eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. SARS-CoV-2 spike protein induces inflammation via TLR2-dependent activation of the NF-κB pathway

   This article has 6 authors:

   1. Shahanshah Khan
   2. Mahnoush S Shafiei
   3. Christopher Longoria
   4. John W Schoggins
   5. Rashmin C Savani
   6. Hasan Zaki

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Evaluation Summary:

     The identification of a novel role of the spike protein expressed on SARS-CoV-2 in directly evoking the host inflammatory responses has a substantial impact in understanding the molecular mechanism of COVID-19 pathogenesis, which may have implication for development of new therapeutics. The elegant analytic approach conducted herein justifies the major conclusions of this work though several additional steps can be made to validate these claims.

     (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, ScreenIT

2. Genetic variant in 3’ untranslated region of the mouse pycard gene regulates inflammasome activity

   This article has 5 authors:

   1. Brian Ritchey
   2. Qimin Hai
   3. Juying Han
   4. John Barnard
   5. Jonathan D Smith

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Evaluation Summary:

     Genetic differences in outbred species such as humans and differences in the epigenomic structure form the basis of the large variability in the immune response. This work demonstrates that a single nucleotide change in the gene encoding for the universal inflammasome adaptor protein ASC regulates mRNA stability of Pycard and thereby inflammasome function. A particular strength of the work is that the authors managed to show, using genetic alterations, that a single SNP in the Pycard gene sequence (rs33183533) between AKR and DBA/2 mice causes variation in inflammasome activity. Given the relevance of inflammasome for various human pathologies, this work is important for a broad readership.

     (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

3. Lipid kinases VPS34 and PIKfyve coordinate a phosphoinositide cascade to regulate retriever-mediated recycling on endosomes

   This article has 10 authors:

   1. Sai Srinivas Panapakkam Giridharan
   2. Guangming Luo
   3. Pilar Rivero-Rios
   4. Noah Steinfeld
   5. Helene Tronchere
   6. Amika Singla
   7. Ezra Burstein
   8. Daniel D Billadeau
   9. Michael A Sutton
   10. Lois S Weisman

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Evaluation Summary:

     The authors investigate the role of the PI3P 5-kinase protein (PIKfyve) in endosome to cell surface recycling. They report that PIKfyve function is necessary for cell migration and endsomal recycling of integrin proteins via the SNX17-Retriever pathway. The findings will be of interest to the endosomal research community.

     (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. Cooperation among c-subunits of FoF1-ATP synthase in rotation-coupled proton translocation

   This article has 7 authors:

   1. Noriyo Mitome
   2. Shintaroh Kubo
   3. Sumie Ohta
   4. Hikaru Takashima
   5. Yuto Shigefuji
   6. Toru Niina
   7. Shoji Takada

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Evaluation Summary:

     This is an interesting manuscript describing for the first time experimentally the cooperative effects of mutations to individual key Glu residues in the c-ring of ATP synthase. The main result is that mutations in nearby c subunits are less inhibitory than those in subunits further apart in the ring. This is explained on the basis of MD/MC simulations as a shared waiting time for delayed proton uptake in case of neighboring subunits, which appears logical. Overall the manuscript is well presented, but with some caveats. The works will be of interest to specialists in bioenergetics, and to a wider biochemical, biophysical and structural biology audience.

     (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 names with the authors.)

   Reviewed by eLife

5. Slow oscillation–spindle coupling strength predicts real-life gross-motor learning in adolescents and adults

   This article has 6 authors:

   1. Michael A Hahn
   2. Kathrin Bothe
   3. Dominik Heib
   4. Manuel Schabus
   5. Randolph F Helfrich
   6. Kerstin Hoedlmoser

   Reviewed by eLife

6. Multiple introductions of multidrug-resistant typhoid associated with acute infection and asymptomatic carriage, Kenya

   This article has 15 authors:

   1. Samuel Kariuki
   2. Zoe A Dyson
   3. Cecilia Mbae
   4. Ronald Ngetich
   5. Susan M Kavai
   6. Celestine Wairimu
   7. Stephen Anyona
   8. Naomi Gitau
   9. Robert Sanaya Onsare
   10. Beatrice Ongandi
   11. Sebastian Duchene
   12. Mohamed Ali
   13. John David Clemens
   14. Kathryn E Holt
   15. Gordon Dougan

   Reviewed by eLife

7. An oscillating computational model can track pseudo-rhythmic speech by using linguistic predictions

   This article has 2 authors:

   1. Sanne ten Oever
   2. Andrea E Martin

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Evaluation Summary:

     The topic is highly interesting and provides new insights to the ongoing debate about the role of oscillations and predictability in speech recognition. The manuscript is of broad interest to readers in the field of speech recognition and neuronal oscillations. Particularly, the authors provide a computational model which additionally to feedforward acoustic input incorporates linguistic predictions as feedback, allowing a fixed oscillator to process non-isochronous speech. The model is tested extensively by applying it to a linguistic corpus, EEG and behavioral data. It explains variations in speech duration based on linguistic predictability, and recently reported phase-dependency of speech perception, supporting the authors claims. The reviewers agreed that this study provides new insights in the current debate about the role of neural oscillations and top-down predictability in speech recognition, and that it represents an important contribution to the field of language neurobiology. Although they thought that the results support the authors' conclusions, the reviewers each raised a number of questions about the modelling and stated that greater clarity is needed in describing this.

     (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 names with the authors.)

   Reviewed by eLife

8. Cis-regulatory variants affect gene expression dynamics in yeast

   This article has 2 authors:

   1. Ching-Hua Shih
   2. Justin Fay

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Evaluation Summary:

     The authors use RNAseq in yeast hybrids to study the effect of cis-variation on evolutionary divergence in gene expression and expression dynamics. Importantly, some of the findings are further confirmed using reporter assays. This is a clever and efficient approach that allows obtaining a genome-wide view of how cis-sequence variation affects expression. What sets this study apart from previous work is that the authors use hybrids across different genetic distances, separate expression levels and dynamics by sampling across different time points during an environmental shift, and also investigate 3' sequences. The main conclusions confirm that SNPs and InDels both affect gene expression as well as dynamics, and that on average, InDels have larger effects compared to SNPs, especially on expression dynamics. Moreover, the results also reflect negative selection on expression levels, with the effect of some cis mutations compensated by other cis variation, which ultimately results in complex interactions between the different cis-acting polymorphisms. Together, the results further our understanding of how cis sequence variation supports divergence in gene expression levels and dynamics.

     (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

9. Decoding the brain state-dependent relationship between pupil dynamics and resting state fMRI signal fluctuation

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Filip Sobczak
   2. Patricia Pais-Roldán
   3. Kengo Takahashi
   4. Xin Yu

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Evaluation Summary:

     Pupil diameter is used as an index of the brain's arousal system, and has traditionally thought to be a non-invasive index of specific neuromodulatory activity. It is therefore been heavily used as a measure in neuroscience. More recent data suggests a more complex picture whereby a pupil dilation might track cocktail of different neuromodulators. This paper provides firm data supporting this view, and introduces the new view that the make-up of this cocktail changes significantly over time. Pupil dynamics are linked with different neuromodulatory centers over different intervals of time. This is clearly important data across a broad range of human and animal systems neuroscience.

     (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

10. Rapid spread of a densovirus in a major crop pest following wide-scale adoption of Bt-cotton in China

    This article has 11 authors:

    1. Yutao Xiao
    2. Wenjing Li
    3. Xianming Yang
    4. Pengjun Xu
    5. Minghui Jin
    6. He Yuan
    7. Weigang Zheng
    8. Mario Soberón
    9. Alejandra Bravo
    10. Kenneth Wilson
    11. Kongming Wu

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      Evaluation Summary:

      This manuscript will be of interest to a broad audience of researchers interested in microbe-insect interactions and how they may affect adaptation to pesticides. It presents data supporting that infection with a mutualistic virus enhances fitness in a moth, and that selection pressure represented by transgenic crops may be driving the spread of this mutualistic infection in Chinese moth populations. Specificially, infection with a densovirus appears to improve the ability of the cotton bollworm to survive on transgenic cotton expressing insecticidal proteins from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). The widely-grown Bt-transgenic crops control insect pests with great reductions in chemical insecticides, and anything that could reduce their efficacy is of relevance to the agricultural biotechnology community and to growers. This work suggests that virus infection of the insect pest can have unexpected interactions with the ongoing selection for Bt resistance that threatens the sustainability of Bt-transgenic crops. The impact of the work would be clearer if there was a better distinction between pest resistance (the evolution of increased tolerance due to genetic changes in the pest population) and other mechanisms of increased pest tolerance (e.g., virus infection).

      (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