eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. Living with relatives offsets the harm caused by pathogens in natural populations

   This article has 3 authors:

   1. Hanna M Bensch
   2. Emily A O'Connor
   3. Charlie Kinahan Cornwallis

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Evaluation Summary:

     Group living may be beneficial for many reasons, but has costs in terms of increased rates of parasitism, in particular if group members are highly related. In this meta analysis, many original studies on questions related to parasitism, relatedness and group living are brought together in one unifying framework. The authors conclude that living in groups can indeed facilitate the spread of infectious diseases, but that these costs can be overcompensated by the benefits of group living.

     (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

2. Fascin limits Myosin activity within Drosophila border cells to control substrate stiffness and promote migration

   This article has 7 authors:

   1. Maureen C Lamb
   2. Chathuri P Kaluarachchi
   3. Thiranjeewa I Lansakara
   4. Samuel Q Mellentine
   5. Yiling Lan
   6. Alexei V Tivanski
   7. Tina L Tootle

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Evaluation Summary:

     This manuscript explores the relationship between stiffness of migrating cells and the stiffness of the substrate of which they are migrating. Specifically, the authors show that the actin-bundling protein Fascin limits the levels of activated myosin to alter stiffness of the migratory substrate. This is a well-controlled study, and with some additional clarifications of methods and extensions to some analyses that would strengthen the paper, it will be of broad interest to cell biologists, particularly those studying cell migration.

     (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 names with the authors.)

   Reviewed by eLife

3. Information flows from hippocampus to auditory cortex during replay of verbal working memory items

   This article has 5 authors:

   1. Vasileios Dimakopoulos
   2. Pierre Mégevand
   3. Lennart H Stieglitz
   4. Lukas Imbach
   5. Johannes Sarnthein

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Evaluation Summary:

     The basis for working memory is controversial in terms of any basis related to neuronal or synaptic activity in sensory cortex during maintenance and the involvement of non-sensory areas especially the frontal cortex and hippocampus. This work uses rare human intracranial recordings to examine another aspect, connectivity between areas, and demonstrates connectivity from sensory cortex to hippocampus during encoding in one frequency band and connectivity in a reverse sense during maintenance. The work has the potential to inform models of working memory.

     (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

4. Global Analysis of the Mammalian MHC class I Immunopeptidome at the Organism-Wide Scale

   This article has 15 authors:

   1. Peter Kubiniok
   2. Ana Marcu
   3. Leon Bichmann
   4. Leon Kuchenbecker
   5. Heiko Schuster
   6. David Hamelin
   7. Jérome Despault
   8. Kevin Kovalchik
   9. Laura Wessling
   10. Oliver Kohlbacher
   11. Stefan Stevanovic
   12. Hans-Georg Rammensee
   13. Marian C. Neidert
   14. Isabelle Sirois
   15. Etienne Caron

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Evaluation Summary:

     Kubiniok et al. use published data sets to bioinformatically study the contribution of tissue type and HLA classical class I gene allotype on the immunopeptidome, the repertoire of peptides presented by MHC class I molecules on the cell surface. This is an understudied and critically important question for understanding CD8+T cell tolerance and immunosurveillance of cancer and other diseased cells and autoimmunity, since it enables accurate prediction of peptide targets for vaccines designed to induce or suppress CD8+ T cell responses. Overall, this is a study that draws attention to some of the properties of the antigen processing and presentation pathway that had not been investigated before, namely the known differential gene expression profiles between tissues resulting in the presentation of tissue-specific antigens on HLA-I molecules, which is very valuable. Additionally this study provides avenues for investigation of the involvement of new enzymatic pathways involved in the generation of HLA-I restricted peptides that are presented to CD8+ T cells for immunosurveillance.

   Reviewed by eLife

5. Structure and mechanistic features of the prokaryotic minimal RNase P

   This article has 8 authors:

   1. Rebecca Feyh
   2. Nadine B Waeber
   3. Simone Prinz
   4. Pietro Ivan Giammarinaro
   5. Gert Bange
   6. Georg Hochberg
   7. Roland K Hartmann
   8. Florian Altegoer

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Evaluation Summary:

     This manuscript provides the first 3D structure of a novel type of RNA processing enzyme recently identified in bacteria. It convincingly uses cryoEM and biochemistry to describe how this small enzyme makes a new type of homo polymeric complex as required for its activity. The manuscript provides important conceptual novelties that will be of interest for a broad readership of biologists interested in gene expression processes.

     (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

6. SMRT and NCoR1 fine-tune inflammatory versus tolerogenic balance in dendritic cells by differentially regulating STAT3 signaling

   This article has 12 authors:

   1. Atimukta Jha
   2. Abdul Ahad
   3. Gyan Prakash Mishra
   4. Kaushik Sen
   5. Shuchi Smita
   6. Aliva Prity Minz
   7. Viplov Kumar Biswas
   8. Archana Tripathy
   9. Shantibhushan Senapati
   10. Bhawna Gupta
   11. Hans Acha-Orbea
   12. Sunil Kumar Raghav

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Evaluation Summary:

     This paper is of interest to immunologists studying the transcriptional control of innate immune responses. The paper presents a new role for transcriptional regulators in the control of inflammatory properties of cross-presenting dendritic cells that are involved in anti-tumoral and anti-viral immunity. The data support the conclusions but some modifications of the text and additional experiments are required.

     (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

7. Unifying the known and unknown microbial coding sequence space

   This article has 17 authors:

   1. Chiara Vanni
   2. Matthew S Schechter
   3. Silvia G Acinas
   4. Albert Barberán
   5. Pier Luigi Buttigieg
   6. Emilio O Casamayor
   7. Tom O Delmont
   8. Carlos M Duarte
   9. A Murat Eren
   10. Robert D Finn
   11. Renzo Kottmann
   12. Alex Mitchell
   13. Pablo Sánchez
   14. Kimmo Siren
   15. Martin Steinegger
   16. Frank Oliver Gloeckner
   17. Antonio Fernàndez-Guerra

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Evaluation Summary:

     This paper tackles perhaps THE central question in metagenomics: what are all these unknown genes and genomes doing!? The authors use recent advances in high-throughput sequencing clustering and homology detection algorithms to systematically integrate unannotated genes into discovery workflows. The paper's exploration results in a wide array of highly informative summative statistics, together with a simple example of how powerful the provided resource can be in generating hypotheses about the function of unknown genes.

     (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

8. Targeting Conserved Sequences Circumvents the Evolution of Resistance in a Viral Gene Drive against Human Cytomegalovirus

   This article has 3 authors:

   1. Marius Walter
   2. Rosalba Perrone
   3. Eric Verdin

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Evaluation Summary:

     This paper will be of interest to experimental virologists and others following the development of "gene drive" technology to promote the rapid spread of specific mutations through a population. The authors first nicely confirm their prior finding that a gene drive virus can be used to transfer mutations into a normal virus when both are infecting the same cell. They then evaluate a strategy with potential to ameliorate the undesirable but expected emergence of viruses that acquire resistance to the gene transfer. Although the experiments are well done, the data are mostly convincing and accurately interpreted, and the presentation is clear, the studies provide a relatively minor advance in fundamental understanding of this potentially innovative therapy.

     (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. Niche partitioning facilitates coexistence of closely related honey bee gut bacteria

   This article has 6 authors:

   1. Silvia Brochet
   2. Andrew Quinn
   3. Ruben AT Mars
   4. Nicolas Neuschwander
   5. Uwe Sauer
   6. Philipp Engel

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Evaluation Summary:

     Brochet et al. address an outstanding ecological question related to how closely related microbial symbionts co-exist in the gut as stable communities. To tackle this question, the authors use an elegant model relying on honeybees colonized with a defined bacterial community. They provide compelling empirical evidence that a nutritionally complex diet together with microbial metabolic diversity play a key role in enabling co-existence of closely-related honeybee gut microbiota.

     (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. A PX-BAR protein Mvp1/SNX8 and a dynamin-like GTPase Vps1 drive endosomal recycling

    This article has 6 authors:

    1. Sho W Suzuki
    2. Akihiko Oishi
    3. Nadia Nikulin
    4. Jeff R Jorgensen
    5. Matthew G Baile
    6. Scott D Emr

    This article has been curated by 1 group:

    • Curated by eLife

      Evaluation Summary:

      This paper will be of broad interest to the vesicle trafficking field, as it defines how an evolutionarily conserved SNX-BAR protein (Mvp1) sorts cargo proteins into membrane tubules emanating from the endosome and recruits a dynamin-like "pinchase" to release the tubule so cargo can move to the Golgi complex.

      (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 names with the authors.)

    Reviewed by eLife