Evaluated articles

eLife assessment

This study provides important findings based on compelling evidence demonstrating that females and males have different strategies to regulate energy consumption in the brain in the context of low energy intake. While food deprivation reduces energy consumption and visual processing performance in the visual cortex of males, the female cortex is unaffected, likely at the expense of other functions. This study is relevant for scientists interested in body metabolism and neuroscience.

eLife assessment

Zhang et al. deliver an important transcriptomic atlas of the human spinal cord, combining single-cell and spatial transcriptomics to unveil molecular insights. While convincingly overcoming Visium limitations using snRNA-seq, the manuscript is criticized for its largely observational approach and lack of quantitative analysis, especially in supporting claims about sex differences in motor neurons and DRG-spinal cord neuronal interactions.

eLife assessment

This valuable study uses a novel experimental design to elegantly demonstrate how we exploit stimulus structure to overcome working memory capacity limits. The presented behavioural and neural evidence are solid and in line with the proposed information compression mechanism. This study will be of interest to cognitive neuroscientists studying structure learning and memory.

eLife assessment

This study investigated the factors related to understudied genes in biomedical research. It showed that understudied genes are largely abandoned at the writing stage, and it identified a number of biological and experimental factors that influence which genes are selected for investigation. The study is an important contribution to this branch of meta-research, and the evidence in support of the findings is solid.

eLife assessment

The OpuA Type I ABC importer uses two substrate binding domains to capture extracellular glycine betaine and present the substrate to the transmembrane domain for subsequent transport and correction of internal dehydration. This study presents valuable findings addressing the question of whether the two substrate binding domains of OpuA dock and physically interact in a salt-dependent manner. The single-molecule fluorescence resonance energy transfer and cryogenic electron microscopy data that are presented provide convincing support for the existence of a transient interaction between the substrate binding domains that depends on ionic strength, laying a foundation for future studies exploring how this interaction is involved in the overall transport mechanism.

eLife assessment

This valuable study presents findings characterising the genomic features of E. coli isolated from neonatal meningitis from seven countries, and documents bacterial persistence and reinfection in two case studies. The genomic analyses are solid, although the inclusion of a larger number of isolates from more diverse geographies would have strengthened the generalisability of findings. The work will be of interest to people involved in the management of neonatal meningitis patients, and those studying E. coli epidemiology, diversity, and pathogenesis.

eLife assessment

This important study follows up on previous work defining the anti-leukemic effects of a previously characterized cannabis extract on Notch-activated T cells and identifies several pathways that mediate its anti-cancer activity including the ER calcium and integrated stress response. The evidence is solid, but several concerns remain including the over reliance on a single cell line for the majority of the studies and lack of integration of the observations with existing literature

eLife assessment

This study presents a valuable finding on how the GAP DLC1, a deactivator of the small GTPase RhoA, regulates RhoA activity globally as well as at Focal Adhesions. Using a new acute optogenetic system coupled to a RhoA activity biosensor, the authors present solid evidence that DLC1 amplifies local Rho activity at Focal Adhesions. Nevertheless, the proposed mechanism could be further supported by a deeper analysis of the data.

eLife assessment

This study presents a valuable finding on the mechanisms underlying general anesthesia, with a focus on microglial regulation. The evidence supporting the claims of the authors is solid, although some of the novelty of these findings may be reduced based on the recent publication of a similar study. The work will be of interest to medical biologists working on mechanisms of anesthesia, microglia, and neuron-microglia interaction.

eLife assessment

This study presents a useful deep learning-based inter-protein contact prediction method named PLMGraph-Inter which combines protein language models and geometric graphs. The evidence supporting the claims of the authors is solid. The authors show that their approach may be used in cases where AlphaFold-Multimer performs poorly. This work will be of interest to researchers working on protein complex structure prediction, particularly when accurate experimental structures are available for one or both of the monomers in isolation.

eLife assessment

Urtecho et al. use genome-integrated massively parallel reporter assays to catalog and characterize promoters throughout the Escherichia coli genome. The result is a state-of-the-art atlas of promoters, coupled with information on their regulation, that is readily accessible through the website http://ecolipromoterdb.com. This compelling work provides an important resource for researchers studying bacterial transcriptional regulation.

eLife assessment

This potentially important paper addresses the question of how numerical information is represented in the human brain. Experimental findings are interpreted as providing evidence for a sensorimotor mechanism that involves channels, each tuned to a particular numerical range. While this is an interesting application of methodologies used to identify the presence of channels, the evidence supporting the claim that these have a sensorimotor basis is incomplete.

eLife Assessment

The important manuscript presents convincing evidence of temporal correlations during specific oscillatory activity between the prefrontal cortex, thalamic nucleus reuniens, and the hippocampus, in naturally sleeping animals. Such correlations represent solid evidence to support the notion that the thalamic nucleus reuniens participates in the hippocampal and prefrontal cortex dialogue subserving memory processes.

eLife assessment

This valuable manuscript reveals sex differences in bi-conditional Pavlovian learning and conditional behavior. Males learn hierarchical context-cue-outcome associations more quickly, but females show more stable and robust task performance. These sex differences are related to cellular activation in the orbitofrontal cortex. Although the evidence supporting these claims is convincing, some assertions of sex differences in context-dependent discrimination behaviour may be slightly overstated yet have strong potential to guide future research to clarify the nature of these differences. The results will be of interest to many behavioural neuroscientists, particularly those who investigate sex-specific behaviours.

eLife Assessment

Identifying chromatin interactions with high sensitivity and resolution at the genome-wide scale continues to be technically challenging. This study introduces findings based on the improved MNase-based proximity ligation method, MChIP-C, which enables genome-wide measurement of chromatin interactions at single-nucleosome resolution. The evidence presented in this manuscript is convincing, and the technological advancements will be valuable for the study of 3D genome architecture.

eLife assessment

In the last 15 years, large-scale association studies (GWAS) have served to estimate the association between genome-wide common variants and a large number of disparate traits and diseases in humans. This valuable method provides a new way to find correlations between the genetic component of a phenotype of interest, and all this wealth of genetic information. This software adds as a new tool to investigate genetic correlation between traits, and to generate new mechanistic hypotheses and dissect the role of the observed associations in disease heterogeneity. The results of the application of their method are solid and generally agree with what others have seen using similar AD and UKB data.

eLife assessment

The authors of this study implemented an important toolset for 3D reconstruction and segmentation of dissection photographs, which could serve as an alternative for cadaveric and ex vivo MRIs. The tools were tested on synthetic and real data with compelling performance. This toolset could further contribute to the study of neuroimaging-neuropathological correlations.

eLife assessment

This important study describes an atypical role of the odorant binding protein Obp56g in mating plug formation in Drosophila melanogaster suggesting that Obps may play roles in reproduction in addition to their originally described roles in olfaction. Mutant males lacking Obp56g fail to induce the formation of a mating plug in the female reproductive tract-leading to ejaculate loss and reduced sperm storage. The evidence supporting the claims of the authors is solid and compelling. The work will be of interest to biologists studying Obps and seminal fluid protein function and their evolution.

eLife assessment

This important work addresses an interesting question for the vertebrate olfactory community of whether mice can discriminate odorant intermittency to help them navigate the environment. The data were collected and analyzed using solid methodology, however, the paper seems to fall short in demonstrating that animal is actually sensitive to intermittency but not other flow parameters. The work will be of interest to researchers working on sensory neurobiology and animal behavior.