Evaluated articles

eLife Assessment

This study provides important insights into how IL-1 cytokines protect cells against SARS-CoV-2 infection. By inducing a non-canonical RhoA/ROCK signaling pathway, IL-1beta inhibits the ability of SARS-CoV-2 infected cells to fuse with uninfected cells and produce syncytia. Convincing evidence underlies the identification of the key signaling components required for this inhibitory phenotype, and suggests that this process may also function to inhibit SARS-CoV-2 infection in vivo.

eLife Assessment

In this valuable study, the authors propose a model wherein the bacterial redox state plays a crucial role in the differentiation of Chlamydia trachomatis into elementary and reticulate bodies. They provide solid evidence to argue that a highly oxidising environment favours the formation of elementary bodies while a reducing condition slows down development. Overall, the study convincingly demonstrates that Chlamydial redox states play a role in differentiation, an observation that may have implications for the study of other bacterial systems.

eLife assessment

This important study examines the role of TNF in modulating energy metabolism during parasite infection. The authors perform an elegant set of studies, however the evidence supporting the major claims of the manuscript is incomplete. This work integrates an interesting set of observations that will be of interest to the Plasmodium and pathogenesis communities with an expanded set of experiments.

eLife assessment

The work provides a valuable assessment of how antibiotics impact the human gut microbiota in diverse observational cohorts. Although the data presented are solid, some of the assumptions underlying their models may have affected the interpretation of their findings. The study is relevant for researchers and clinicians interested in antimicrobial resistance.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study reports the link between a disruption in testicular mineral (phosphate) homeostasis, FGF23 expression, and Sertoli cell dysfunction. The data supporting the conclusion are solid. This work will be of interest to biomedical researchers working on testis biology and male infertility. The assessment is based on the editors' critical evaluation of the authors' responses.

eLife assessment

This useful study investigates the evolution of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis Complex (MTBC) pangenome using state-of-the-art bioinformatic tools to analyse 324 complete and 11 new genomes representing all known lineages and sublineages, yielding data indicating that MTBC has a closed pangenome with relatively few accessory genes. The strength of the evidence is solid for gene presence-absence analysis and inadequate for the deletion bias claim. Their conclusions regarding pangenome evolution being driven by deletions in sublineage-specific regions of difference are difficult to interpret due to the description of methods not being complete and data interpretation not being adequate.

eLife assessment

This valuable study explores a new strategy of lysin-derived antimicrobial peptide-primed screening to find peptidoglycan hydrolases from bacterial proteomes. Using this strategy, the authors identified five peptidoglycan hydrolases from Acinetobacter baumannii, which they tested on various Gram-positive and Gram-negative pathogens for antimicrobial activity. The revised manuscript addressed most of the prior concerns, and the data presented are solid and will be of interest to microbiologists.

eLife Assessment

This fundamental study substantially advances our understanding of how habitat fragmentation and climate change jointly influence bird community thermophilization in a fragmented island system. The authors provide convincing evidence using appropriate and validated methodologies to examine how island area and isolation affect the colonization of warm-adapted species and the extinction of cold-adapted species. This study is of high interest to ecologists and conservation biologists, as it provides insight into how ecosystems and communities respond to climate change.

eLife assessment

This important study investigates neurobiological mechanisms underlying the maintenance of stable, functionally appropriate rhythmic motor patterns during changing environmental conditions - temperature in this study in the crab Cancer borealis stomatogastric central neural pattern generating circuits producing the rhythmic pyloric motor pattern, which is naturally subjected to temperature perturbations over a substantial range. The authors present compelling evidence that the neuronal hyperpolarization-activated inward current (Ih), known to contribute to rhythm control, plays a vital role in the ability of these circuits to appropriately adjust the frequency of rhythmic neural activity in a smooth monotonic fashion while maintaining the relative timing of different phases of the activity pattern that determines proper functional motor coordination transiently and persistently to temperature perturbations. This study will be of interest to neurobiologists studying rhythmic motor circuits and systems and their physiological adaptations.

eLife assessment

This important study explores how cells maintain subcellular structures in the face of constant protein turnover, focusing on neurons, whose synapses must be kept stable over long periods of time for memory storage. Using proteins from knock-in mice expressing tagged variants of the synaptic scaffold protein PSD95, nanobodies, and multiple imaging methods, there is compelling evidence that PSD95 proteins form complexes at synapses in which single protein copies are sequentially replaced over time. This happens at different rates in different synapse types and is slowest in areas where PSD95 lifetime is the longest and long-term memories are stored. While of general relevance to cell biology, these findings are of particular interest to neuroscientists because they support the hypothesis put forward by Francis Crick that stable synapses, and hence stable long-term memories, can be maintained in the face of short protein lifetimes by sequential replacement of individual subunits in synaptic protein complexes.

eLife Assessment

The authors studied the relationship between structural and functional lateralization in the planum temporale region of the brain, whilst also considering the morphological presentation of a single or duplicated Heschl's gyrus. The analyses are compelling due to a large sample size, inter-rater reliability, and corrections for multiple comparisons. The associations in this important work might serve as a reference for future targeted-studies on brain lateralization.

eLife assessment

This study used deep neural networks (DNN) to reconstruct voice information (viz., speaker identity), from fMRI responses in the auditory cortex and temporal voice areas, and assessed the representational content in these areas with decoding. A DNN-derived feature space approximated the neural representation of speaker identity-related information. While some of the neural decoding results are valuable, the overall evidence for general representational and computational principles is incomplete as the results rely on a very specific model architecture.

eLife assessment

Some delayed rectifier currents in neurons are formed by the combination of Kv2 and silent subunits, KvS. However, we lack the tools to identify these heteromeric channels in vivo. In this valuable study by the Sack group, the authors identify a pharmacological tool that can reveal the presence of KvS subunits as components of the delayed rectifier potassium currents in selected neurons. The experimental evidence presented in the manuscript is compelling and represents an advance that should be of interest to a wide community of neuroscientists and channel physiologists.

eLife assessment

This useful study measured how information about object categories varies with time in EEG responses to object images in human participants and found that real-world size, retinal size, and real-world depth are represented at different time points in the response. The evidence presented is incomplete and can be further strengthened by removing confounds related to other covarying properties such as semantic categories, and by clarifying the partial correlations that are used to support the conclusions.

eLife assessment

In their manuscript, Cummings et al. use in vitro reconstitution to examine the differential activities of tubulin polyglycylases, providing valuable insights into the enzymatic regulation of microtubule glycylation and its mechanistic role in maintaining cilia function and microtubule dynamics. The convincing evidence, supported by well-designed experiments and appropriate controls, significantly advances our understanding of the tubulin code and its biochemical mechanisms.

eLife Assessment

Bowler et al. present a software/hardware system for behavioral control of navigation-based virtual reality experiments, particularly suited for pairing with 2-photon imaging but applicable to a variety of techniques. This system represents a valuable contribution to the field of behavioral and systems neuroscience, as it provides a standardized, easy to implement, and flexible system that could be adopted across multiple laboratories. The authors provide compelling evidence of the functionality of their system by reporting benchmark tests and demonstrating hippocampal activity patterns consistent with standards in the field. This work will be of interest to systems neuroscientists looking to integrate flexible head-fixed behavioral control with neural data acquisition.

eLife Assessment

This important study combines convincing evolution experiments with molecular and genetic techniques to study how a genetic lesion in MreB that causes rod-shaped cells to become spherical, with concomitant deleterious fitness effects, can be rescued by natural selection. The detailed mechanistic investigation increases our understanding of how mreB contributes to cell wall synthesis and shows how compensatory mutations may reestablish its homogeneity.

eLife assessment

This important work introduces a method to express fluorogenic DNA aptamers in E. coli, paving the way for genetically encoded fluorescent DNA. The evidence supporting the conclusions is solid, consisting of comparisons of the aptamer's activity in vitro and within bacterial cells. This advancement described in this study is likely to become a standard technique in the DNA aptamer field, and the work will be of interest and utility to researchers in synthetic biology, molecular imaging, and bacterial genetics fields.

eLife Assessment

In this valuable study, Huffer et al posit that non-cold sensing members of the TRPM subfamily of ion channels (e.g., TRPM2, TRPM4, TRPM5) contain a binding pocket for icilin that overlaps with the one found in the cold-activated TRPM8 channel. After examining a body of TRP channel cryo-EM structures to identify the conserved site, this study presents convincing electrophysiological evidence supporting the presence of an icilin binding pocket within TRPM4. This study shows that icilin has modulatory effects on the TRPM4 channel and will be of direct interest to those working in the TRP-channel field, but it also has implications for studies of somatosensation, taste, as well as pharmacological targeting of the TRPM subfamily.

eLife Assessment

This fundamental research conducted a molecular comparison between smooth muscle cells and adjacent fibroblast cells within lung blood vessels affected by pulmonary arterial hypertension. The study identified distinct disease-related states in each cell type and provided deeper insights into their interactions and communication. While certain conclusions should be interpreted with caution due to inherent methodological limitations, the study's findings remain convincing and robust. This is supported by the use of advanced and complementary techniques, as well as the rare isolation of diseased lung blood vessel cells from the same donor, enabling direct comparison.