Evaluated articles

eLife Assessment

This study reports a valuable finding for the treatment of colorectal cancer (CRC), as the authors demonstrated that the enzyme CPT1A plays an significant role in the response to radiotherapy in CRC patients. However, the reviewers found that the results presented are still incomplete.

eLife Assessment

This manuscript provides valuable evidence comparing the performance of mathematical models and opinions from experts engaged in outbreak response in forecasting the spatial spread of an Ebola epidemic. The evidence supporting the conclusions is convincing. It will be of interest to disease modellers, infectious disease epidemiologists, policy-makers, and those who need to inform policy-makers during an outbreak.

eLife Assessment

This important paper explores the impact of early life stress (ELS) on adult brain and behavior. The significance of the convincing findings are that they implicate regulation of non-neuronal cells in the development of brain and behavioral dysfunction associated with ELS. With an elegant combination of behavioral models, morphological and functional assessments using immunostaining, electrophysiology, and viral-mediated loss-of-function approaches, the authors report that astrocyte dysfunction plays a role in ELS responses. The work is of interest to a broad behavioral and cellular neuroscience audience.

eLife Assessment

This manuscript provides convincing evidence derived from diverse state-of-the-art approaches to suggest that non-dopaminergic projection neurons in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) make local synapses. These important findings challenge the prevailing wisdom that VTA interneurons exclusively form local synaptic contacts and instead reveal that VTA neurons expressing interneuron markers also form long-range projections to forebrain targets such as the cortex, ventral pallidum, and nucleus accumbens. Given the importance of VTA interneurons to many models of VTA-linked behavioral functions, these findings have significant implications for our understanding of the neural circuits underlying reward, motivation, and addiction.

eLife Assessment

This important study presents genome-wide high-resolution chromatin-based 3D genomic interaction maps for over 50 diverse human cell types and integrates these data with pediatric obesity GWAS. The work provides convincing evidence that multiple pancreatic islet cell types are key effector cell types. The authors also perform variant-to-gene mapping to nominate genes underlying several GWAS hits. Overall, the results will be of interest to both the fields of 3D genome architecture and pediatric obesity.

eLife Assessment

This study presents valuable insights into the involvement of miR-26b in the progression of metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH). The delivery of microRNA-containing nanoparticles to reduce MASH severity has practical implications as a therapeutic strategy. The authors use two sets of transgenic mouse models, conducted kinase activity profiling of mouse liver samples, and supplemented their findings with additional experiments on human liver and plasma, providing solid support for their findings.

eLife Assessment

This study by Li et al. presents important findings on the metabolism-independent role of nuclear IDH1 in chromatin regulation during erythropoiesis. The authors provide convincing evidence that IDH1 deficiency disrupts H3K79 methylation and nuclear architecture, contributing to dyserythropoiesis. Their findings offer invaluable mechanistic insights with potential therapeutic implications for erythroid disorders and hematologic malignancies.

eLife Assessment

This work is an important contribution to understanding the role of FGF signaling in the induction of primitive-like cells in a 2D system of human gastrulation. The authors provide compelling evidence showing that endogenous FGF ligands, acting through FGF receptors localized basolaterally, are determinant in the acquisition of specific cell fates. These observations will be of broad relevance to the FGF field.

eLife assessment

This study is potentially valuable, however currently its findings are incomplete, in that the paper's promise to deliver multiscale models that further our understanding of striatal function remains largely unfulfilled. A major weakness is that the findings are not integrated well within the rich landscape of existing striatal network modeling literature. Another major weakness is that the model is explored only in overly simplified scenarios and with limited comparison to data.

eLife Assessment

This study provides a valuable examination of the social discrimination abilities of a jumping spider, Phippidus regius, based on visual cues. Behavioral essays yielded solid evidence that these spiders discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar individuals on the basis of visual cues, however the experimental support for individual recognition and long-term memory is incomplete. While the results supply evidence of discrimination, additional experiments would be needed to verify the evidence of individual recognition.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study uses a massive and long-term experimental data set to provide solid evidence on how tree diversity affects host-parasitoid communities of insects in forests. The work will be of interest to ecologists working on biodiversity conservation, community ecology, and food webs.

eLife Assessment

This useful study holds importance within the focused scope of endometriosis treatment, providing initial evidence of a potential new therapeutic target. The strength of the evidence is solid, as the methods, data, and analyses support the authors' conclusions regarding the specific aims. The study provides promising preliminary evidence of KMO implication in endometriosis, but it falls short of establishing a strong rationale for proposing KNS898 as a treatment for endometriosis given the limitations in evidence and mechanistic insights.

eLife Assessment

This study is important, with the potential to greatly impact future research on the evolution of chemical defense mechanisms in animals. The authors present compelling evidence for the presence of low quantities of alkaloids in amphibians previously thought to lack these toxins. They then integrate these findings with existing literature to propose a four-phase scenario for the evolution of chemical defense in alkaloid-containing poison frogs, emphasizing the role of passive accumulation mechanisms.

eLife Assessment

This study provides important new insights into the contributions of local DNA features to the complex molecular mechanisms and dynamics of copy number variation (CNV) formation during adaptive evolution. While limited to a single CNV of interest, the study is well-designed and carefully controlled, presenting compelling evidence that supports the conclusions. This work will be of general interest to those studying genome architecture and evolution from yeast biologists to cancer researchers.

eLife assessment

This solid and innovative study explores the uptake of fixed nitrogen in maize chloroplasts facilitated by symbiotic Gluconacetobacter diazotrophicus bacteria. The findings provide valuable insights into plant-microbe interactions, particularly highlighting a symbiotic mechanism of nitrogen delivery independent nodule formation. Additional controls would help to substantiate the findings and enhance the overall strength of the evidence.

eLife Assessment

This important study offers insights into the function and connectivity patterns of a relatively unknown afferent input from the endopiriform to the CA1 subfield of the ventral hippocampus, suggesting a neural mechanism that suppresses the processing of familiar stimuli in favor of detecting memory guided novelty. The strength of evidence is convincing, with careful anatomical and electrophysiological circuit characterization. The work will be of broad interest to researchers studying the neural circuitry of behavior.

eLife Assessment

This important study presents a new framework (ASBAR) that combines open-source toolboxes for pose estimation and behavior recognition to automate the process of categorizing behaviors in wild apes from video data. The authors present compelling evidence that this pipeline can categorize simple wild ape behaviors from out-of-context video at a similar level of accuracy as previous models, while simultaneously vastly reducing the size of the model. The study's results should be of particular interest to primatologists and other behavioral biologists working with natural populations.

eLife assessment

This valuable paper presents findings showing that different brain regions were best described by a distinct accumulation model, which all differed from the model that best described the rat's choices. These findings are solid because the authors present a very strong methodological approach. This work will be of interest to a wide neuroscientific audience.

eLife Assessment

This study presents a useful model of genetic drift by incorporating variance in reproductive success, aiming to address several apparent paradoxes in molecular evolution. However, some of the apparent paradoxes only arise in the most basic version of standard models and have been reconciled in more advanced models. Nonetheless, this paper offers intuitive explanations for these apparent paradoxes, by adopting a new perspective and solid modeling and analysis. More broadly, the proposed model provides an alternative framework to address puzzling observations in molecular evolution, which will be of interest to evolutionary and population geneticists.