Evaluated articles

Evaluation Summary:

The manuscript provides novel data to support the role of CNP (C Type Natriuretic peptide) in the proliferation and stimulation of growth plate chondrocytes for development of bone. The methods used are innovative and the data provided support the overall hypothesis of the study presented in the paper, which should be of broad interest to bone and cartilage biologists.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1 and Reviewer #2 agreed to share their names with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

This paper addresses the mechanisms regulating cytoskeletal changes mediating neuronal branching and axon growth. The authors assess the role of the scaffolding protein giant ankyrin B in cortical neuron differentiation and present strong data implicating ankyrin B functions with the cell adhesion molecule/Sema3A receptor complex and an actin severing protein. With a better explanation of the function of ankyrin B in the Sema3A signaling pathway, this manuscript will be of interest to cell biologists and developmental neurobiologists working to uncover the biological mechanisms of early circuit development, and how these mechanisms relate to autism spectrum disorders.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

Feedforward inhibition (FFI) typically exerts a powerful effect shaping neural activity. In this paper, Suzuki et al use a combination of in vivo and in vitro experiments to characterize, for the first time, responses in the two main classes of FFIs in the mouse olfactory cortex, neurogliaform cells (NG) and horizontal cells (HZ). They find that these two cell types have different responses and different connectivity, which partially explains their different responses. This paper also helps resolve a previously perplexing result from a recent high-profile publication that claimed that FFI in the mouse olfactory cortex appears to play a negligible role in shaping cortical odor responses, presumably because those authors were only recording from HZ cells.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #3 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

Transient Receptor Potential (TRP) cation channels, related to voltage-gated channels, appeared before plants and animals diverged in evolution and expanded in vertebrates into seven major subfamilies and took multiple essential physiological functions encoding chemical and physical information into electrical signals. In this manuscript, Deny Cabezas-Bratesco and co-workers draw from multiple sequence alignments and available structural information to identify highly conserved features in the transmembrane domains across several major TRP subfamilies in vertebrate and invertebrate animals and even in unicellular organisms. By systematically analyzing their findings, the authors propose a structural framework hinting at common mechanisms utilized by TRP channels to integrate stimuli into electric signals, which has major implications for a wide range of biological processes where TRP channels play a role.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

The manuscript by Hoehn et al use a novel approach to quantify the somatic evolution in B cells. It brings together existing datasets to investigate the evidence for detectable evolution across longitudinal samples of BCR repertoires. This work provides significant new insight into which stimuli induce effective immune responses, and has the potential to improve vaccine design. Notably, these results are of interest for characterizing B cell responses, especially to vaccinations that induce a poor immune response, such as influenza.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. The reviewers remained anonymous to the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

Zhang and colleagues have conduced extensive multi-omic data analyses and functional assays, aiming to identify novel risk variants and to then explore the potential mechanisms with which the identified variants mediate risk of systemic lupus erythematosus. The findings could advance the understanding of the genetic susceptibility and biology of systemic lupus erythematosus.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. The reviewers remained anonymous to the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

This manuscript will be of interest to those studying the neuroscience of movement, as it addresses a fundamental aspect of movement: motoneuron recruitment. The authors provide a comprehensive analysis of motoneuron intrinsic properties that mature in the early post-natal period in mice and may lead to differentiation into "slow" and "fast" phenotypes. The authors argue that these properties, studied in spinal cord slices, contribute to motoneuron recruitment. While the study provides insights on the maturation of electrophysiological properties in motoneuron subtypes, the claims related to ionic mechanisms involved in orderly recruitment require further justification.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1 and Reviewer #2 agreed to share their names with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

This study elucidates the molecular mechanisms whereby Gastrodia elata Blume confers neuroprotection in G2019S-induced PD models and provides a potential therapeutic treatment for PD patients. The experiments are very well designed; the images are of high-quality and convincing. The conclusions are well supported by multiple of lines of genetic and biochemical evidence. This is an important and innovative study.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #2 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

This study examines the degree to which idiosyncrasies in visual object representations (beyond just image-driven objective representations) exist in visual areas of the brain. The authors report that later stages of the visual processing stream (specifically involving the perirhinal cortex and parts of the entorhinal cortex) do show these idiosyncratic representations, and for all levels of similarity (even for distinguishing very highly similar stimuli). These findings are interesting to vision scientists working to understand the role of different regions within the visual processing stream and to memory scientists interested in how this visual input is transformed in medial temporal lobe regions.

This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #2 agreed to share their name with the authors.

Evaluation Summary:

This manuscript reports high-resolution crystallographic structures of the L,D, transpeptidase from Mycobacterium tuberculosis. These structures were obtained with ligands (a sugar molecule and a beta-lactam). A surprising finding is that the enzyme contains a ligand-binding site located greater than 20 Å away from the catalytic site. The authors propose and provide some evidence for an allosteric role of the new ligand site (S-pocket), which would be significant because it could allow new ways of targeting the protein for inhibition. While enthusiasm is high for the discovery of a putative allosteric site, more rigorous computation is necessary, along with some biochemical investigations and mutagenesis studies to rule out the possibility of a different role for the S-site. Moreover, a better articulation of the connection/crosstalk between the two sites in the form of a mechanistic hypothesis would strengthen the paper.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

This manuscript is of broad interest for the neuroscience and imaging community. The authors employ an array of advanced imaging techniques to bridge the understanding of neuronal function in whole organisms to the sub-cellular physiology of specific neuronal types. The microscopical observations, combined with system perturbations strongly support the claims.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1 and Reviewer #2 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

This paper will be of interest to researchers in the fields of biomechanics, movement control, and decision making. It presents a novel mechanistic model of metabolic cost that includes a cost for rate of muscle force production explains metabolic cost better than current models. They next demonstrate how this metabolic model can improve our understanding of movement control by revealing an energetic basis for smooth movements.

This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #2 agreed to share their name with the authors.

Evaluation Summary:

The study proposes a new evolutionary-ecological scenario for Late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic beetles, supported by the summary of all available knowledge about early beetle fossils, including analyses of their taxon and morphological diversity and phylogenetic relationships. The effects of xylophagous beetles during the Paleozoic may have played a fundamental role in global biochemical cycles. The results advance our understanding of the evolutionary success of beetles and the many ways in which large environmental changes may affect biodiversity in general.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #2 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

This paper is of potential interest to cognitive neuroscientists seeking to understand commonalities and differences in the neural basis of instructed and experiential reversal learning in the context of human pain. The authors report that learning from instructions versus experience leads to differences in the behavioral ratings of and the neural responses to noxious stimuli. The innovative experimental design and analyses in this study offer new perspectives on using neuro-computational models for understanding how explicitly informed vs experientially acquired information influences learning about cues predicting painful stimuli.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #3 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

This study aims to find the genetic mechanisms underlying sex-ratio distortion through male-killing in Drosophila melanogaster flies infected with the endosymbiont Wolbachia. The endosymbiont carries the prophage WO, which is in the center of interested in this study. The key result of this study is that a synonymous mutation in a prophage gene can explain the differences between sex-ratio distorting and not distorting symbionts.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. The reviewers remained anonymous to the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

The manuscript by Mast et al. describes an impressive collection of new nanobodies against SARS-CoV-2 spike, which probably provides the most complete coverage of the accessible epitopes of spike to date. The authors thoroughly characterize biophysical and functional properties of the nanobodies and set an example of how to best combine multiple nanobodies to target a pathogen. As the latest in a long series of SARS-CoV-2 nanobody papers, this study stands out for its completeness, although it does not provide a novel mechanism of action or biological insights.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

This paper is of broad interest to biologists and oncologists who study tumour evolution. The study provides new insights into the propagation of a transmissible cancer in clams. Remarkably, based on the analysis of mitochondrial DNA, the transmissible cancer seems to have jumped species. The findings reported have implications to understand the conditions that allow this cancer to spread across huge regions, threatening certain clam species.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1, Reviewer #2 and Reviewer #3 agreed to share their name with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

This work provides direct evidence that PcTx1, a modulator commonly used to study acid-sensing ion channels, induces a conformational change that persists long after an effect on the channel activity has dissipated. The data support this central claim of the paper and invite future investigation of the precise mechanism. The work is of general interest to those studying ion channel biophysics and pharmacology and is a fine example of the power of combined functional and fluorescence measurements.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #1 and Reviewer #2 agreed to share their names with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

Endosome maturation in animal cells has been challenging to characterize by microscopy because the fluorescence patterns are complex and dynamic. This study uses acute ionophore treatment to generate enlarged early endosomes, whose behavior and maturation can then be readily tracked. The results offer new insights into several phenomena, including the regulation of endosomal acidification during the maturation process.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #2 and Reviewer #3 agreed to share their names with the authors.)

Evaluation Summary:

This manuscript provides some clear ideas on the use of next-generation sequencing data to rapidly increase biodiversity inventories and set the basis for future research. The principal objective of this study is to demonstrate how biodiversity information for a hyperdiverse tropical group can be rapidly expanded via targeted field research and large-scale sequencing. The authors use a comprehensive sampling for a tribe of beetles with complicated morphological characters, highlight the existence of multiple undescribed taxa. The database of sequences could set a benchmark for the spatiotemporal evaluation of biodiversity, would support evidence-based conservation planning, and would provide a robust framework for systematic, biogeographic, and evolutionary studies.

(This preprint has been reviewed by eLife. We include the public reviews from the reviewers here; the authors also receive private feedback with suggested changes to the manuscript. Reviewer #2 agreed to share their name with the authors.)