Evaluated articles

eLife assessment

This important study advances our understanding of how distinct types of communication signals differentially affect mouse behaviors and amygdala cholinergic/dopaminergic neuromodulation. The evidence supporting the authors' claims is solid. Researchers interested in the complex interaction between prior experience, sex, behavior, hormonal status, and neuromodulation should benefit from this study.

eLife assessment

This study provides an important tool for predicting binding between immune cells receptors and antigens based on protein sequence data. The analysis convincingly showed the tool's effectiveness in both supervised TCR binding prediction and unsupervised clustering, surpassing existing methods in accuracy and reducing annotation costs. This study will be of interest to immunologists and computational biologists.

eLife assessment

In Drosophila melanogaster, the SOCE channel Orai is required for the development of flight promoting dopaminergic neurons. The Hasan laboratory has previously shown that disabling Orai function impairs Drosophila flight due to aberrant neuronal development at the pupal stage. In this fundamental study, Mitra et al show that SOCE drives a transcriptional feedback loop via the homeobox transcription factor, 'Trithorax-like' (Trl), and histone modifiers, Set2 and E(z), to regulate the expression of key genes required for the function of dopaminergic flight neurons, including the muscarinic acetylcholine receptor and the inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate receptor. This solid study is carefully performed with validated methodology and most of the analyses are rigorous.

eLife assessment

This manuscript supports the intriguing idea that some aspects of novel learning can occur during sleep and outside of awareness. The authors provide solid evidence that presenting participants with novel words and their translations during sleep, especially during slow oscillation troughs, leads to the ability to categorize the semantic meaning of those words during awake testing 36 hours later. These findings represent a valuable contribution to the literature on unconscious processing and learning during sleep, although the claim that the results reflect episodic memory formation, in particular, deviates from the typical use of this term in the literature.

eLife assessment

In this manuscript, Chakraborty et al address the role of IP3R1 in regulating store-operated calcium entry in neurons and neural progenitors. Long-standing observations in non-neuronal cells have shown that IP3Rs are not required for SOCE. In contrast to those findings, this manuscript determines that in neuronal cells, knockdown of IP3R1 suppresses SOCE by disrupting ER-plasma membrane contact sites. The paper supports a novel role for IP3R1 as a tether in promoting membrane contact sites which would have broad implications for a range of physiological processes including SOCE and lipid metabolism.

eLife assessment

This study reports valuable behavioral and computational observations regarding how passive exposure to auditory stimuli can facilitate auditory categorization. The combination of behavioral results in mice with a study of artificial neural network models provides solid evidence for the authors' conclusions. This paper will likely be of broad interest to the general neuroscience community.

eLife assessment

This is an important study on the role of the Ras/MEK/Erk signaling cascade in brain development, with both theoretical and practical implications in multiple fields. The authors reveal functional redundancy and shared function for Erk1 and Erk2 in determining medial ganglionic eminence derived glial number, and exclude a role for Erk1 and Erk2 in the regulation of GABAergic neuron number or initial specification of GABAergic identity. They combine multiple methods including Ribotags, electrophysiology, and chemogenetic stimulation using DREADDs towards comprehensive conclusions. Reviewers expressed concerns about the coherence of the findings, and about the selection of controls mouse lines. Heterozygous ERK1/2 mice are used as 'het controls' throughout the manuscript, however, reviewers felt that there was not sufficient evidence that ERK levels in heterozygous mice are similar to wildtype mice. Nevertheless, these compelling findings will be of interest to a broad readership, and especially readers interested in kinase function and neurodevelopmental syndromes.

eLife assessment

This detailed and well powered manuscript explores auditory perception of modulated noise in the presence of transcranial alternating-current stimulation (tACS) and shows valuable results suggesting that there are subject-specific effects when the phase of 2-Hz tACS varies relative to the phase of the noise modulation. The strength of the evidence is mixed. There is convincing evidence that tACS alters perception significantly in individuals; however, the effects are inconsistent across subjects and even across sessions, frustrating attempts to draw conclusions about the underlying mechanisms of the idiosyncratic effects. Despite these limitations, the paper will be of great interest to researchers interested in determining when and how tACS influences neural processes, especially those interested in neural entrainment and its relationship to perception.

eLife assessment

fMRI was used to address an important aspect of human cognition - the capacity for structured representations and symbolic processing - in a cross-species comparison with macaques; the experimental design probed implicit symbolic processing through reversal of learned stimulus pairs. The authors present solid evidence in humans that helps elucidate the role of brain networks in symbolic processing, however the evidence from macaques was necessarily incomplete (e.g., hard-to-quantify differences in learning trajectories and lived experience between species).

eLife assessment

The manuscript by Bull et al provides valuable information on the relationship between metabolic features, in particular different lipoproteins and fatty acids, and colorectal cancer. They use solid methods and combine different data sources to analyze forward and reverse Mendelian Randomizations that support their claims.

eLife assessment

This valuable study identifies an Ephrin type-B Receptor 2 (EPHB2) interactor, MYCBP2, as a potential regulator of EPHB2 stability and function. In contrast to expectations, based on MYCBP2 function in the ubiquitin pathway, loss of function of MYCBP2 resulted in less EPHB2 receptor and defective EPHB2 function. The paper is supported by a largely convincing set of biochemical, cell culture and in vivo experiments.

eLife assessment

This valuable study aims to identify pioneer transcription factors, which are defined as transcription factors that compete with nucleosomes for DNA binding. The authors provide methods for identifying pioneer transcription factors on a cell type basis, using nucleosome positioning and motif information across different cell lines. The evidence to support the claims is largely solid. This work will be of interest to computational and molecular biologists working on transcription factors.

eLife assessment

This important study combines in vitro experiments with simulations to identify the mechanisms governing modulation of microtubule dynamics by GTP hydrolysis. The authors introduce a convincing new approach by using a mixed GDP/GMPCPP lattice and varying GDP concentration to reveal that the nucleotide at the interface of two tubulin dimers determines the strength of the interaction between two dimers. Overall, the findings will be of interest to biophysicists and cell biologists, especially in the field of microtubule biology.

eLife assessment

The study presents patterns of cancer care disruption in southern Illinois and eastern Missouri in the summer of 2020. Survey results show factors that impact cancer care during the COVID-19 pandemic, including group differences by race. The important findings provide solid evidence about variation in cancer care disruptions and opportunities to improve return to care.

eLife assessment

This valuable work presents new results to characterize the relationship between electrical excitation and torque generation in stick insect joints. The evidence supporting this work is a series of torque-voltage measurements across individuals. The strength of evidence is solid in supporting the outcomes, but some details of the methodology, which could potentially shed light on the sources of this variation, are missing.

eLife assessment

This study presents a valuable finding on the combination treatment of ONC201/TIC10 with everolimus for metastatic ER+ breast cancer. The evidence supporting the claims of the authors is solid. The work will be of interest to medical biologists working on breast cancer.

eLife assessment

This study demonstrates an important method that drastically improves the precision of ultrasound localization in interacting mice. The authors present convincing evidence of the usefulness of the method for quantifying vocal behavior in various situations and demonstrate an interesting vocal dominance phenomenon between males. This tool will be of great interest to all scientists interested in vocal behavior in small animals.

eLife assessment

This important study reports selective CDKL5 inhibitors that may be of high interest to investigate the role of this kinase in disease (particularly, in CDKL5 deficiency disorder) and to address unsolved issues of inconsistency in the phenotypic characterization of CDKL5-deficient knockout mice. The evidence supporting the conclusions is convincing, with rigorous biochemical, in vitro and ex vivo assays. The work will be of interest to cell and medical biologists and epileptologists working in the fields of epilepsy and neural excitation.

eLife assessment

This study presents a valuable finding on the optimal prioritization in different malaria transmission settings for the distribution of insecticide-treated nets to reduce the malaria burden. The evidence supporting the claims of the authors is solid. The work will be of interest from a global funder perspective, though somewhat less relevant for individual countries.

eLife assessment

This is important work analyzing the trial-by-trial progression of learning, and how the outcome of one trial influences cortex-wide neural responses on the next trial. However, the evidence for the central claims is incomplete because the potential confounds of slow hemodynamic effects and behavioral changes induced by the previous trial were not adequately addressed.