Evaluated articles

eLife Assessment

This important study investigates how distinct honey bee viruses differentially alter flight performance through interactions with octopamine signaling pathways. The combination of behavioral flight assays, pharmacological perturbation, and transcriptomic analyses provides solid evidence that virus-specific effects on flight are associated with octopamine signaling. However, some of the stronger mechanistic conclusions regarding direct regulation of octopamine signaling remain incomplete without more specific validation of receptor-level effects and direct quantification of octopamine levels or signaling activity.

eLife Assessment

In this study, the authors propose a role for the Huntingtin protein in the organization of the Golgi apparatus and examine the effect of polyQ aggregates at the Golgi. The observations are interesting and potentially important for the field; however, the key claim that polyQ HTT functionally disrupts the Golgi (Golgipathy) is incompletely supported by the data.

eLife Assessment

This paper addresses a key question regarding the molecular mechanisms underlying GABA and glutamate release from co-releasing neurons projecting from the entopeduncular nucleus (EPN) to the lateral habenula (LHb) in mice. The authors conclude that the two neurotransmitters are released from separate vesicle pools and rely on distinct molecular machinery; these conclusions contrast with previous functional studies at the same synapse, suggesting that GABA and glutamate are co-packaged within the same vesicles. The study employs useful electrophysiological and imaging approaches, however, a key limitation is the use of Cre lines that also label a purely glutamatergic EPN population projecting to the LHb. This inadequate methodology complicates the interpretation of the data and weakens the central conclusions regarding neurotransmitter co-release mechanisms.

eLife Assessment

This important study investigates the peptide-binding principles of promiscuous chicken MHC molecules. The data from crystallography, mass spectrometry, and modeling are convincing. However, the presentation would benefit from streamlining and clear links between data and conclusions. This paper will be of broad interest to immunologists and those interested in vaccine development.

eLife Assessment

The authors have presented a study which addresses a recognised gap in the literature, the emergence of the neural correlates of cognitive and affective empathy in children; they introduce a task for measuring both positive and negative empathy in a relatively large group of children aged 3-5. The task was combined with functional near-infrared spectroscopy to examine brain regions involved in the task. The findings are interpreted as providing evidence for the earlier emergence of cognitive than affective empathy. The study represents a valuable contribution to understanding the development of cognitive function, but in its current form, the strength of support for the conclusion is incomplete due to limited support for the comparison to the adult literature and a need to more clearly justify the pre-selected brain regions, their links to empathy and the justification of the hypotheses.

eLife Assessment

This is an important study that applies a new chromatin profiling technique to the study of cellular responses to low oxygen. The authors provide convincing evidence for distinct kinetic phases of the response and identify many new putative regulators of the response. This work will be of broad interest to those studying low oxygen responses and transcriptional regulation.

eLife Assessment

This study presents a valuable finding that the Par polarity complex, but not Crumbs or Scrib, regulates morphological remodeling during the naive-to-primed transition of pluripotent stem cells, with later effects on differentiation and neural tube organoid lumen formation. The evidence is incomplete, as the developmental significance of the PAR KO phenotype requires clearer framing and deeper characterization, and the proposed signaling pathway is currently presented more strongly than the data support. The work will be of interest to developmental and stem cell biologists studying polarity, pluripotent-state transitions, epithelialization, and lumen formation.

eLife Assessment

This study presents fundamental results on the presence of the Entner-Doudoroff pathway in cyanobacteria. In contrast to an earlier study, compelling evidence is given that Synechocystis PCC 6803 lacks both an Entner-Doudoroff pathway and a related bypass but contains a promiscuous aldolase. This study successfully reconciles data from different studies and lessons learned from a previous misconception.

eLife Assessment

This important work introduces an integrated open-source platform for behavioral acquisition and pose estimation that substantially improves the accessibility and speed of real-time animal tracking workflows. The evidence supporting the utility and usability of SqueakPose Studio is compelling, particularly the substantial inference speed gains, intuitive graphical interface, flexible pose configuration, and successful testing on independent datasets, although the evidence supporting broader benchmarking claims and the hardware ecosystem surrounding MouseHouse and SqueakView remains somewhat incomplete. The study will be of broad interest to neuroscientists and behavioural researchers seeking scalable and user-friendly approaches for real-time behavioral analysis, and the work would be further strengthened by more rigorous benchmarking, expanded installation and hardware documentation, formal software release practices, and clearer delineation between demonstrated capabilities and future applications.

eLife Assessment

This is a fundamental study that clarifies the cellular mechanism of sound localization in the horizontal plane. The analysis of medial superior olivary neurons provides experimental and computational evidence for a new mechanism in which a range of asymmetric dendritic delays permits individual MSO neurons to represent the full range of biologically relevant ITDs. Using elegant 2-photon guided simultaneous recordings from distal dendrites and soma, along with compartmental modeling on anatomically reconstructed neurons, the authors provide compelling evidence that this mechanism contributes to microsecond-level tuning.

eLife Assessment

This manuscript provides a valuable perspective on microbial community diversity and how this is shaped by the presence of cheaters. The evidence provided is solid, and the methods used to assess the research question are convincing. However, a major weakness is the general framing (or lack of embedding in recent literature), reducing the usefulness of the paper for a broad audience.

eLife Assessment

GPR52 is an orphan receptor implicated in neuropsychiatric disorders, and this study addresses the lack of real-time monitoring tools by developing GPR52-1.0, a genetically encoded fluorescent sensor built on the GRAB platform. The design of the sensor is elegant and the validation is thorough. The authors also utilized the sensor to discover that striatal neuron excitation may activate the sensor, providing exciting new biological insights into GPR52 functional mechanisms. The work could be useful to the field if presented in the correct context, but as it stands, the work remains incomplete as it overlooks GPR52's well-documented high constitutive activity (PMID: 32076264, PMID: 26384023), which raises major questions about the sensor's physiological relevance.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study combines multiscale molecular simulations with supporting biophysical experiments to investigate how the myristoylated VP4 peptide of non-enveloped viruses interacts with host membranes during viral entry. The authors show that myristoylation facilitates VP4 membrane anchoring, condensate formation, and membrane remodeling events linked to early stages of membrane breaching. The work provides a convincing biophysical framework for understanding myristoylation-dependence in membrane-penetrating proteins.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study presents evidence that DNA Polymerase β strand displacement synthesis within linker DNA is stimulated by the presence of an adjacent nucleosome core particle. The biochemical analyses of the strand displacement synthesis by the DNA polymerase on a reconstituted nucleosome substrate with a linker DNA provided incomplete evidence to support the authors' conclusion. The results in the paper are of interest to researchers in DNA repair and nucleosome biology.

eLife Assessment

This convincing contribution addresses a question of practical importance: when collecting tilt-series data, what is the optimal angular step size between successive tilt images? The work provides valuable practical insights into cryo-ET data acquisition by demonstrating that balancing two competing demands - sufficient dose per individual tilt image and fine angular sampling - is essential to achieve high-quality tomographic reconstructions. They demonstrate that tilt-series acquired with finer increments (1-3 degrees) yield superior alignment accuracy and improved template-matching performance,

eLife Assessment

This important study investigates how the hippocampus distinguishes between reactive escape and anticipatory withdrawal during approach-avoidance conflict in rats performing a naturalistic decision-making task. Solid evidence supports the main finding that hippocampal neuronal representations differ during different types of defensive behaviors, although the evidence for some of the claims in the paper could be strengthened. The study will be of interest to researchers studying memory, navigation, and decision-making in the presence of competing rewards and threats.

eLife Assessment

This work introduces a new paradigm for modeling decision-making under time pressure: rather than having to infer the evidence accumulated by the subjects, experimenters can directly measure it on a trial-by-trial basis. This is an important advance, as it has the potential to address questions that are off limits to the standard paradigm. The methodology and analyses are convincing, especially the ones that manipulate the reward structure. Additional analyses - in particular, a deeper comparison to an ideal observer model - would strengthen and broaden the conclusions.

eLife Assessment

This study provides important findings on the expression of glutamate receptor (GluR) subunits across developmental stages and muscle types in Drosophila. It shows that adult muscle differs in GluR composition from larval body wall muscles, which have been the focus of most past studies. The study, while convincing, could be strengthened by acknowledging that it relies on heterogeneous methods and the absence of positive signals to infer receptor loss, which limits confidence in some of its claims. The findings illuminate how Drosophila excites muscles in diverse tissue types at different life stages, and are of interest to researchers across neuroscience.

eLife Assessment

This important study examines the benefits of spatial cognition in a wild population of mountain chickadees. Using robust genetic analyses and experimental design, the authors show with compelling evidence that females seeking out extra-pair copulations prefer males with strong spatial cognition, and that these males have a reproductive advantage over other males. This work is of broad interest to evolutionary and behavioural biologists.

eLife Assessment

This important study provides evidence that plateau pikas, at moderate densities, can facilitate yak nutrition by suppressing a poisonous plant, offering a helpful perspective on reciprocal interactions between small mammal ecosystem engineers and large herbivores. The evidence is solid, supported by a manipulative field experiment and appropriate measurements of intermediary ecological processes, although some claims about density dependence, competition, and stress-gradient mechanisms are not fully supported by the experimental design. The work will be of interest to ecologists, conservation biologists, and rangeland managers, particularly those studying grassland herbivore interactions and livestock management on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau.