eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. Region-specific mechanosensation modulates Drosophila postural control behaviour

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. William Roseby
   2. Jonathan AC Menzies
   3. Victoria A Lipscomb
   4. Claudio R Alonso

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This study by Roseby and colleagues shows that region-specific mechanosensation - especially anterior-dorsal inputs - controls larval self-righting, and links this to Hox gene function in sensory neurons. The work is important for understanding how body plan cues shape sensorimotor behaviour, and the experimental toolkit will be of use to others. The strength of evidence is compelling with respect to the assays developed and the involvement of the anterior region, the evidence is more limited with respect to the dorso-ventral organization of sensory inputs in that region and the mechanism by which Hox genes contribute to the process. These findings will be of broad interest to researchers studying neural circuits, developmental genetics, and the evolution of behaviour.

   Reviewed by eLife

2. A stochastic RNA editing process targets a select number of sites in individual Drosophila glutamatergic motoneurons

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Andrés B Crane
   2. Michiko O Inouye
   3. Suresh K Jetti
   4. J Troy Littleton

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This important study uses single-neuron Patch-seq RNA sequencing to investigate the process by which RNA editing can produce protein diversity and regulate function in various cellular contexts. The computational analyses of the data collected are convincing, and from an analytical standpoint, this paper is a notable advance in seeking to provide a biological context for massive amounts of data in the field. The study would be of interest to biologists looking at the effects of RNA editing in the diversification of cellular behaviour.

   Reviewed by eLife

3. Where is the melody? Spontaneous attention orchestrates melody formation during polyphonic music listening

   This article has 5 authors:

   1. Martin M Winchester
   2. Kevin Reynolds
   3. Charbel Nebo
   4. Ian Cecil Scott
   5. Giovanni M Di Liberto

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This valuable work potentially advances our understanding of melody extraction in polyphonic music listening by identifying spontaneous attentional focus in uninstructed listening contexts. However, the evidence supporting the main conclusions is incomplete. The work will be of interest to psychologists and neuroscientists working on music listening, attention, and perception in ecological settings.

   Reviewed by eLife

4. SynaptoTagMe, a toolkit for in vivo mapping and modulating neurotransmission at single-cell resolution

   This article has 12 authors:

   1. Andrea Cuentas-Condori
   2. Patricia Chanabá-López
   3. Matthew Thomas
   4. Likui Feng
   5. Aaron Wolfe
   6. Peter Agoba
   7. Matthew L Schwartz
   8. Maximillian Brown
   9. Margaret S Ebert
   10. Erik Jorgensen
   11. Cornelia I Bargmann
   12. Daniel A Colón-Ramos

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This important advancement in the field of neurotransmission delivers a novel toolkit for in vivo visualization of vesicular transporters for ACh, GABA, glutamate and monoamines in C. elegans. With the application of newly developed neuron-specific knockout methods for these vesicular transporters, the results convincingly demonstrate that over 10% of the neurons studied show transporter co-expression that may be correlated with co-transmission. These findings and toolkit will be of interest towards the study of neural circuit function.

   Reviewed by eLife

5. Asymmetric neural entrainment at resonance frequencies underlies unilateral spatial neglect

   This article has 6 authors:

   1. Yuka O Okazaki
   2. Noriaki Hattori
   3. Teiji Kawano
   4. Megumi Hatakenaka
   5. Ichiro Miyai
   6. Keiichi Kitajo

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This valuable study uses EEG and computational modeling to investigate hemispheric oscillatory asymmetries in unilateral spatial neglect. The work benefits from rare patient data and a careful multimethod approach. However, the evidence is incomplete because key assumptions about alpha‑band entrainment and methodological confounds such as lesion variability and eye‑movement artifacts remain insufficiently addressed.

   Reviewed by eLife

6. Megabouts: a flexible pipeline for zebrafish locomotion analysis

   This article has 9 authors:

   1. Adrien Jouary
   2. Pedro TM Silva
   3. Alexandre Laborde
   4. J Miguel Mata
   5. João C Marques
   6. Elena MD Collins
   7. Randall T Peterson
   8. Christian K Machens
   9. Michael B Orger

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This study introduces Megabouts, a transformer-based classifier for larval zebrafish movement bouts. This useful tool is thoughtfully implemented and has clear potential to unify analyses across labs. However, the evidence supporting its robustness is incomplete. How the method generalizes across datasets, how sensitive it is to noise, and the specific sources of misclassification are unclear. The method would also be strengthened by providing options for users to fine-tune the clusters under different experimental conditions, which would further enhance reliability and flexibility.

   Reviewed by eLife

7. Herbivorous insects independently evolved salivary effectors to regulate plant immunity by destabilizing the malectin-LRR RLP NtRLP4

   This article has 8 authors:

   1. Xin Wang
   2. Jia-Bao Lu
   3. Yi-Zhe Wang
   4. Xu-Hong Zhou
   5. Jian-Ping Chen
   6. Chuan-Xi Zhang
   7. Jun-Min Li
   8. Hai-Jian Huang

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This study provides an important contribution by showing that whiteflies and planthoppers use salivary effectors to suppress plant immunity through the receptor-like protein RLP4, suggesting convergent evolution in these insect lineages. The topic is of clear interest for understanding plant-insect interactions and offers ideas that could stimulate further research in the field. The authors provide convincing evidence for the functional roles of the salivary effectors.

   Reviewed by eLife

8. Inhibitory columnar feedback neurons are involved in motion processing in Drosophila

   This article has 6 authors:

   1. Miriam Henning
   2. Madhura D Ketkar
   3. Teresa Lüffe
   4. Daryl M Gohl
   5. Thomas R Clandinin
   6. Marion Silies

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This important article reports on the role of specific interneurons in the motion processing circuitry of the fruit fly, and marshals convincing evidence from neural recording, genetic manipulation, and behavioral analysis. A significant result ties the activity of C2/C3 neurons to the temporal resolution of the motion vision system. It remains unclear whether disrupting this pathway affects the dynamics of vision more generally.

   Reviewed by eLife

9. Dissecting surveying behavior of reactive microglia under chronic neurodegeneration

   This article has 5 authors:

   1. Sunitha Subhramanian
   2. Olga Bocharova
   3. Natallia Makarava
   4. Tarek Safadi
   5. Ilia V Baskakov

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This fundamental study provides new evidence of a change in how microglia survey neurons during the chronic phase of neurodegeneration, which researchers studying neuroinflammation and its role in neurodegenerative disease should find interesting. In this research, using time-lapse imaging of acute brain slices from prion-affected mice, the researchers show that, unlike in healthy brains, microglia become reactive, lose their territorial boundaries, and become highly mobile, exhibiting "kiss-and-ride" behavior, migrating into brain tissue and forming reversible, transient body-to-body contact with neurons. The evidence is compelling, with well-executed time-lapse imaging, good quantitative analysis across several disease stages, pharmacological validation of P2Y6 involvement, and the very surprising finding that this mobile behavior persists after microglia are removed from the brain.

   Reviewed by eLife

10. A stress-activated neuronal ensemble in the supramammillary nucleus produces anxiety-like behavior in male mice

    This article has 11 authors:

    1. Jinming Zhang
    2. Kexin Yu
    3. Junmin Zhang
    4. Yuan Chang
    5. Xiao Sun
    6. Zhaoqiang Qian
    7. Zongpeng Sun
    8. Yanning Qiao
    9. Zhiqiang Liu
    10. Wei Ren
    11. Jing Han

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      eLife Assessment

      This manuscript provides a valuable contribution by identifying a stress-responsive circuit and its regulation of anxiety-related behaviors. The evidence is convincing that the supramammillary nucleus contains stress-responsive neurons that increase anxiety-like behaviors when activated, and that ventral subiculum projections to the supramammillary are also activated by stress and their inhibition alleviates some effects of stress. Evidence that this pathway encodes and is functionally specific to anxiety is, at present, not sufficiently support and will require future studies. This work offers new insights into how distinct circuits are activated by stress and can regulate emotional behaviors and will be of interest to those interested in brain systems of aversive emotional and behavioral states.

    Reviewed by eLife