eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. Asprosin Neutralizing Antibodies as a Treatment for Metabolic Syndrome

   This article has 10 authors:

   1. Ila Mishra
   2. Clemens Duerrschmid
   3. Zhiqiang Ku
   4. Wei Xie
   5. Elizabeth Sabath Silva
   6. Jennifer Hoffmann
   7. Wei Xin
   8. Ningyan Zhang
   9. Zhiqiang An
   10. Atul R. Chopra

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Summary: Mishra et al. present data characterizing the effect of asprosin neutralizing antibodies on the parameters of metabolic syndrome (weight, glucose, lipids, etc). This group were the initial discoverers and characterized asprosin as a hormone that increases blood sugar and stimulates appetite. In their Nature Medicine 2017 article they also present data on a neutralizing antibody. In this follow-up manuscript the group characterizes the impact of neutralizing monoclonal antibodies on metabolic parameters of three mouse models of obesity (DIO, NASH diet and Leptin receptor knockout). The translational focus of the manuscript is potential use of monoclonal antibodies against aprosin as a treatment of metabolic syndrome.

   Reviewed by eLife

2. Frontal cortical regions associated with attention connect more strongly to central than peripheral V1

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Sara A. Sims
   2. Pinar Demirayak
   3. Simone Cedotal
   4. Kristina M. Visscher

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Summary: The manuscript is a replication of findings from Griffis et al., 2017, and it seeks to validate those findings using a different modality (diffusion-weighted imaging; DWI). While the questions asked in this manuscript are of considerable interest to the field, the findings' focus and implications are relatively narrow. Further, the study does not reveal new conclusions about brain function or organization. Authors may be cautious about interpreting the findings as representing direct structural connections between the occipital and frontal cortex -- as the reported structural and functional connectivity values may not be strong enough to support such a strong interpretation. The reviewers also agree that the methods are not presented clearly, in a manner that is straightforward to follow and critique.

   Reviewed by eLife

3. Structural characterization of the ANTAR antiterminator domain bound to RNA

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. James L Walshe
   2. Rezwan Siddiquee
   3. Karishma Patel
   4. Sandro F Ataide

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Summary: The reviewers were excited by the structural data, and felt that the structure represents an important advance in our understanding of ANTAR domain proteins. Nonetheless, while the reviewers found the proposed model of ANTAR regulation to be interesting, they raised concerns about the limited evidence in support of this model. In addition to the suggestions in the individual reviews, the authors thought the model could be tested using mutagenesis together with an in vivo or in vitro reporter system, and/or by structural studies of nascent transcripts in transcription complexes with EutV.

   Reviewed by eLife

4. Starburst amacrine cells amplify optogenetic visual restoration through gap junctions

   This article has 10 authors:

   1. Yusaku Katada
   2. Hiromitsu Kunimi
   3. Naho Serizawa
   4. Deokho Lee
   5. Kenta Kobayashi
   6. Kazuno Negishi
   7. Hideyuki Okano
   8. Kenji F. Tanaka
   9. Kazuo Tsubota
   10. Toshihide Kurihara

   Reviewed by eLife

5. Adaptive evolution of nontransitive fitness in yeast

   This article has 3 authors:

   1. Sean W Buskirk
   2. Alecia B Rokes
   3. Gregory I Lang

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Summary: The findings presented in this manuscript are interesting. They show that selection is happening at multiple scales - among viruses within a cell - and between their host cells within a population. The conflict between these levels of selection results in evolved populations that are less fit than the ancestors. This work demonstrates that evolution may not be a simple linear march of progress. Rather, progress over short time scales can sometimes lead to a reduction of fitness over the longer time scale due to the evolution of ecological interactions.

   Reviewed by eLife

6. DRAXIN regulates interhemispheric fissure remodelling to influence the extent of corpus callosum formation

   This article has 14 authors:

   1. Laura Morcom
   2. Timothy J Edwards
   3. Eric Rider
   4. Dorothy Jones-Davis
   5. Jonathan WC Lim
   6. Kok-Siong Chen
   7. Ryan J Dean
   8. Jens Bunt
   9. Yunan Ye
   10. Ilan Gobius
   11. Rodrigo Suárez
   12. Simone Mandelstam
   13. Elliott H Sherr
   14. Linda J Richards

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Summary: Your manuscript is an excellent account of the cellular and genetic mechanisms involved in the diversity of corpus callosum dysgenesis (CCD) phenotypes in humans and in a mouse model. Your work over the years has revealed that interhemispheric fissure (IHF) fusion is critical for proper formation of the callosum and its failure is the main cause of complete CCD. Here you nicely show that the extent of aberrant interhemispheric fissure (IHF) remodeling does in fact correlate with commissure dysgenesis severity, in inbred and outcrossed BTBR mouse strains, as well as in humans with partial CCD. The phenotypes in the mouse are very similar to what is found in humans, and also variable, perhaps related to stochasticity on the mechanisms involved, or to the dependency on other allelic variants.

     You also identify an eight base pair deletion in Draxin and misregulated astroglial and leptomeningeal proliferation as genetic and cellular factors for variable IHF remodelling and CCD in BTBR acallosal strains. The Draxin mutations interrupt the normal remodeling (closing) of interhemispheric fissure necessary for callosal axons to cross. Your study thus places the focus on midline cellular populations and away from axonal navigation as the main source of corpus callosum dysgenesis. The findings are important to understand what mutations cause CCD in humans and how, mechanistically, it occurs.

     This manuscript was co-submitted with https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.03.233593v1

   Reviewed by eLife

7. Flagellar energetics from high-resolution imaging of beating patterns in tethered mouse sperm

   This article has 8 authors:

   1. Ashwin Nandagiri
   2. Avinash Satish Gaikwad
   3. David L Potter
   4. Reza Nosrati
   5. Julio Soria
   6. Moira K O'Bryan
   7. Sameer Jadhav
   8. Ranganathan Prabhakar

   Reviewed by eLife

8. Phasic oxygen dynamics confounds fast choline-sensitive biosensor signals in the brain of behaving rodents

   This article has 2 authors:

   1. Ricardo M Santos
   2. Anton Sirota

   Reviewed by eLife

9. Trading mental effort for confidence in the metacognitive control of value-based decision-making

   This article has 2 authors:

   1. Douglas G Lee
   2. Jean Daunizeau

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Summary: This manuscript addresses a timely subject: the role of cognitive control (or mental effort) in value-based decision making. While there are plenty of models explaining value-based choice, and there is a growing number of computational accounts concerning effort-allocation, little theoretical work has been done to relate the two literatures. This manuscript contributes a novel and interesting step in this direction, by introducing a computational account of meta-control in value-based decision making. According to this account, meta-control can be described as a cost-benefit analysis that weighs the benefits of allocating mental effort against associated costs. The benefits of mental effort pertain to the integration of value-relevant information to form posterior beliefs about option values. Given a small set of parameters, as well as pre-choice value ratings and pre-choice uncertainty ratings as inputs to the model, it can predict relevant decision variables as outputs, such as choice accuracy, choice confidence, choice induced preference changes, response time and subjective effort ratings. The study fits the model to data from a behavioral experiment involving value-based decisions between food items. The resulting behavioral fits reproduce a number of predictions derived from the model. Finally, the article describes how the model relates to established accumulator models of decision-making.

     The (relatively simple) model is impressive in its apparent ability to reproduce qualitative patterns across diverse data including choices, RTs, choice confidence ratings, subjective effort, and choice-induced changes in relative preferences successfully. The model also appears well-motivated, well-reasoned, and well-formulated. While all reviewers agreed that the manuscript is of potential interest, they also all felt that a stronger case needs to be made for the explanatory power of the model, and that the model should be embedded more thoroughly in the existing literature on this topic.

   Reviewed by eLife

10. Simulated poaching affects global connectivity and efficiency in social networks of African savanna elephants—An exemplar of how human disturbance impacts group-living species

    This article has 7 authors:

    1. Maggie Wiśniewska
    2. Ivan Puga-Gonzalez
    3. Phyllis Lee
    4. Cynthia Moss
    5. Gareth Russell
    6. Simon Garnier
    7. Cédric Sueur

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      Summary: Your study used simulated elephant poaching to investigate the impact of selective individual removal on the functional resilience of animal social networks to human-induced disturbance. This topic is interesting and timely, because understanding how threatened animal populations are impacted by humans is of critical importance and requires more study -- especially for species/processes with limited real-world data, but with a potentially strong impact on ecosystem functioning. However, the reviewers unanimously agreed that the logic and assumptions underlying the study are problematic and, thus, limit the insights that can be drawn from the simulation results. They highlighted specifically that the network metrics used to infer functionality are not supported by field data on elephants, or indeed any other study systems. Please find more detailed comments from all three reviewers appended below.

    Reviewed by eLife