Evaluated articles

eLife assessment

This study used electrophysiology and imaging to show that the majority of excitatory cells in the dentate gyrus of adult mice have very slow oscillations during non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep. The oscillations were influenced by serotonin when it was released during NREM sleep. Moreover, the serotonin receptor type 1a mediated the effect, and reducing these receptors impaired a type of memory. The significance of the study is important and the strength of the evidence is solid, but revisions to the figures and making conclusions more consistent with the data could improve the significance and strength of evidence.

eLife assessment

In this study, Ferling and colleagues provide convincing evidence demonstrating that myeloid cells exert distinct, cargo-dependent responses during and after phagocytosis. These important findings establish previously unrecognized insights into the function(s) of myeloid cells in immunosurveillance and are thus likely to be broadly impactful across the spectrum of biomedical disciplines including immunology and cell biology. Notwithstanding these clear strengths of the article, some minor issues were noted pertinent to the relative opaqueness of the mechanisms underpinning context-specific RhoA activation.

eLife Assessment

Utilizing transgenic lineage tracing techniques and tissue clearing-based advanced imaging and three-dimensional slices reconstruction, the authors comprehensively mapped the distribution atlas of NFATc1+ and PDGFR-α+ cells in dental and periodontal mesenchyme and tracked their in vivo fate trajectories. This important work extends our understanding of NFATc1+ and PDGFR-α+ cells in dental and periodontal mesenchyme homeostasis, and should provide impact on clinical application and investigation. The strength of this work is compelling in employing CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene editing to generate two dual recombination systems, and mapped gNFATc1+ and PDGFR-α+cells residing in dental and periodontal mesenchyme, their capacity for progeny cell generation, and their inclusive, exclusive and hierarchical relations in homeostasis, generating a spatiotemporal atlas of these skeletal stem cell population.

eLife assessment

The authors made a useful finding that Zizyphi spinosi semen, a traditional Chinese medicine, has demonstrated excellent biological activity and potential therapeutic effects against Alzheimer's disease (AD). The researchers presented the effects, but the research evidence for the mechanism was incomplete. The main claims were only partially supported.

eLife assessment

This study presents a fundamental finding on how levels of m6A levels are controlled, invoking a consolidated model where degradation of modified RNAs in the cytoplasm plays a primary role in shaping m6A patterns and dynamics, rather than needing active regulation by m6A erasers and other related processes. The evidence is compelling and uses transcriptome-wide data and mechanistic modeling. However, it is possible that m6A-erasers will have roles in specific developmental contexts or conditions, so this model may not apply universally.

eLife assessment

In this fundamental study, the authors describe a new data processing pipeline that can be used to discover causal interactions from time-lapse imaging data. The utility of this pipeline was convincingly illustrated using tumor-on-chip ecosystem data. The newly developed pipeline could be used to better understand cell-cell interactions and could also be applied to perform temporal causal discovery in other areas of science, meaning this work could potentially have a wide range of applications.

eLife assessment

This important study shows a significant role for Mushashi-2 (Msi2) in lung adenocarcinoma. The authors provided solid data that support the requirement for Msi2 in tumor growth and progression, although the study would have been strengthened by including more patient samples and additional evidence regarding Msi2+ cells being more responsive to transformation. These findings are of interest to both the lung cancer and the RNA binding protein fields.

eLife assessment

This valuable study characterizes the variability in spacing and direction of entorhinal grid cells and shows how this variability can be used to disambiguate locations within an environment. These claims are supported by solid evidence, yet some aspects of the methodology should be clarified. This study will be of interest to neuroscientists working on spatial navigation and, more generally, on neural coding.

eLife assessment

This important study combines genetic analysis, biochemistry, and structural modeling to reveal new insights into how changes in protein-protein structure activate signal transduction as part of the bacterial general stress response. The data, collected using validated and standard methods, and the interpretations are solid, although additional experimental structural evidence would strengthen the proposed model and its potential application to other systems. This manuscript, which provides multiple avenues for follow-up studies, will be of broad interest to microbiologists, structural biologists, and cell biologists.

eLife assessment

Recent studies have demonstrated that depletion of nuclear TDP-43 leads to loss of its nuclear function resulting in changes in gene expression and splicing of target mRNAs. This study developed a sensitive and robust sensor for TDP-43 activity that should impact the field's ability to monitor whether TDP-43 is functional or not. Though limited to cell culture, the evidence presented is convincing and is the first demonstration that a GFP on/off system can be used to assess TDP-43 mutants as well as loss of soluble TDP-43. The findings are valuable and may represent a novel tool to investigate TDP-43-associated disease mechanisms.

eLife assessment

The authors present a valuable study exploring the interaction between JNK signaling and high sucrose feeding. The strength of evidence supporting these observations is solid, including multi-tissue transcriptomic and metabolic analyses, followed by network modeling approaches to define the organs and pathways involved. Reviewers provided several suggestions to improve the manuscript including clarifications of model and analyses, as well as explanations for within-group variations and confirming RNA-seq results at the level of metabolite processes highlighted.

eLife Assessment

This manuscript presents a valuable new quantitative crosslinking mass spectrometry approach using novel isobaric crosslinkers. The data are solid and the method has potential for a broad application in structural biology if more isobaric crosslinking channels are available and the quantitative information of the approach is exploited in more depth.

eLife assessment

This study provides potentially highly valuable new insight into the role of Fgf signalling in SUFU mutation-linked cerebellar tumors and indicates novel therapeutic interventions via inhibition of Fgf signalling. The evidence supporting the major claims, however, is at this point currently incomplete. A more robust analysis of gene expression patterns and deeper mechanistic insight would significantly enhance this study, which could have wide-ranging implications for the treatment of specific cerebellar tumors.

eLife assessment

This valuable study investigates the immune system's role in pre-eclampsia. The authors map the immune cell landscape of the human placenta and find an increase in macrophages and Th17 cells in patients with pre-eclampsia. Following mouse studies, the authors suggest that the IGF1-IGF1R pathway might play a role in how macrophages influence T cells, potentially driving the pathology of pre-eclampsia. There is solid evidence in this study that will be of interest to immunologists and developmental biologists, however, some of the conclusions require additional detail and/or more appropriate statistical tests.

eLife assessment

This important work advances our understanding of how mechanical forces transmitted by blood flow contribute to cardiac development by identifying id2b as a flow-responsive factor that is required for valve development and calcium-mediated cardiac contractility and its downstream mechanism of action. However, the evidence supporting the conclusions is incomplete and would benefit from more rigorous approaches. With additional support of the main conclusions, the work will be of interest to those working on developmental biology, heart development, and congenital heart disease.

eLife assessment

This important study offers a powerful empirical test of a highly influential hypothesis in population genetics. It incorporates a large number of animal genomes spanning a broad phylogenetic spectrum and treats them in a rigorous unified pipeline, providing the convincing negative result that effective population size scales neither with the content of transposable elements nor with overall genome size. These observations demonstrate that there is still no simple, global hypothesis that can explain the observed variation in transposable element content and genome size in animals.

eLife assessment

This study presents valuable findings with practical and theoretical implications for drug discovery, particularly in the context of repurposing CIP for the treatment of Babesia spp. The evidence is convincing overall, as the data and analyses support the main claims. However, a few assertions are only partially substantiated. If the authors can strengthen these areas with additional evidence, the paper could attract greater interest from scientists in drug discovery, computational biology, and microbiology.

eLife assessment

Zhou et al. introduce cascading neural activations, known as 'replay', into a context-maintenance and retrieval model (CMR) that has been previously used to capture a range of memory phenomena. The proposed 'CMR-replay' model outperforms its CMR predecessor in a compelling way, and thus, the work makes important strides towards understanding the empirical memory literature as well as some of the cognitive functions of replay. Notable limitations include the scope of the model with respect to established aspects of memory consolidation, such as the stages and physiology of sleep, and the lack of integration with highly relevant associative and deep learning theories.

eLife assessment

This useful study provides data suggesting that subcellular localization of the spatial regulator of cell division, MinD, is an intrinsic feature of the protein's ability to associate with the membrane as both a dimer and a monomer. These findings distinguish the behavior of MinD in B. subtilis from its counterpart in E. coli and suggest that there is not a need to invoke additional localization factors. However, all three reviewers agreed that the study is incomplete: experimentally, quantitation and assessment of MinD behavior in the presence of proteins previously implicated in its localization are missing, among other assays, and the molecular modeling necessary to support the authors' conclusion that their data support a reaction-diffusion model is completely absent. Finally, the manuscript itself is difficult to read with an overly long discussion and disorganized introduction and results sections, and it will require significant revision.

eLife assessment

This important study provides solid mechanistic and modeling data suggesting that the polar localization of MinCD in Bacillus subtilis is largely due to differences in diffusion rates between monomeric and dimeric MinD. This finding is exciting as it negates the necessity for a third, localization determinant, in this system as has been previously proposed. The work is generally strong but is incomplete without some additional quantitative analysis, as well as clarification of the underlying assumptions and details used for the modeling experiments.