eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. A δ-cell subpopulation with a pro-β-cell identity contributes to efficient age-independent recovery in a zebrafish model of diabetes

   This article has 12 authors:

   1. Claudio Andrés Carril Pardo
   2. Laura Massoz
   3. Marie A Dupont
   4. David Bergemann
   5. Jordane Bourdouxhe
   6. Arnaud Lavergne
   7. Estefania Tarifeño-Saldivia
   8. Christian SM Helker
   9. Didier YR Stainier
   10. Bernard Peers
   11. Marianne M Voz
   12. Isabelle Manfroid

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Evaluation Summary:

     This manuscript describes the presence of two discernable populations of pancreatic delta cells in a zebrafish model. One of these subsets of delta cells is suggested to facilitate the regeneration of functional beta cell mass following beta cell ablation. This observation is of interest to investigators studying islet regeneration.

     (This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. The reviewers remained anonymous to the authors.)

   Reviewed by eLife

2. Immunometabolic hijacking of immune cells by a Pseudomonas aeruginosa quorum-sensing signal

   This article has 5 authors:

   1. Arunava Bandyopadhaya
   2. Vijay K Singh
   3. Arijit Chakraborty
   4. A. Aria Tzika
   5. Laurence G Rahme

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Evaluation Summary:

     In a previous study the authors showed that the quorum sensing signal molecule 2-aminoacetophenone (2-AA) produced by Pseudomonas aeruginosa enables persistence in host tissue of this pathogen. They propose that this effect depends on a Warburg-like metabolic reprogramming effect in macrophages.

     (This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

   Reviewed by eLife, preLights

3. Novel multicellular prokaryote discovered next to an underground stream

   This article has 8 authors:

   1. Kouhei Mizuno
   2. Mais Maree
   3. Toshihiko Nagamura
   4. Akihiro Koga
   5. Satoru Hirayama
   6. Soichi Furukawa
   7. Kenji Tanaka
   8. Kazuya Morikawa

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Evaluation Summary:

     This is a fascinating article on the discovery of an unusual form of bacterial multicellularity: an organism that can exist in dense, filamentous multicellular structures and clusters of coccobacillus daughter cells. Experiments that mimic the periodic immersion that the bacteria experience in their natural cave environment suggest that water immersion plays a role in this life-cycle dynamics. This work, while rather qualitative, will nevertheless likely attract great interest from a diverse range of scientists working on multicellularity, the biophysics of cell packing, and geobiological problems.

     (This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. The reviewers remained anonymous to the authors.)

   Reviewed by eLife

4. Pyruvate:ferredoxin oxidoreductase and low abundant ferredoxins support aerobic photomixotrophic growth in cyanobacteria

   This article has 11 authors:

   1. Yingying Wang
   2. Xi Chen
   3. Katharina Spengler
   4. Karoline Terberger
   5. Marko Boehm
   6. Jens Appel
   7. Thomas Barske
   8. Stefan Timm
   9. Natalia Battchikova
   10. Martin Hagemann
   11. Kirstin Gutekunst

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Evaluation Summary:

     The work supports the hypothesis that novel specific enymes evolved to modify metabolic pathways, allowing phototrophs to shift from growth under photoautotrophic and photomixotrophic growth conditions.

     (This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1, Reviewer #2 and Reviewer #3 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

   Reviewed by eLife

5. Experimental evidence that uniformly white sclera enhances the visibility of eye-gaze direction in humans and chimpanzees

   This article has 3 authors:

   1. Fumihiro Kano
   2. Yuri Kawaguchi
   3. Yeow Hanling

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Evaluation Summary:

     The study by Kano et al. provides experimental evidence that specific features of the human eye, namely shape and sclera depigmentation, enhance the ability to detect gaze direction of individuals. The study is notable for being the first to adopt a comparative experimental approach, testing both humans and chimpanzees, to demonstrate that white sclera can enhance gaze discrimination in both species, particularly when visibility is poor.

     (This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1 and Reviewer#2 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

   Reviewed by eLife

6. Opioid analgesia alters corticospinal coupling along the descending pain system in healthy participants

   This article has 3 authors:

   1. Alexandra Tinnermann
   2. Christian Sprenger
   3. Christian Büchel

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Evaluation Summary:

     This is a challenging study exploring the effects of a commonly used analgesic, remifentanil, on brain and spinal cord related pain processing in humans. It is of considerable interest to the pain research, neuroimaging and opioid neuroscience communities and are also relevant to clinicians who commonly use opioid infusions. The authors have used sophisticated methods for combined brain and spinal cord functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the influence of an intravenous opioid on pain processing in the ascending and descending pain pathways in healthy subjects. The authors have conducted a comprehensive assessment in large numbers of subjects and have explored both changes in amplitude of activity as well as connectivity. Their detailed analysis strengthens findings from previous human and animal studies and extend to demonstrate novel changes in connectivity in the descending pathway to the spinal cord although these data are potentially compatible with alternative interpretations and may need to be reinforced by further analysis.

     (This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #2 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

   Reviewed by eLife

7. The LOTUS initiative for open knowledge management in natural products research

   This article has 15 authors:

   1. Adriano Rutz
   2. Maria Sorokina
   3. Jakub Galgonek
   4. Daniel Mietchen
   5. Egon Willighagen
   6. Arnaud Gaudry
   7. James G Graham
   8. Ralf Stephan
   9. Roderic Page
   10. Jiří Vondrášek
   11. Christoph Steinbeck
   12. Guido F Pauli
   13. Jean-Luc Wolfender
   14. Jonathan Bisson
   15. Pierre-Marie Allard

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Evaluation Summary:

     Rutz et al. outline LOTUS, a new open-source database that links natural product structures with the organisms they are present in. It contains over 700,000 referenced structure-organism pairs and search tools that make mining the database intuitive and efficient. The LOTUS Initiative comprises an important data harmonization/integration effort over previous databases. The results are distributed to the public through Wikidata, which additionally supports future curation. This new resource is likely to be of great interest to natural product researchers as well as across fields of biology including ecology, evolution, and biochemistry.

     (This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

   Reviewed by eLife

8. Perception is associated with the brain’s metabolic response to sensory stimulation

   This article has 6 authors:

   1. Mauro DiNuzzo
   2. Silvia Mangia
   3. Marta Moraschi
   4. Daniele Mascali
   5. Gisela E Hagberg
   6. Federico Giove

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Evaluation Summary:

     Giove and colleagues demonstrate an intriguing dissociation of neurovascular (as measured with BOLD-fMRI) and neurometabolic (measured with fMRS) responses during perception. This is a thought-provoking study that makes one wonder about the signals we measure with human neuroimaging, especially fMRI. It will therefore be of great interest to the broad community of neuroimagers, as well as perception researchers.

     (This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1, Reviewer #2 and Reviewer #3 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

   Reviewed by eLife

9. Shallow neural networks trained to detect collisions recover features of visual loom-selective neurons

   This article has 5 authors:

   1. Baohua Zhou
   2. Zifan Li
   3. Sunnie Kim
   4. John Lafferty
   5. Damon A Clark

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Evaluation Summary:

     This paper uses an anatomically-constrained neural network model to investigate how looming visual stimuli - i.e. stimuli likely to collide with an organism - could be detected. The authors find one dominant solution to this problem reproduces both the computational properties and neural responses of known collision detecting neurons in the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, without ever being trained on neural data. Their findings shed light on why biological collision detection circuits may have converged on particular solutions. A similar approach could reveal important computational features in other circuits.

     (This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1 and Reviewer #3 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

   Reviewed by eLife

10. Kidney organoids recapitulate human basement membrane assembly in health and disease

    This article has 13 authors:

    1. Mychel RPT Morais
    2. Pinyuan Tian
    3. Craig Lawless
    4. Syed Murtuza-Baker
    5. Louise Hopkinson
    6. Steven Woods
    7. Aleksandr Mironov
    8. David A Long
    9. Daniel P Gale
    10. Telma MT Zorn
    11. Susan J Kimber
    12. Roy Zent
    13. Rachel Lennon

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      Evaluation Summary:

      Kidney organoid cultures derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells represent a new tool with which to study renal morphogenesis in both normal and pathological states. In the current study, the authors have combined morphological evaluation with proteomics to elucidate aspects of the temporal sequence of basement membrane composition during normal renal development and in the setting of a pathogenic collagen type IV alpha 5 chain variant associated with Alport syndrome, an inherited kidney disease. This model system may help us to better understand the pathogenesis of inherited diseases that affect renal basement membrane composition.

      (This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #3 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

    Reviewed by eLife