiger GW Simon

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This is a valuable study of Arabidopsis shoot apical meristem maintenance and organ initiation, defining the expression, interactions and functions of four transcription factors (SHR, SCR, JKD, and SCL23) whose roles were initially described in the root apical meristem. The imaging, genetics and FRET-FLIM evidence supporting the claims of the authors is comprehensive, extensive, and solid, although similar mechanisms, protein interactions, and gene regulatory interactions were previously reported in the root. The work will be of interest and importance for plant developmental biologists.

   Reviewed by eLife

3. Pan-cancer association of DNA repair deficiencies with whole-genome mutational patterns

   This article has 8 authors:

   1. Simon Grund Sørensen
   2. Amruta Shrikhande
   3. Gustav Alexander Poulsgaard
   4. Mikkel Hovden Christensen
   5. Johanna Bertl
   6. Britt Elmedal Laursen
   7. Eva R Hoffmann
   8. Jakob Skou Pedersen

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This paper will be of interest to researchers in the field of genomic medicine and cancer mutagenesis. It presents predictive models with potential clinical applications that can identify patients with specific gene dysfunction based on characteristic patterns of mutation. The key findings are well supported.

   Reviewed by eLife

4. Nationwide participation in FIT-based colorectal cancer screening in Denmark during the COVID-19 pandemic: An observational study

   This article has 6 authors:

   1. Tina Bech Olesen
   2. Henry Jensen
   3. Henrik Møller
   4. Jens Winther Jensen
   5. Berit Andersen
   6. Morten Rasmussen

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     The authors convincingly demonstrate that, in the absence of any shutdowns, the Danish colorectal cancer screening program experienced only minor decreases in program participation during the COVID-19 pandemic period. This likely ensured ongoing program effectiveness in detecting early colorectal cancers and precancerous polyps. The evidence is solid, as the national screening database was used and only a small proportion of participants were excluded.

   Reviewed by eLife

5. Munc13 supports fusogenicity of non-docked vesicles at synapses with disrupted active zones

   This article has 7 authors:

   1. Chao Tan
   2. Giovanni de Nola
   3. Claire Qiao
   4. Cordelia Imig
   5. Richard T Born
   6. Nils Brose
   7. Pascal S Kaeser

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     Tan and colleagues studied synaptic transmission, presynaptic protein levels, and synaptic ultra-structure in hippocampal cultures of mice lacking the key active-zone proteins RIM (1, 2), ELKS (1, 2), and Munc13 (1, 2). Compared to cultures lacking only RIM and ELKS, additional deletion of Munc13 results in a further decrease of synaptic Munc13-1 levels, a similar reduction of the number of docked synaptic vesicles, and a more pronounced decrease of total synaptic vesicle number. At the physiological level, these RIM-ELKS-Munc13 hextuple knockout cultures display a further decrease in the pool of release-ready synaptic vesicles with largely unchanged release probability compared with RIM-ELKS quadruple KO cultures. The results support the conclusion of the nonredundant role of Munc13 in synaptic vesicle priming. On the other hand, while the genetic removal of all six genes involved clearly require the use of conditional KO mice, the resulting outcome of the experimental design is a hypomorphic phenotype, as neurotransmitter release is still detected and this complicates the interpretation of the findings. Overall, this study reinforces the notion that synapse formation is a remarkably resilient process that occurs even under strong perturbation of presynaptic function.

   Reviewed by eLife

6. Cellular reprogramming with ATOH1, GFI1, and POU4F3 implicate epigenetic changes and cell-cell signaling as obstacles to hair cell regeneration in mature mammals

   This article has 16 authors:

   1. Amrita A Iyer
   2. Ishwar Hosamani
   3. John D Nguyen
   4. Tiantian Cai
   5. Sunita Singh
   6. Melissa M McGovern
   7. Lisa Beyer
   8. Hongyuan Zhang
   9. Hsin-I Jen
   10. Rizwan Yousaf
   11. Onur Birol
   12. Jenny J Sun
   13. Russell S Ray
   14. Yehoash Raphael
   15. Neil Segil
   16. Andrew K Groves

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     Overall, this is an interesting paper that explains molecular underpinnings of hair cell reprogramming. This paper could have significant implications for our understanding of how different cellular programs can dictate phenotypic outcomes such as hearing.

   Reviewed by eLife

7. Fixation can change the appearance of phase separation in living cells

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Shawn Irgen-Gioro
   2. Shawn Yoshida
   3. Victoria Walling
   4. Shasha Chong

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     Chemical fixation of cells is ubiquitous in microscopy. However, fixation artifacts can lead the incorrect interpretations of biological processes. In here, Irgen-Gioro et al. show that in the context of liquid condensates formed by liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS), paraformaldehyde (PFA) fixation can lead to artifacts such as changes in the number, appearance, or disappearance of liquid condensates, when comparing fixed to live cells. This will be of great interest not only for those in the LLPS field but for cell biologists, in general, using fixed samples for microscopy.

   Reviewed by eLife

8. Spatial frequency representation in V2 and V4 of macaque monkey

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Ying Zhang
   2. Kenneth E Schriver
   3. Jia Ming Hu
   4. Anna Wang Roe

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     This manuscript makes a major contribution to the study of early visual representation in primates by showing that intermediate cortical areas V2 and V4, as well as primary cortical area V1 (previously shown), contain orthogonal maps of orientation and spatial frequency, which are recursive across the visual field representation. This is a fundamental principle of functional mapping across the two-dimensional cortical surface that ensures and optimizes the complete representation of all combinations across two coding dimensions.

   Reviewed by eLife

9. Exploiting the mediating role of the metabolome to unravel transcript-to-phenotype associations

   This article has 6 authors:

   1. Chiara Auwerx
   2. Marie C Sadler
   3. Tristan Woh
   4. Alexandre Reymond
   5. Zoltán Kutalik
   6. Eleonora Porcu

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife assessment

     Auwerx and colleagues take a new approach to mine large datasets of the intermediary molecular data between GWAS and phenotype, touncover molecular mechanisms that lead from a GWAS hit to a phenotypic effect. The approach should be of great use to all (human) geneticists. Revisions are necessary to ensure that the significant findings from this approach are understood by the bioinformatic community and that these methods can be applied generally, given that the paper's main novelty is in its approach to mine large datasets, rather than a specific, key molecular finding.

   Reviewed by eLife

10. Compartmentalization and persistence of dominant (regulatory) T cell clones indicates antigen skewing in juvenile idiopathic arthritis

    This article has 13 authors:

    1. Gerdien Mijnheer
    2. Nila Hendrika Servaas
    3. Jing Yao Leong
    4. Arjan Boltjes
    5. Eric Spierings
    6. Phyllis Chen
    7. Liyun Lai
    8. Alessandra Petrelli
    9. Sebastiaan Vastert
    10. Rob J de Boer
    11. Salvatore Albani
    12. Aridaman Pandit
    13. Femke van Wijk

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      eLife assessment

      In this study, the authors performed mass cytometry (CyTOF) analysis and T cell receptor (TCR) sequencing to study immune cell composition and expansion of joint-derived Tregs and non-Tregs in Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA). They studied different joints affected at the same time and found that the composition and functional characteristics of immune infiltrates are strikingly similar between joints within one patient. The research design of this study is appropriate and the methods used in this study are adequately described in the manuscript. The study may be potentially beneficial for the JIA treatment.

    Reviewed by eLife