Evaluated articles

eLife assessment

This important study offers new insight into how floral and reproductive phenotypes and gene expression evolve in allopolyploids. The authors marshal compelling evidence, using well-constructed genetic lines, RNA sequencing, and phenotypic analyses to distinguish the roles of hybridization, whole genome duplication, and subsequent evolution in phenotypes associated with the selfing syndrome and in gene expression. The work will be of interest to researchers working in plant speciation and genomics, as well as those more broadly interested in the effects of genome copy number on phenotypic and expression evolution.

eLife assessment

This manuscript presents a useful analysis of allosteric communication in the CFTR protein using a coarse-grained dynamic model and characterized the role of disease-causing mutations. The results and analyses are generally solid and validated with available experimental observations. The findings provide comprehensive insights into the allosteric mechanism of this protein.

eLife assessment

This study presents findings on changes in brain network asymmetry in infants with congenital hearing loss. The findings are valuable but the evidence supporting the claims is incomplete and needs more appropriate and strict statistical analyses. The findings will be of interest to psychologists, neuroscientists, and clinicians.

eLife assessment

This work will be of interest to the motor control community as well as neuroAI researchers interested in how bodies constrain neural circuit function. The authors present "MotorNet", a useful software package to train artificial neural networks to control a biomechanical model of an effector. The manuscript provides solid evidence that MotorNet is easy to use and can reproduce past results in the field, both at the neural and behavioural levels. Validation is limited to planar arm-like plants or point-masses, so future work exploring three-dimensional movements and other types of plants would strengthen the impact of the tool.

eLife assessment

This study presents a valuable set of findings on how prior expectations modulate tactile sensory processing. The neuroimaging evidence supporting the main conclusions is solid, although the nature of the experimental task somewhat limits the interpretation of the findings. This work will be of interest to neuroscientists working on sensory processing and perception.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study investigated the appearance of ultrasonic vocalizations around 44 kHz that occurs in response to prolonged fear conditioning in male rats. Evidence in support of the conclusions is solid and may be of interest to some researchers also investigating distress-related ultrasonic vocalizations.

eLife assessment

The authors use reinforcement learning modeling to study the alterations following acute ketamine in macaques. The evidence supporting the conclusion that ketamine reduces the impact of losses vs. neutral/gains is solid. In this version of this valuable study, the authors make more measured interpretations about the relationship between the processing of losses and ketamine's antidepressant effects.

eLife assessment

This study presents a computational model to explore how neurostimulation could impact hippocampal theta oscillations. The computational model combines a detailed physiologically realistic hippocampus model and an abstract theta oscillator. The study could provide valuable predictions on pathological changes in this network. The modelling is based on convincing approaches that could be improved with experimental validation in future experiments.

eLife assessment

This study provides solid evidence for differences in habit-learning in obsessive-compulsive disorder versus controls. Contrary to previous studies that employed a single laboratory session to study habit-learning, here a smartphone app delivered motor-sequence tasks daily for a month. These results have important implications for our understanding of goal-directed versus habit learning in obsessive-compulsive disorder.

eLife assessment

This study provides a valuable contribution to the study of eye-movements in reading, revealing that attention-weights from a deep neural network show a statistically reliable fit to the word-level reading patterns of humans. Its evidence is convincing and strengthens a line of research arguing that attention in reading reflects task optimization. The work would be of interest to psychologists, neuroscientists, and machine learning researchers.

eLife assessment

This fundamental study has successfully identified four key transcription factors (MECOM, PAX8, SOX17, and WT1) that exhibit synergistic effects and are potentially responsible for the transformation of fallopian tube secretory epithelial cells into high-grade serous 'ovarian' cancer cells. Convincing data strongly support the drawn conclusion and significantly contribute to our understanding of the etiology of this devastating cancer. The implications of this finding are substantial, as it provides molecular insights that can potentially pave the way for innovative diagnostics and therapeutics in the field of gynecological oncology. Enhancing the clarity and impact of this study would be achieved through improvements in data presentation.

eLife assessment:

This useful study shows that the essential Acinetobacter baumannii gene Aeg1 likely plays an key role in cell division. The strength of the work is the discovery that the depletion of Aeg1 leads to cell filamentation and that gain-of-function mutations in cell division genes FtsB and FtsL rescue the lethality of Aeg1 depletion. However, Aeg1's localization pattern and its requirement for other division proteins' localizations require further characterization of the functionality of fluorescent fusion proteins, fluorescence images of higher quality, and improvements in statistic qualifications, leaving the study' evidence for Aeg1's exact role in cell division incomplete at this time. In conclusion, the critical role of Aeg1 in the assembly of the A. baumannii divisome has yet to be established unambiguously.

eLife assessment

This manuscript reports important results on the potential influence of maternally derived extracellular vesicles on embryo metabolism. The study combines convincing techniques for isolating different subtypes of EV, DNA sequencing, embryo culture, and respiration assays performed on human endometrial samples and mouse embryos. These findings set the stage for in-depth studies to elucidate the role of EV contents in embryo energetics and further enhance our understanding on maternal-fetal communication during peri-implantation development.

eLife assessment

This study presents an important discovery that the RNA synthesis protein of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that is responsible for COVID 19, has fewer mutations and causes limited conformational changes. The evidence supporting the claims is convincing, with robust sequence alignment studies, state-of-the-art protein-protein interaction analysis, and molecular conformational analysis. This work has implications for drug design and will be of broad interest to the general biophysics and structural biology community.

eLife assessment

In this valuable paper, the authors use an existing theoretical framework relying on information theory and maximum entropy inference in order to quantify how much information single cells can carry, taking into account their internal state. They reanalyze experimental data in this light. Despite some limitations of the data, the study convincingly highlights the difference between single-cell and population channel capacities. This result should be of interest to the quantitative biology community, as it contributes to explaining why channel capacities are apparently low in cells.

eLife assessment

This study presents a novel fluorescence based imaging strategy to investigate the folding status of RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) and their association with molecular chaperones under stress. It provides fundamental findings that will potentially advance our understanding in the folding and aggregation status of RBPs in nuclear stress bodies in a significant manner. However, there is also the concern that the evidence regarding protein fate is incomplete and additional controls are needed to fully support the conclusion. The imaging methodology can be adapted to study many other proteins that undergo liquid-liquid phase separation under specific cellular conditions.

eLife assessment

This is an important study that brings insight into mechanisms that underlie regulation of GABAergic transmission in response to changes in activity. The authors present solid data supporting the premise that action potential firing rather than excitatory synaptic strength is a key determinant of GABAergic synaptic inputs.

eLife assessment

This manuscript describes important findings that will impact our understanding of nuclear pore complex (NPC)-genome interactions and how nuclear pore proteins (nucleoporins) impact super enhancer function. The authors develop a clever new approach termed NPC-DamID to map chromatin-NPC interactions that has several important advantages over existing techniques and may be used in contexts that are incompatible with genetic manipulation. The authors provide compelling evidence that nucleoporins interact with super enhancers in multiple cell types and also suggest that the phase separation behavior of nucleoporins contributes to the hierarchical organization of super enhancers, which is exciting and will stimulate additional work.

eLife assessment

This is an important study highlighting how a single protein transporter dysfunction can significantly alter brain biochemistry, potentially playing a crucial role in the intellectual disability in creatine transporter deficiency (CTD) patients. The evidence is compelling that the new in vitro CTD model using CTD patient's brain organoid cultures will be widely applicable. Despite minor areas for further exploration, the study significantly enhances our understanding of CTD, offering potential therapeutic targets and a robust foundation for continued research in the field.

eLife assessment

This study demonstrates that plasticity of ocular dominance of binocular neurons in the visual thalamus persists in adulthood. The evidence supporting the authors' conclusion is convincing, and the findings are an important contribution to a growing body of work identifying plasticity in the adult visual system. This work will interest those in the field of ocular dominance plasticity in the visual system as well as scientists investigating the function of synaptic plasticity in the brain.