Evaluated articles

eLife assessment

This is an important information-theoretic re-analysis of human intracranial recordings during reward and punishment learning. It provides convincing evidence that reward and punishment learning is represented in overlapping regions of the brain while relying on specific inter-regional interactions. This preprint will be interesting to researchers in systems and cognitive neuroscience.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study combines anatomical tracing and slice physiology to examine how anterior thalamic and retrosplenial inputs converge in the presubiculum, a key region in the navigation circuit. The authors show that near-simultaneous co-activation of retrosplenial and thalamic inputs drives supra-linear presubiculum responses, revealing a potential cellular mechanism for anchoring the brain's head direction system to external visual landmarks. Their thorough experimental approach and analyses provide convincing evidence for the cellular basis of how the brain's internal compass may be anchored to the external world, laying the groundwork for future experimental testing in vivo.

eLife assessment

The solid study addresses the role of extracellular matrix (ECM) in neuronal migration. The authors showed that the interaction between the ternary complex formed by tenascin-C, the chondroitin sulfate proteoglycan neurocan, and hyaluronic acid is important for the multipolar to bipolar transition in the intermediate zone (IZ) of the developing cortex

eLife assessment

This important work by Hann et al. advances our understanding of the role of the survival motor neuron (SMN) protein in coordinating pathogenesis of the spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). The authors addressed many concerns raised by the reviewers, providing convincing evidence in terms of skeletal analyses not being able to satisfactorily elucidate SMN regulation of bone development.

eLife assessment

This important study identifies the gustatory receptors for sugar sensing in the larval and adult forms of the cotton bollworm, which is responsible for the destruction of many food crops world-wide. The authors find that the larval and adult forms utilise different receptors to sense sugars. The data are convincing and will be of interest neuroscientists working in sensory coding of sugars and to the pest management field.

eLife assessment

This study presents a valuable report on the first warm autopsy case of a metastatic prostate cancer patient and the follow-up genomic and epigenomic analysis. The evidence supporting the claims of the authors is solid, although inclusion of more discussion of the study limitation and elaboration of mechanistic link for TP53, CDK12, and CDKN1B mutations would have strengthened the study. The work will be of interest to medical biologists working on prostate cancer.

eLife Assessment

This important study examines the effects of NFKB2 mutations on pituitary gland development through hypothalamic-pituitary organoids. The evidence supporting the main conclusions is solid, although analysis of additional clones to exclude inter-clone variability would strengthen the conclusions. This is a revised study, but insight into the mechanism of action of NFKB2 during pituitary development is incomplete. This work will be of interest to endocrinologists and biologists working on pituitary gland development and disease.

eLife assessment

This valuable study presents findings that suggest the need for postoperative type 2 diabetes screening and that this should be prioritized in colorectal cancer survivors with overweight/obesity regardless of the type of colorectal cancer treatment applied. The evidence supporting the claims of the authors is solid and the authors use a population-based cohort study including all Danish colorectal patients who had undergone colorectal cancer surgery between 2001-2018. The work will be of interest to medical biologists, endocrinologists and oncologists working on colorectal cancer.

eLife assessment

This useful paper addresses a novel exercise mimetic agent on muscle exercise and performance. While the data provided are interesting, the evidence is incomplete, as much of it is correlative.

eLife Assessment

The authors established a useful syndetome differentiation protocol from human induced pluripotent stem cells, guided by single-cell transcriptomic analysis. Their findings could significantly impact the field, particularly for patients needing tendon cell therapy. However, the evidence presented is currently incomplete, as the authors did not yet test the applicability of their protocol across multiple human induced pluripotent stem cell lines.

eLife assessment

This study presents valuable new insights into a HIV-associated nephropathy (HIVAN) kidney phenotype in the Tg26 transgenic mouse model, and delineates the kidney cell types that express HIV genes and are injured in these HIV-transgenic mice. A series of compelling experiments demonstrated that PKR inhibition can ameliorate HIVAN with reversal of mitochondrial dysfunction (mainly confined to endothelial cells), a prominent feature shared in other kidney diseases. The data support that inhibition of PKR and mitochondrial dysfunction has potential clinical significance for HIVAN.

eLife assessment

This study presents a valuable dissection on how functional HSCs are expanded in PVA cultures. The functional and multi-omic analyses provided are convincing, although the additional data and their analysis provided during revision could have been included in the test to assist readers and to strengthen the published manuscript. Nevertheless, the present work will be of value for stem cell biologists interested in HSC regulation.

eLife Assessment

This study provides important insights into bacterial genome evolution by analyzing single-cell genome sequences of cyanobacteria from Yellowstone hot springs. Using compelling evidence, the authors demonstrate that both homologous recombination within species and frequent hybridization across species are major drivers of genome diversification. Despite the challenges that are inherent to sparse and fragmented single-cell data, the analyses are thorough, carefully controlled, and supported by multiple complementary approaches, making the conclusions highly robust. This work represents a significant advance in our understanding of microbial evolution in natural environments.

eLife Assessment

This work provides important insights into mucosal antibody responses against SARS-CoV-2 following intranasal immunization by characterizing a large number of monoclonal antibodies at both mucosal and non-mucosal sites. The evidence supporting the claims is solid. The demonstrated in vitro antiviral activity of antibodies characterized provides a rationale for developing mucosal vaccines, especially if confirmed in vivo and benchmarked against antibodies generated following intramuscular vaccination.

eLife assessment

While decades of research findings have supported the idea that action attenuates predicted touch, recent work has countered this, proposing that action actually enhances predicted touch and the previously observed attenuation is due to tactile contact. This present study resolves these contradictory claims regarding the role of prediction in perception of self-action. This important work provides compelling evidence that self-generated touch is attenuated compared to the same touch externally-generated, and a clear explanation for recent high-profile results that appeared to support the opposite view.

eLife assessment

This work presents useful and potentially valuable findings on how food signals may influence reproduction in the nematode C. elegans. In the current manuscript, the evidence in support of the authors' model is incomplete, and additional experimental data is needed to buttress the authors' conclusions.

eLife assessment

This study presents a useful mathematical analysis of different signaling networks in an attempt to provide general rules that give rise to biphasic responses, a widely observed behavior in biology in which the outputs of the network depend non-monotonically on the inputs. Determining general conditions that underlie this behavior would be useful in engineering synthetic biological systems and for mechanistically understanding biphasic responses in biological systems. However, whereas the mathematical approach and methods are solid, as they stand, the analyses are inadequate to assess how these findings are applicable in nature and which are general.

eLife assessment

The authors studied the mechanisms by which dead cells are removed from the wounded skin in a process called efferocytosis. By analyzing different cell populations in the skin, the authors find that proteins involved in mediating the cell death and marking the cells as undergoing this process are elevated during distinct times in the wound healing program. Interestingly, these same proteins are elevated even higher in diabetic wounds. Finally the authors demonstrate that blocking the process of efferocytosis alters the wound healing program, thus illustrating its importance in effective wound repair.

eLife assessment

This work is fundamental in providing compelling evidence of mitochondria-encoded RNAs playing a role in controlling nuclear gene expression. How mitochondria and the nucleus communicates is an important but yet not well-appreciated area of biology. Using the iMARI (in situ mapping of RNA-Genome Interactions) technology developed by this team, the authors found that mitochondria-encoded RNAs play an unexpected role in regulating nuclear gene expressions in endothelial cells and intriguingly, depletion or overexpression of a specific mt-caRNA altered stress-induced transcription of nuclear genes encoding for innate inflammation and endothelial activation. Overall, these findings are interesting and supported by experimental confirmation, bulk-RNA-seq, and snRNA and scRNA-seq data and will be of interest to the field studying RNA regulation, gene expression and cell biology.

eLife assessment

This paper presents valuable findings from whole-brain modeling of persistent activity states (underlying working memory) in the mouse brain. The most novel finding is that a spatial gradient of the density of inhibitory neurons supports a corresponding spatial gradient of propensity to support persistent activity. However, the evidence for this finding appears to be incomplete.