Evaluated articles

eLife Assessment

This important study looks into the effect of exogenous CoA on the response of TLR4-activated macrophages. Specifically, CoA enhances the LPS response by examining metabolomics, 13C tracing, and assessments of transcription and acetylation. Together, these provide a compelling series of findings that show exogenous CoA is taken up by macrophages, and this facilitates histone acetylation and transcription associated with activation and antimicrobial activity.

eLife Assessment

This valuable manuscript investigates the localisation of nutrient receptors in bloodstream stage trypanosomes, with implications for both nutrient uptake and immune evasion. Results after direct fixation of the cells in culture medium (as opposed to fixation after centrifugation) provide compelling evidence that the amounts of receptors on the surface of the cell, as opposed to the flagellar pocket, have previously been severely underestimated.

eLife Assessment

This important study shows that long-range somatostatin-expressing neurons in the ventrolateral periaqueductal grey that project to the rostral ventromedial medulla selectively suppress pain responses during conditioned fear. The evidence supporting these conclusions is exceptional, with methods spanning a novel cued fear-conditioned analgesia paradigm, cell-type-specific optogenetic activation and inhibition, anatomical circuit tracing, and in vivo spinal cord electrophysiology. These results will be of broad interest to systems and behavioral neuroscientists studying fear, pain, and descending pain-control circuitry.

eLife Assessment

The identification of RBMX2 as a novel regulator linking mycobacterial infection to Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition and cancer progression are fundamental findings that advance our understanding of a major research question about the link between infectious and non-infectious diseases, microbiology and oncology. It does so by introducing RBMX2 as a novel host factor, a potential therapeutic target and biomarker for both TB and lung cancer. The evidence provided is convincing because it is appropriate and the validated multi-omics methodologies used are in line with the current state of the art. This study will be of interest to scientists working in the fields of drug discovery, microbiology and oncology.

eLife Assessment

The authors quantified intentions and knowledge gaps in scientists' use of sex as a biological variable in their work, and used a workshop intervention to show that while willingness was high, pressure points centered on statistical knowledge and perceived additional monetary costs to research. These important findings demonstrate the difficulty in changing understanding: while interventions can improve knowledge and decrease perceived barriers, the impact was small. The evidence for the findings is solid.

eLife Assessment

This study provides valuable insights into the mechanisms of remote memory impairment in an Alzheimer's disease mouse model. The evidence is compelling, with careful use of viral-TRAP labeling and patch-clamp electrophysiology to demonstrate altered inhibitory microcircuit function, though the mechanistic link to memory deficits remains correlative. Overall, the work advances understanding of early circuit-level changes in AD, while highlighting open questions regarding causality and broader network contributions.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study presents Altair-LSFM, a well-documented implementation of a light-sheet fluorescence microscope (LSFM) designed for accessibility and reduced cost. The approach provides compelling evidence of its strengths, including the use of custom-machined baseplates, detailed assembly instructions, and demonstrated live-cell imaging capabilities. This manuscript will be of interest to microscopists and potentially biologists seeking accessible LSFM tools.

eLife Assessment

This important study by Zeng et al characterizes a novel Legionella pneumophila effector, Llfat1 (Lpg1387), which binds actin through a newly identified actin-binding domain. Data is convincing; structural analysis of the Llfat1 ABD-F-actin complex enabled the development of this domain as a probe for F-actin. Additionally, the authors show that Llfat1 functions as a lysine fatty acyltransferase targeting small GTPases, highlighting its importance in both bacterial pathogenesis and cytoskeletal biology.

eLife Assessment

This paper provides important findings towards understanding the role of the lncRNA EPB41L4A-AS1 in a human cell line. The data is generally convincing, supported by extensive and clever integrative analysis. The work provides insights into how this lncRNA regulates gene expression via complex mechanisms; however the biological relevance awaits validation in other models.

eLife Assessment

This revised manuscript retreats from the original claim of establishing a causal link between cardiolipin deficiency and the progression from steatotic liver disease to steatohepatitis and instead advances a more limited mechanistic conclusion: that cardiolipin deficiency perturbs electron transport and promotes electron leak from the mitochondrial respiratory chain. The experimental evidence supporting this revised claim is now solid, and the potential for increased electron leak to contribute to liver pathophysiology is demonstrated. However, absent evidence that cardiolipin deficiency is causally upstream of disease progression, the overall significance of the work remains limited. While the study provides a convincing analysis of mitochondrial bioenergetics, the narrowing of its central claim diminishes its impact relative to that proposed in the original submission.

eLife Assessment

This important study reports that the human posterior inferotemporal cortex (hPIT) functions as an attentional priority map, integrating both top-down and bottom-up attentional signals rather than serving solely as an object-processing region. The experiments and analyses are well conducted and provide compelling evidence that hPIT bridges dorsal and ventral attention networks and is robustly modulated by attention across diverse visual tasks. The study will be relevant for researchers investigating visual attention, high-level visual cortex, and the neural mechanisms that integrate endogenous and exogenous attentional control.

eLife Assessment

This study provides important findings on the neural circuits underlying dishabituation of the olfactory avoidance response in Drosophila. The data as presented provide solid evidence that the dishabituation involves distinct pathways from habituation. They show that reward-activated dopaminergic neurons provide input for within-modal dishabituation, while punishment-activated dopaminergic neurons provide input for cross-modal dishabituation. The work will interest neuroscientists, particularly behavioral neuroscientists working on habituation, neural circuits, and the dopaminergic system.

eLife Assessment

In this manuscript, the authors describe a software package for automatic differentiation of action potentials generated by excitatory and inhibitory neurons, acquired using high-density microelectrode arrays. The work is valuable as it offers a tool with the potential to automatically identify these neuron types in vitro. It is solid, as it provides a tool to identify putative excitatory and inhibitory neurons on high-density electrode arrays, which can be used in conjunction with other existing spike sorting pipelines.

eLife Assessment

This useful study reports findings that support the use of the Open Field Test in Drosophila as a model to study "emotion-like states", which are behavioral responses to several stressful or aversive treatments, and resilience upon their subsequent removal. Behavioral data, by employing established stress-causing treatments and genetic manipulations, are solid. The main advance of this work over previous Drosophila work using a similar experimental setup is systematic analysis of various stressors.

eLife Assessment

This important study provides a novel approach for delineating subcortical-cortical white matter bundles. The authors provide convincing evidence by harnessing state-of-the-art methods and cross-species data. Together, this effort will be of interest to scientists across multiple subfields and accelerate progress in a biologically critical but methodologically challenging area.

eLife Assessment

This useful study attempts to place an ancient maize sample from Bolivia, dated to the end of the Incan empire, in genetic and geographical context. The analyses show that this sample is most closely related to ancient Peruvian maize, but the data remain inadequate to determine the direction of dispersal and the extent of Inca influence over the genetic make up of the analyzed sample. There are additional deficiencies in the statistical analyses and selection inferences. The topic of the study would appeal to researchers studying maize dispersal and adaptation.

eLife Assessment

This important study demonstrates the significance of incorporating biological constraints in training neural networks to develop models that make accurate predictions under novel conditions. By comparing standard sigmoid recurrent neural networks (RNNs) with biologically constrained RNNs, the manuscript offers compelling evidence that biologically grounded inductive biases enhance generalization to perturbed conditions. This manuscript will appeal to a wide audience in systems and computational neuroscience.

eLife Assessment

This important study reports that higher genetically predicted BMI is associated with a modestly increased risk of head and neck cancer. The convincing evidence is supported by rigorous Mendelian Randomization approaches, using multiple genetic instruments and models that reduce sensitivity to pleiotropy. However, results from pleiotropy-robust analyses were less consistent, which limits the strength of causal inference. The work will be of interest to researchers studying cancer risk factors and genetic epidemiology.