eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. Multimodal MRI marker of cognition explains the association between cognition and mental health in the UK Biobank

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Irina Buianova
   2. Mateus Silvestrin
   3. Jeremiah D Deng
   4. Narun Pat

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This valuable work advances our understanding of the relationship between multimodal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) measures, cognition, and mental health. Compelling use of statistical learning techniques in UK Biobank data shows that 48% of the variance between an 11-task derived g-factor and imaging data can be explained. Overall, this paper contributes to the study of brain-behaviour relations and will be of interest for both its methods and its findings on how much variance in g can be explained.

   Reviewed by eLife

2. Adaptor protein supersaturation drives innate immune signaling and cell fate

   This article has 10 authors:

   1. Alejandro Rodriguez Gama
   2. Tayla Miller
   3. Shriram Venkatesan
   4. Jeffrey J Lange
   5. Jianzheng Wu
   6. Xiaoqing Song
   7. William D Bradford
   8. Malcolm Cook
   9. Jay R Unruh
   10. Randal Halfmann

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This important study investigates the self-assembly activity of all 109 human death-fold domains. The data collected using advanced microscopy and distributed amphifluoric FRET-based flow cytometry methods are compelling to support the "phase change battery" model that explains how signal amplification can occur without ATP consumption. This paper provides new insight into the thermodynamic control of protein phase behaviors within cells and will be of interest to those studying a variety of biological pathways involved in inflammatory responses and various forms of cell death.

   Reviewed by eLife

3. Selective life-long suppression of an odor processing channel in response to critical period experience

   This article has 8 authors:

   1. Hans C Leier
   2. Julius Jonaitis
   3. Alexander J Foden
   4. Abigail J Wilkov
   5. Annika E Ross
   6. Paola Van der Linden Costello
   7. Heather T Broihier
   8. Andrew M Dacks

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This study in the Drosophila antennal lobe, which contains multiple non-equivalent sensory channels, provides valuable new insight into how early-life sensory experience can produce lasting, cell-type-specific changes in neural circuit function. The work convincingly demonstrates that glial-mediated pruning during a defined developmental window leads to persistent suppression of odor responses in one olfactory neuron type, while sparing another. The evidence is solid and supported by multiple complementary approaches, although some mechanistic interpretations remain speculative and would benefit from additional functional testing.

   Reviewed by eLife

4. Modeling metabolic disease susceptibility and resilience in genetically diverse mice

   This article has 14 authors:

   1. Candice N Baker
   2. Jeffrey M Harder
   3. Daniel A Skelly
   4. Isabella Gerdes Gyuricza
   5. Margaret Gaca
   6. Matthew Vincent
   7. Allison Ingalls
   8. Mark P Keller
   9. Alan D Attie
   10. Madeleine Braun
   11. Michael Stitzel
   12. Edison T Liu
   13. Nadia Rosenthal
   14. Gary A Churchill

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     The authors used three genetically diverse mouse models to investigate the impact of genome diversity on metabolic disease outcomes, such as obesity and glucose tolerance. This study is important because it integrates comprehensive metabolic analyses and multi-tissue phenotyping across sexes to reveal pathways relevant to obesity and its complications; the data are convincing and uncover several pathways that advance understanding of disease etiology while suggesting potential therapeutic avenues to prevent obesity-related health risks. There are limitations, such as a limited number of mouse strains used in the work, the 9-week feeding regime may be too short to capture full metabolic remodeling, and the mechanisms by which the immune-adipose axis impacts the broader phenotype are not fully described. Overall, the study is compelling, but the manuscript could be improved by justifying the strain selection, addressing the concern about the feeding duration, and providing stronger mechanistic support or discussion.

   Reviewed by eLife

5. Large-scale identification of plasma membrane repair proteins revealed spatiotemporal cellular responses to plasma membrane damage

   This article has 2 authors:

   1. Yuta Yamazaki
   2. Keiko Kono

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This work provides an important resource identifying 72 proteins as novel candidates for plasma membrane and/or cell wall damage repair in budding yeast, and describes the temporal coordination of exocytosis and endocytosis during the repair process. The data are convincing; however, additional experimental validation will better support the claim that repair proteins shuttle between the bud tip and the damage site.

   Reviewed by eLife

6. Spatially periodic computation in the entorhinal-hippocampal circuit during navigation

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. Bo Zhang
   2. Xin Guan
   3. Dean Mobbs
   4. Jia Liu

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This study offers important insights into how entorhinal and hippocampal activity support human thinking in feature spaces. It replicates hexagonal symmetry in entorhinal cortex, reports a novel three-fold symmetry in both behavior and hippocampal signals, and links these findings with a computational model. The task and analyses are sophisticated, and the results appear convincing and of broad interest to neuroscientists.

   Reviewed by eLife

7. In vivo mapping of striatal neurodegeneration in Huntington’s disease with Soma and Neurite Density Imaging

   This article has 14 authors:

   1. Vasileios Ioakeimidis
   2. Marco Palombo
   3. Chiara Casella
   4. Lucy Layland
   5. Carolyn B McNabb
   6. Robin Schubert
   7. Philip Pallmann
   8. Monica E Busse
   9. Cheney JG Drew
   10. Sundus Alusi
   11. Timothy Harrower
   12. Jane Davies
   13. Anne E Rosser
   14. Claudia Metzler-Baddeley

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This fundamental manuscript presents a novel application of the SANDI (Soma and Neurite Density Imaging) model to study microstructural alterations in the basal ganglia of individuals with Huntington's disease (HD). The compelling methods are, to our understanding, the first application of SANDI to neurodegenerative diseases, provide strong evidence for HD-related neurodegeneration in the striatum, account significantly for striatal atrophy, and correlate with motor impairments. The integration of novel diffusion acquisition and modelling methods with multimodal behavioural data are both of high value in their own right, and create a framework for future studies.

   Reviewed by eLife

8. Allosteric effects of the coupling cation in melibiose transporter MelB

   This article has 6 authors:

   1. Parameswaran Hariharan
   2. Yuqi Shi
   3. Amirhossein Bakhtiiari
   4. Ruibin Liang
   5. Rosa Viner
   6. Lan Guan

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     This manuscript presents useful insights into the molecular basis underlying the positive cooperativity between the co-transported substrates (galactoside sugar and sodium ion) in the melibiose transporter MelB. Building on years of previous studies, this convincing study improves on the resolution of previously published structures and reports the presence of a water molecule in the sugar binding site that would appear to be key for its recognition, introduces further structures bound to different substrates, and utilizes binding and transport assays, as well as HDX-MS and molecular dynamics simulations to further understand the positive cooperativity between sugar and the co-transported sodium cation. The work will be of interest to biologists and biochemists working on cation-coupled symporters, which mediate the transport of a wide range of solutes across cell membranes.

   Reviewed by eLife

9. A genome-wide MAGIC kit for recombinase-independent mosaic analysis in Drosophila

   This article has 11 authors:

   1. Yifan Shen
   2. Ann T Yeung
   3. Payton Ditchfield
   4. Elizabeth Korn
   5. Rhiannon Clements
   6. Xinchen Chen
   7. Bei Wang
   8. Zixian Huang
   9. Michael Sheen
   10. Parker A Jarman
   11. Chun Han

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     eLife Assessment

     The study showcases a significant and important enhancement of the MAGIC transgenesis method, by extending it genome-wide to all chromosomes. The authors provide compelling evidence to demonstrate that the MAGIC mosaic clones can be generated for genes from all, including the 4th chromosome. With this toolkit extension, the method is set to complement the classical FRT/Flp recombination system for gene manipulation in flies.

   Reviewed by eLife

10. A cell atlas of the developing human outflow tract of the heart and its adult aortic valve derivatives

    This article has 11 authors:

    1. Rotem Leshem
    2. Syed Murtuza-Baker
    3. Joshua Mallen
    4. Lu Wang
    5. John Dark
    6. Andrew D Sharrocks
    7. Karen Piper Hanley
    8. Neil Hanley
    9. Magnus Rattray
    10. Simon D Bamforth
    11. Nicoletta Bobola

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      eLife Assessment

      This is a valuable study that presents human single nuclei RNA-seq and spatial transcriptomics data of the developing outflow tract and adult aortic valves that will facilitate research in this area. Data presented are solid, with bioinformatics analyses showing cell lineage and trajectory relationships, intriguingly suggesting persistence of embryonic signature in adult aortic valve cells. The latter results would be strengthened by experimental validation.

    Reviewed by eLife