Evaluated articles

eLife assessment

This important study introduces and evaluates the efficacy of a novel form of non-invasive brain stimulation in humans: kilohertz transcranial magnetic perturbation (kTMP). The evidence provided for the ability of kTMP to increase cortical excitability with minimal sensation is compelling, with two separate replication experiments. Although exploratory in nature, this work represents new avenues for non-invasive brain stimulation research that has potential long-term appeal for both clinical and research applications. This paper will be of significant interest to neuroscientists interested in brain stimulation.

eLife Assessment

In this important paper, Garcia et al seek to determine whether the superior frontal sulcus (SFS), an area previously implicated in evidence accumulation for perceptual decisions, plays a causal role in perceptual and/or value-based decisions. Through a combination of careful paradigm design, computational modelling, transcranial magnetic stimulation and fMRI analyses, the authors provide convincing evidence that the SFS supports perceptual but not value-based decisions and that its disruption leads to a lowering of decision boundaries.

eLife assessment

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a particularly aggressive form of cancer, with an increasing number of treatment options approved for use in patients over the past decade. However, the biology of HCC and identifiable therapeutic targets have not been as clear, even in the era of molecular oncology. Likewise, the cellular biology of HCC, including the role of intercellular communication, has not been well elucidated. In this compelling study, Dantzer et al. provide fundamental insight into the role of beta-catenin on intercellular communication occurring via extracellular vesicles, with implications for immune evasion in a cancer increasingly being treated using immuno-oncologic agents.

eLife assessment

This work advances our understanding of transcriptional regulation of virulence and metabolic pathways in plant pathogenic bacteria. Solid evidence for the claims is provided by computational analysis of newly generated data on the genome-wide binding of 170 transcription factors to their target genes, together with experimental validation of the biological functions of some of these transcription factors. The findings and resources from this study will be valuable to researchers in the fields of systems biology, bacteriology, and plant-microbe interactions.

eLife assessment

This study provides valuable new insights into the trade-offs associated with the evolution of drug resistance in the yeast S. cerevisiae, based on a solid approach to evolving and phenotyping hundreds of independent strains. The authors identify distinct phenotypic clusters, defined by their growth across defined conditions, which suggest that tradeoffs are diverse but at the same time could be limited to a few classes according to the underlying resistance mechanisms. The methodologies used align with the current state-of-the-art, and the data and analysis are solid as they broadly support the claims, with only a few minor weaknesses remaining after revision. This work will interest molecular biologists working on the evolution of new phenotypes and microbiologists studying multi-drug therapy.

eLife Assessment

This study aims to analyse the effect of polymorphism on meiotic recombination in subspecies of Saccharomyces. The detection of reciprocal and non-reciprocal events is based on sequencing the haploid products of meiosis, and frequencies are compared between strains having introgressed genomic segments and strains lacking such segments. Unfortunately, the method used are inadequate for quantifying the non-reciprocal events.

eLife assessment

In this important study, the authors manually assessed randomly selected images published in eLife between 2012 and 2022 to determine whether they were accessible for readers with deuteranopia, the most common form of color vision deficiency. They then developed an automated tool designed to classify figures and images as either "friendly" or "unfriendly" for people with deuteranopia. Such a tool could be used by journals or researchers to monitor the accessibility of figures and images, and the evidence for its utility was solid: it performed well for eLife articles, but performance was weaker for a broader dataset of PubMed articles, which were not included in the training data. The authors also provide code that readers can download and run to test their own images, and this may be of most use for testing the tool, as there are already several free, user-friendly recoloring programs that allow users to see how images would look to a person with different forms of color vision deficiency. Automated classifications are of most use for assessing many images, when the user does not have the time or resources to assess each image individually.

eLife Assessment

In this important study, the authors investigate the biogenesis of extracellular vesicles in mycobacteria and provide several observations to link VirR with vesiculogenesis, peptidoglycan metabolism, lipid metabolism, and cell wall permeability. The authors have done a commendable job of comprehensively examining the phenotypes associated with the VirR mutant using various techniques. The evidence presented in the revised manuscript is convincing and creates several avenues for further research.

eLife assessment

This useful study uses a chemoinformatics pipeline to identify a list of candidate mosquito repellants that may be pleasant to smell and safe for humans. The computational methodology is solid, but insufficiently benchmarked against other leading models. At the high concentrations tested, there may also be off-target effects of the repellents on the mosquitoes that are not considered. This paper may be of interest to specialists interested in the discovery of new mosquito repellents.

eLife Assessment

This paper presents useful results that extend our understanding of how the visual cortex encodes temporal structure, providing new information about sequence representations in the upper layers of the visual cortex. The evidence for prediction errors is solid, however, support for other claims regarding sparsification and simplification of activity following training is incomplete. The main concerns pertain to the confounds associated with restricted ordering within blocks that does not allow for separate plasticity mechanisms operating on different time scales.

eLife Assessment

The authors show that a middle carotid artery occlusion (MCAO) hypoxia lesion leads to hyaluronan-mediated chemoattraction to the lesion penumbra of Thbs-4-expressing astrocytes of the sub-ventricular zone (SVZ). These findings are valuable because they shed light on the function of astrocytes from the adult SVZ in pathological states like brain ischemic injury. The results are convincing, as they rely on a comprehensive analysis of experimental data.

eLife assessment

This work presents a valuable data-driven method to extract the "true" synaptic plasticity rule (or learning rule) operating in a neural circuit from empirical measurements of neural activity. The approach aims to train a generative adversarial network (GAN) to match neural activity measurements in terms of statistics, learning them from the data, rather than being pre-determined by the experimenter. The main conclusion is that the extracted learning rules are not unique, but rather degenerate, meaning that multiple plasticity rules can produce the same neural activity. Although the paper presents a thorough investigation using one learning rule as a case study (the Oja rule), the evidence that the results can be inferred beyond the specific numerical experiments presented in the paper is incomplete.

eLife assessment

This work addresses an important biological question: what is the cellular basis of wound healing? Using the Drosophila pupal notum as a model, the paper provides an elegant, thorough, descriptive characterisation of syncytia-driven wound closure using state-of-the-art confocal live imaging of the pupal notum. The authors meticulously characterize the cell-cell fusion events during wound healing, but without any mechanisms to inhibit cell fusion, it is incomplete, since it remains unclear whether cell fusion is required or not for speeding wound healing and/ or increasing the level of actin resources at the leading edge.

eLife assessment

This fundamental work significantly advances our understanding of how FOG1 nuclear localization is regulated during erythropoiesis and megakaryopoiesis, including the role of EPO and MPL/TPO signaling in this process. The authors provide compelling evidence using both K562 and CD34+ cells that heat shock cognate B (HSCB) can promote the proteasomal degradation of TACC3 to regulate the nuclear localization of FOG1, and that this function is independent of its role in iron-sulfur cluster (ISC) biogenesis. Together these data will be of interest to the fields of hematopoiesis and cell biology.

eLife Assessment

This fundamental work advances our understanding of the mechanisms underlying lactation-induced infertility. Compelling evidence supports the notion that prolactin inhibits kisspeptin activity and LH pulsatile release and that loss of this signal results in an early reestablishment of fertility during lactation. This work will be of interest to endocrinologists and reproductive biologists.

eLife assessment

This study reports an important discovery highlighting the essential role of the putative ion channel, TMC7, in acrosome formation during sperm development and thus male fertility. The evidence for the requirement of TMC7 in acrosome biogenesis and sperm function is convincing, although its function as an ion channel remains to be further determined. Overall, this work will be of great interest to developmental biologists and ion channel physiologists alike.

eLife Assessment

This manuscript provides valuable insights into the heterogeneity of hematopoietic stem cells and age-associated myeloid-biased hematopoiesis. While several aspects of the study are intriguing and merit further investigation, the current results remain incomplete and additional data are necessary to substantiate the conclusions. Some of the methods and data analyses partially support the claims.

eLife Assessment

The manuscript represents a valuable conceptual and technical contribution to our understanding of ciliogenesis and intraflagellar transport in vertebrates. Through a series of solid and technically superb live imaging experiments to directly visualize intraflagellar transport in various zebrafish ciliated tissues, the authors unveil the surprising breadth of intraflagellar transport speed among differing organs and link this to cell type-specific differences in cilia length and intraflagellar transport train size. This work will be of broad interest to researchers in numerous fields, including development, cell biology, and imaging.