eLife

Latest preprint reviews

1. A computationally designed fluorescent biosensor for D-serine

   This article has 13 authors:

   1. Vanessa Vongsouthi
   2. Jason H. Whitfield
   3. Petr Unichenko
   4. Joshua A. Mitchell
   5. Björn Breithausen
   6. Olga Khersonsky
   7. Leon Kremers
   8. Harald Janovjak
   9. Hiromu Monai
   10. Hajime Hirase
   11. Sarel J. Fleishman
   12. Christian Henneberger
   13. Colin J. Jackson

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Summary: The reviewers recognize the merits of your work and your efforts to engineer a D-serine selective biosensor. However, they also raise major concerns regarding the experimental design (selection of mutations), methodology and achieved applicability. The reviewers find that the improvement in the selectivity of the engineered construct for the targeted ligand over alternative ligands is modest. They further indicate ambiguities regarding the origin of the ligand-induced fluorescence signal changes of the sensor. Other problematic aspects are the estimation of thermal stabilities and the lack of physiological signals in fluorescence imaging results that could demonstrate applicability to a biological problem.

   Reviewed by eLife

2. Linking minimal and detailed models of CA1 microcircuits reveals how theta rhythms emerge and their frequencies controlled

   This article has 3 authors:

   1. Alexandra Pierri Chatzikalymniou
   2. Melisa Gumus
   3. Frances K. Skinner

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Summary: This study tackles a difficult problem of understanding the basis for hippocampal theta rhythms through reduction of a highly detailed model, seeking to validate a reduced model that would be more amenable to analysis. The reviewers appreciated the attention to this challenging problem and the substantial work that went into it, but had several fundamental concerns about the methodology, interpretation, and reporting.

   Reviewed by eLife

3. Exposing distinct subcortical components of the auditory brainstem response evoked by continuous naturalistic speech

   This article has 2 authors:

   1. Melissa J Polonenko
   2. Ross K Maddox

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Summary: This manuscript describes a type of alteration to speech to make it more peaky, with the goal of inducing stronger responses in the auditory brainstem. Recent work has employed naturalistic speech to investigate subcortical mechanisms of speech processing. However, previous methods were ill equipped to tease apart the neural responses in different parts of the brainstem. The authors show that their speech manipulation improves this: the peaky speech that they develop allows to segregate different waves of the brainstem response. This development may allow further and more refined investigations of the contribution of different parts of the brainstem to speech processing, as well as to hearing deficits.

   Reviewed by eLife

4. Systematic investigation of imprinted gene expression and enrichment in the mouse brain explored at single-cell resolution

   This article has 4 authors:

   1. M. J. Higgs
   2. M. J. Hill
   3. R. M. John
   4. A. R. Isles

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Summary: The reviewers appreciated the effort to merge most of the available datasets to make a precise survey of the sites of imprinted gene expression and the great resource it could bring to the community. However, the reviewers also felt that the study suffered from methodological bias, was preliminary (no allelic information in particular), and that the conclusions did not go beyond previous reports. The general lack of citation of the name of imprinted genes made it difficult to judge whether conclusions were consistent among the different datasets. Highlighting specific imprinted genes would bring a clearer focus and narrative.

   Reviewed by eLife

5. Brain network reconfiguration for narrative and argumentative thought

   This article has 5 authors:

   1. Yangwen Xu
   2. Lorenzo Vignali
   3. Olivier Collignon
   4. Davide Crepaldi
   5. Roberto Bottini

   This article has been curated by 1 group:

   • Curated by eLife

     Summary: The reviewers thought this was a nicely written paper, and were interested in the idea of extending intersubject correlation (ISC) and intersubject functional connectivity (ISFC) work on narratives to arguments. One major concern was that effects reported here may be driven in part by the scrambled conditions. Specifically, the scrambled argument seems to have resulted in stronger and more widespread ISC than the intact argument: this would call into question assumptions about the scrambled version being a control condition. Another, related concern raised is that perhaps argumentative texts are very different from narrative texts: perhaps argumentative texts are less structured, or less interesting (?) and this is why the intact and scrambled versions are so similar. Together with other issues, relating to the interpretation of the findings, it was felt that while of interest, the study's major conclusions could not be justified without additional experiments.

   Reviewed by eLife

6. Evoked pain intensity representation is distributed across brain systems: A multistudy mega-analysis

   This article has 11 authors:

   1. Bogdan Petre
   2. Philip Kragel
   3. Lauren Y. Atlas
   4. Stephan Geuter
   5. Marieke Jepma
   6. Leonie Koban
   7. Anjali Krishnan
   8. Marina Lopez-Sola
   9. Mathieu Roy
   10. Choong-Wan Woo
   11. Tor D. Wager

   Reviewed by eLife

7. Can computers understand words like humans do? Comparable semantic representation in neural and computer systems

   This article has 8 authors:

   1. Linmin Zhang
   2. Lingting Wang
   3. Jinbiao Yang
   4. Peng Qian
   5. Xuefei Wang
   6. Xipeng Qiu
   7. Zheng Zhang
   8. Xing Tian

   Reviewed by eLife

8. TWIST1 and chromatin regulatory proteins interact to guide neural crest cell differentiation

   This article has 9 authors:

   1. Xiaochen Fan
   2. V Pragathi Masamsetti
   3. Jane QJ Sun
   4. Kasper Engholm-Keller
   5. Pierre Osteil
   6. Joshua Studdert
   7. Mark E Graham
   8. Nicolas Fossat
   9. Patrick PL Tam

   Reviewed by eLife

9. Neural signatures of vigilance decrements predict behavioural errors before they occur

   This article has 3 authors:

   1. Hamid Karimi-Rouzbahani
   2. Alexandra Woolgar
   3. Anina N Rich

   Reviewed by eLife

10. The population genetics of collateral resistance and sensitivity

    This article has 2 authors:

    1. Sarah M Ardell
    2. Sergey Kryazhimskiy

    Reviewed by eLife