Evaluated articles

eLife assessment

This manuscript investigates how the fly visual system can encode specific features in the presence of self-generated motion. Using volumetric imaging, it explores the encoding of visual features in population activity in the Drosophila visual glomeruli - a set of visual "feature detectors". Through an elegant combination of neural imaging, visual stimulus manipulations, and behavioral analysis, it demonstrates that two different mechanisms, one based on motor signals and one based on visual input, serve to suppress local features during movements that would corrupt these features. The results of this study open up future directions to determine how motor and visual signals are integrated into visual processing at the level of neural circuits.

eLife assessment

This work offers fundamental insights into how asymmetric behavioral features in optokinetic eye movements can be predicted from visual responses of direction-selective neurons in the retina. The electrophysiological experiments and model-based analyses are carefully performed and offer convincing conclusions. The presentation could improve in clarity for a stronger focus on the most important results.

eLife assessment

Organoids mimic the architecture and function of their cognate organs and have potential as replacements for animal models. Here the authors generated canine organoids from multiple adult tissues, including endometrium, lung, and pancreas, in addition to previously generated organoids from the kidney, bladder, and liver. However more methodological detail and functional characterization are required before this toolbox can be optimally utilized by wider scientific community.

eLife assessment

This manuscript constitutes an important foray into the conformational rearrangements throughout various domains of the notoriously difficult-to-study P2X7 receptor, with a focus on the enigmatic intracellular 'ballast' domain. This is of broad interest to those studying the role of enzymatically active intracellular domains of membrane proteins. The authors provide convincing evidence that the ballast domain is unlikely to undergo major conformational changes upon ATP-induced gating, but additional experimental support is required on the facilitation process and to elucidate the consequences exerted by intracellular factors.

eLife assessment

This study investigates factors that control egg size plasticity in a social insect, the honey bee Apis mellifera. It finds that honey bee queens vary egg size in response to size of their colony, and that the gene Rho1 is involved in egg-size determination. These findings inform our understanding of maternal control over egg size, a key form of maternal investment. The work is relevant to colleagues studying reproduction and social insects.

eLife assessment

This manuscript reports the results of an observational study in 312 cancer patients to assess post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC). Their descriptive results provide details on the type of persistent symptoms as well as their frequency among cancer patients. This is valuable information to inform clinical policies regarding disease management in cancer patients.

eLife assessment

The premise behind this manuscript is important and timely for muscle biologists and for stem cell biologists. The identification of heterogenous distribution of factors across the myofiber is an important contribution for dissecting how muscle stem cell diversity in a tissue is achieved. However, the mechanism of action proposed by the authors will require additional experimental support.

eLife assessment

This study provides empirical support for how brain function at the system level, particularly network segregation, influences cognitive abilities even in the oldest-old range of human aging. The findings are potentially interesting to understand successful aging.

eLife assessment

This manuscript provides insights into the architecture of the yeast histone acetyltransferase complex NuA4 and is of broad interest to those studying transcription and chromatin modification. The cryo-EM data are of very high quality, and enable the authors to devise a structural model that is in much better agreement with biochemical data than previously reported models. This structure represents an important puzzle piece towards a molecular understanding of chromatin modification.

eLife assessment

This study connects changes in single-cell twitching motility due to substrate stiffness to multicellular phenotypes. It is likely to have a broad impact on those studying microbiology and multicellular communities as it assesses the influence of single-cell behavior on multicellular processes. However, some of the presented data conflict with previously published literature, raising questions about the nature of these differences.

eLife assessment

This paper will be of broad interest to anyone aiming to understand the neural basis of human touch perception. This is an important paper that provides compelling evidence for peripheral tactile encoding of orientation that reflects perceptual capabilities, by using a wide range of stimulus conditions. The results will be valuable to inform both future experiments and computational investigations into the neural representation and processing of small tactile spatial features at the edge of perceptual resolvability and on the emergence of invariant representations in touch more generally.

eLife assessment

This work makes an important contribution to the study of the cell cycle and inferring mechanisms by studying correlations in division timing between single cells. By treating the problem in a general way and computing over lineage trees, the authors can infer timescales in the underlying mechanism. This approach is able to detect a general role of circadian rhythms in cell cycle control. The method is validated on data sets from bacterial and mammalian cells and can suggest when additional measurements are needed to distinguish competing models. This paper is of broad interest to scientists in the fields of cell growth, cell division, and cell-cycle control.

eLife assessment

This manuscript will be of interest to those working on non-neuronal bioelectricity, particular synthetic biologists and bioengineers. The primary contribution is the ability to leverage engineered gene circuits to control cellular membrane potential. We find issue, however, with the presentation of the data in this work as electrical communication since the synchronous behavior largely arises from external chemical stimuli.

eLife assessment

When sensory inputs, such as vision or sound, are chronically disabled, the loss of input activity is counterbalanced by the upregulation of synaptic activity. In this study, the authors provide evidence that instead of synapses that directly represent the sensory information, synapses that show correlated intrinsic network activity are the ones that undergo the change upon sensory deprivation. This fundamental and important paper will be useful to readers in the fields of experience-dependent plasticity, sensory cortical coding, and homeostatic plasticity. While the key claims of the manuscript are well supported by the data, minor changes are suggested for clarification, including the fact that the present study has addressed homeostatic responses in adult animals rather than in juvenile animals with which homeostatic plasticity has been actively studied to date.

eLife assessment

The manuscript by Wardwell-Ozgo and co-authors describes a thorough and interesting study that explores the mechanisms through which a hormone receptor can both repress and activate gene transcription. They have conducted an impressive number of experiments all aimed at showing that by using their new transgenic tool, and Ecdysone Receptor (EcR) ligand binding domain sponge, they can demonstrate that EcR activity is important for eliciting both types of ecdysone responses, repression, and activation, in the Drosophila wing disc and that the EcR binding partner Smarter is essential for the repressive function. The differences in expression levels have however not been quantified, which would lend greater support to their claims.

eLife assessment

This manuscript is of interest to researchers investigating genetic mechanisms of aging and transcriptional regulation of developmental processes in mesenchyme-derived tissues. In this study, fibroblast cell lines from patients with and without Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria were compared to pinpoint the molecular mechanisms leading to the phenotypes of persons with this condition. The identification of five major dysregulated functional hubs in fibroblast cell lines derived from Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome (HGPS) patients provides a unique opportunity for others working on this disorder to utilize animal models to validate the authors' hypotheses.

eLife assessment

The authors show that the amino terminus of dystroglycan is required for the production of full-length matriglycan, and in its absence, a shorter matriglycan is produced that is still capable of binding laminin. alpha-DGN deficient mice have abnormal neuromuscular synapses and reduced lengthening contraction-induced force. Overall, the well-controlled and convincing data mostly support the main conclusions, which will be of interest to scientists in membrane biology, muscle biology, and glycobiology.

eLife assessment

This paper will be of interest to scientists studying species-specific immune responses and those studying how transposable elements rewire transcriptional regulatory networks. The work describes a new class of TEs that may act as enhancers of immune genes in mice. A combination of computational and experimental data supports most but not all conclusions in the paper.

eLife assessment

This article is a valuable contribution to the field of neuroimaging. The paper proposes a deep neural network for brain extraction that generalises across domains, including species, scanners, and MRI sequences. Although in some sense brain extraction is not a challenging problem for deep learning, domain generalisation can be. The authors provide solid evidence that their approach works though it may need to be precisely matched to the training data.

eLife assessment

This paper is of interest to cell biologists studying the mechanisms and control of microtubule nucleation. In this work, the authors use a novel protocol for the purification of gamma-TuRCs and for the production of gamma-TuNA that enables them to demonstrate a clear activating effect of gamma-TuNA on microtubule nucleation that depends on the dimerization of gamma-TuNA protein chains.