Evaluated articles

eLife Assessment

This study presents compelling new data that combine two FTD-tau mutations, P301L/S320F (PL-SF), that reliably induce spontaneous full-length tau aggregation across multiple cellular systems. The findings are important for the field of neurodegenerative disease. The strength of evidence is solid; however, several conclusions would benefit from more validation.

eLife Assessment

By investigating spine nanostructure and dynamics across multiple genetic mouse models for neurodevelopmental disorders, this important study has the potential to uncover convergent or divergent synaptic phenotypes that may be specifically associated with autism versus schizophrenia risk. While the imaging and breadth are impressive, there are potential methodological concerns, especially around statistical analyses, which render the evidence incomplete and should be addressed. The purely in vitro nature of the study also slightly limits the generalisability of the findings.

eLife Assessment

This useful study provides a systematic and solid comparison of sex-biased enteroendocrine peptide expression, including AstC and Tk, to show that these peptides contribute to female-biased fat storage. The major research question of this study is based on the authors' previous papers, and therefore, the presented results are incremental. This study serves as a foundation for future investigation of regulatory mechanisms for the sex-biased fat content by AstC and Tk.

eLife Assessment

In this important manuscript, the authors establish a vertebrate model for studying the development of circuits that control heart rate. This contribution uses a combination of experimental techniques to provide compelling information for scientists looking to understand how heart rate regulation emerges during development.

eLife Assessment

This study provides a valuable advance in understanding how decision boundaries may change over time during simple choices by introducing a method that uses information about non-decision components to improve parameter estimates. The evidence supporting the main claims is convincing, with clear demonstrations on simulated and real data, although additional model comparison work would further strengthen confidence. The findings will be of interest to researchers studying human decision processes and the methods used to analyse them.

eLife Assessment

This important study provides a detailed analysis of the transcriptional landscape of the mouse hippocampus in the context of various physiological states. The main conclusions have solid support: that most transcriptional targets are generally stable, with notable exceptions in the dentate gyrus and with regard to circadian changes. There are some weaknesses and it would improve the manuscript to address them.

eLife Assessment

This study presents a valuable and practical approach for one-photon imaging through GRIN lenses. By scanning a low numerical aperture (NA) beam and collecting fluorescence with a high NA, the method expands the usable field of view and yields clearer cellular signals. The evidence is solid overall, with strong qualitative demonstrations, but some claims would benefit from additional quantitative tests. The work will interest researchers who need simple, scalable tools for large‑area cellular imaging in the brain.

eLife Assessment

This paper presents an important advance in genetically encoded voltage imaging of the developing zebrafish spinal cord in vivo, capturing voltage dynamics in neuronal populations, single cells, and subcellular compartments inaccessible to patch clamp, and diverse spike waveforms and subthreshold voltage dynamics inaccessible to calcium imaging. The work identifies a developmental progression from irregular voltage fluctuations to coordinated contralateral and ipsilateral activity, providing insight into how electrical dynamics and cellular morphology evolve during circuit formation. The strength of evidence is solid, with imaging data supporting the main conclusions, although the manuscript would be strengthened by more complete methodological documentation and clearer context relative to earlier calcium imaging studies. Overall, this study provides a resource that is of importance for researchers investigating neural development and circuit assembly, illustrating the value of voltage imaging as a general tool for probing bioelectric mechanisms in morphogenesis and circuit development.

eLife Assessment

This study provides important evidence that myristate, a fatty acid commonly present in soil environments, is taken up by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi during symbiosis with a plant host. The evidence presented is solid, with multiple experimental approaches including stable isotope tracing, transcriptional analysis, and physiological measurements across different plant species and phosphorus conditions. However, the main claims are only partially supported.

eLife Assessment

Ge et al here report a structural study of the native tripartite multidrug efflux pump complexes from Escherichia coli that identifies a novel accessory subunit, YbjP, the structure of the native TolC-YbjP-AcrABZ complex, as well as structures of the AcrB protein in L, T, and O conformations. The strength of the structural data is compelling, and the importance of the findings is potentially fundamental. However, additional analysis and comparison with pre-existing data would help to put the obtained data and its impact in the proper context, and the inclusion of functional data would help to substantiate some claims that are currently incompletely supported.

eLife Assessment

This important study identifies PRRT2 as an auxiliary regulator of Nav channel slow inactivation, proposing that PRRT2 facilitates entry into, and delays recovery from, the slow-inactivated state. The evidence provided is compelling and well executed, though the work would be bolstered by additional studies of Nav1.6, as well as structural studies to directly investigate the molecular basis of gating modulation. Overall, this study will be of interest to ion channel biophysicists and neurophysiologists, particularly those studying channelopathies.

eLife Assessment

This important study fills a major geographic and temporal gap in understanding Paleocene mammal evolution in Asia and proposes an intriguing "brawn before bite" hypothesis grounded in diverse analytical approaches. However, the findings are incomplete because limitations in sampling design - such as the use of worn or damaged teeth, the pooling of different tooth positions, and the lack of independence among teeth from the same individuals - introduce uncertainties that weaken support for the reported disparity patterns. The taxonomic focus on predominantly herbivorous clades also narrows the ecological scope of the results. Clarifying methodological choices, expanding the ecological context, and tempering evolutionary interpretations would substantially strengthen the study.

eLife Assessment

This fundamental study provides compelling evidence for the functional segregation of the sensorimotor cortex into precisely delineated areas, and highlights a rapid transition in functional properties at the boundaries between these areas. This result further confirms and extends recent work on the diversity of neural response specificities across cortical areas in the context of complex behavioral tasks. This work will be of interest to neuroscientists studying sensory-motor functions.

eLife Assessment

This study presents a valuable advance in reconstructing naturalistic speech from intracranial ECoG data using a dual-pathway model. The evidence supporting the claims of the authors is solid, although the rationale for employing a smaller language model rather than a large language model (LLM) should be further clarified. This work will be of interest to cognitive neuroscientists and computer scientists/engineers working on speech reconstruction from neural data.

eLife Assessment

This work provides a fundamental molecular mechanism of how a single enzyme can coordinate the ordered assembly of hyaluronan, a complex polysaccharide, from two different building blocks in an alternating pattern. The authors present compelling evidence by combining high-resolution structural data with rigorous biochemical validation to define the underlying process. Major strengths of the study include the clarity and coherence of the mechanistic insights and the complementary use of structural and functional approaches to address the research question.

eLife Assessment

The authors present evidence for a WIPI2-Retriever complex (termed CROP2) that couples cargo selection to carrier fission at endosomes. CROP2 appears to function analogously to the previously described CROP1 complex, formed by WIPI1 and Retromer, with which it shares structural similarities. They provide convincing evidence that CROP1 and CROP2 regulate the trafficking of distinct subsets of cargoes; however, the cellular evidence for the existence of these distinct complexes remains incomplete. Overall, the findings are important and expand our understanding of how cargo selection by Retriever and Retromer is orchestrated at endosomes.

eLife Assessment

This study reports a valuable method to predict the capacity of a candidate probiotic bacterium to metabolically outcompete a bacterial pathogen in the ecological niche of the murine respiratory tract (niche exclusion) based on the overlap of used carbon sources in vitro. The in vivo confirmation of the in vitro/in silico predicted efficacy is, at this stage, incomplete and would require more persuasive experimental evidence for the elimination of alternative mechanisms of action.

eLife Assessment

This paper describes a useful Bayesian model to estimate the probabilities of access, use, and use given access of insecticide-treated bed nets (ITNs), by using sub-national cross-sectional survey data and the annual number of ITNs received at the country level. The authors provide convincing evidence to support their modeling approach, which could be enhanced by more validation and exploration of model assumptions.

eLife Assessment

The authors provide a useful integrated analytical approach to investigating MASLD focused on diverse multiomic integration methods. The strength of evidence for this new resource is solid, as analyses highlight the importance of previously-described pathophysiologic processes, as well as unveil several new mechanisms as key features of MASLD in obese patients.

eLife Assessment

The study presents convincing quantitative evidence, supported by appropriate negative controls, for the presence of low-abundance glycine receptors (GlyRs) within inhibitory synapses in telencephalic regions of the mouse brain. Using sensitive single-molecule localization microscopy of endogenously tagged GlyRs, the authors reveal previously undetected populations of these receptors. Although the functional significance of these low-abundance GlyRs remains to be established, the findings offer valuable insights and methodologies that will be of interest to neuroscientists studying inhibitory synapse biology.

[Editors' note: this paper was reviewed by Review Commons.]