Evaluated articles

eLife Assessment

This important study integrates mouse genetics with sequencing, electrophysiological and behavioral tools to uncover the behavioral role and molecular profile of a developmentally defined subpopulation in the lateral septum. The data collected and analyzed are convincing, highlighting the role of this subpopulation in threat avoidance and stress, providing a framework by which developmental origin is linked to mature neuronal function. The work will be of interest to biologists and neuroscientists working on development and behavior.

eLife Assessment

This important paper provides evidence that visual representations, as observed through drawing, preferentially preserve topological features over metric features. Across three experiments with different age groups and creative converging methods, they demonstrate that holes and T-junctions are relatively preserved as compared to topologically irrelevant L-junctions, and Euclidian features like length or precise angle. Together, these data provide convincing evidence for topology as an organizing principle for spatial representation, but the work would be strengthened by considering a broader range of topological features, or by ruling out alternative accounts, like preserved memory for complex features, motor production limitations, or noisy compression, that may produce a similar pattern without a topological prior.

eLife Assessment

This study examines how prefrontal population dynamics tune social behaviors, providing important findings that oxytocin receptor-expressing interneurons support sociosexual choice in female mice. The multidisciplinary evidence is convincing and could be strengthened by more comprehensive reporting of the methodology and a clearer distinction between inferential and directly tested insights from modelling. This work will be of interest to those interested in prefrontal cortex, oxytocin, and/or social behavior.

eLife Assessment

This study provides useful information for the Drosophila ageing community by characterising the auxin-based gene expression system (AGES) and identifying caveats associated with its use in adult flies. The authors provide solid evidence for sex-, age-, tissue- and dose-dependent variability in transgene induction, as well as effects of auxin feeding and AGES activation on stress resistance, metabolism, and lifespan. While the study would benefit from a broader characterisation of some of these limitations, the findings provide a helpful benchmark for researchers using AGES in ageing studies.

eLife Assessment

This study offers valuable insights into brain responses to somatosensory and visual temporal and spatial tasks in the auditory cortex of Deaf and hearing individuals. The evidence for a sensorily-bound representation in the deprived cortex -- rather than abstract -- is solid; however, the study will benefit from some additional analyses to better clarify and contextualise the results. This work will be of broad interest to neuroscientists investigating brain plasticity and development.

eLife Assessment

This study presents a useful finding on using diverse experimental systems to understand how neuromodulatory signals shape glial inflammatory signaling; however, the strength of evidence is inadequate. The astrocyte-enrichment method used may permit contamination by microglia, oligodendrocyte-lineage cells, or neurons, complicating attribution of TNF expression specifically to astrocytes. This concern is compounded by the strong microglial response to Gi manipulation and the lack of quantitative validation of chemogenetic cell-type specificity in vivo. These weaknesses have hindered further evaluation of the claims.

eLife Assessment

This important study demonstrates how ablation or silencing of hilar mossy cells in the mouse influences the primary location where the mossy cells project, the inner molecular layer of the dentate gyrus. The anatomical findings are convincing and include altered adult-born granule cells and the shrinkage of the inner molecular layer following mossy cell ablation. However, the mechanisms and their functional significance are unclear, so more of these types of experiments/analyses would strengthen the study, especially the support for the broader conclusions.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study analyzes how recurrent neural network can flexibly switch between multiple tasks. The evidence is solid, but reviewers have raised questions about the impacts of transient dynamics, whether the activity is actually chaotic, can inputs be used to switch between tasks, what determines overlap between tasks and others. In addition, there were more minor questions pertaining to whether the analyses are actually analytic or primarily based on numerical simulations, as well as the relationship to prior studies where the same network was optimized to perform multiple tasks simultaneously with different readouts.

eLife Assessment

This important study proposes a framework in which tutor-song memorization and performance-error computation arise from a shared predictive-cancellation circuit. The approach is solid, but the choice of learning rules, circuit architecture, and sparsity assumptions is not always sufficiently justified, and the model would benefit from a clearer mechanistic derivation and more concrete experimental predictions. This study would be relevant for researchers studying vocal learning and motor learning in general.

eLife Assessment

This study reports results characterizing two boundaries (homie and nhomie) flanking the TAD of a developmental gene. The study's thorough and mechanistic characterization of these boundaries provides useful information to the field, and the conclusions are well supported by convincing evidence. The novelty of the work is somewhat limited because the major conclusion is confirmatory in nature.

eLife Assessment

The study provides important insight into the development of CD8 T cell virtual memory cells by identifying a dose-sensitive role for Bcl11b. The authors define the developmental stages affected by reduced Bcl11b expression and establish its role in promoting the virtual memory fate. The evidence is compelling, supported by multiple genetic models and complementary approaches.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study examines the macroevolutionary patterns of male-female divergence driven by conflict over mating rate in a lineage of water striders called Pseudovelia, found in China. The authors used a convincing combination of phylogenetic reconstruction, morphological diversification and molecular evolution techniques to assess whether a correlation exists between the divergence of sexually antagonistic traits and species diversification. The study finds widespread conflict across the phylogeny of the clade and presents compelling evidence for the role of incomplete lineage sorting (ILS), introgression, and differential evolutionary rates of male and female antagonistic traits. Overall, the study offers a valuable contribution to our understanding of the link between phylogenetic patterns of ILS and introgression, and male-female phenotypic divergence shaped by conflict over mating interactions.

eLife Assessment

This is an important work, using preclinical models and reporting that a shared inflammatory and vascular leakage response following Treg depletion, UVB irradiation, and DNFB contact hypersensitivity facilitates outgrowth of premalignant melanocytes. However, some of the work to support the claims is incomplete; this pertains particularly to the quantification of melanocyte expansion and sample size inconsistencies. With some additional supporting evidence to strengthen the claims, the study will be of broad interest to cancer biologists and immunologists.

eLife Assessment

This useful study reports the application of targeted RNA-probe hybridization-capture metagenomic sequencing to characterize Klebsiella pneumoniae detected in post-mortem lung tissue from infants and young children who died from respiratory illness in Lusaka, Zambia. The findings provide a convincing proof-of-concept for the use of targeted sequencing to recover clinically relevant genomic information from archived post-mortem tissue specimens. However, the evidence supporting broader epidemiological and public health conclusions should be interpreted with caution given the small number of cases, the limitations inherent to culture-independent sequencing, and the fact that the study was not designed to determine the source or setting of acquisition.

eLife Assessment

This potentially valuable work finds that exposure to the odor diacetyl in the worm C. elegans leads to changes in metabolic nutrient-responsive programs, inducing expression of genes that act in the DHAP-glycerol shunt followed by induction of the flavin-containing monooxygenase fmo-2. The genetic and multi-omic evidence is solid and is based on an extensive set of experiments; however, mechanistic support for underlying metabolic and redox changes remains incomplete without more comprehensive metabolic profiling. The mechanism through which diacetyl or its breakdown products is sensed did not involve known receptors of diacetyl, so it remains unknown whether sensory neurons are involved in these responses.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study examines how abstraction and metacognition relate to transdiagnostic dimensions of psychopathology. It combines a reward-learning task, computational modelling and a large questionnaire. The evidence linking reduced metacognitive sensitivity to a compulsive hypersensitivity dimension is solid, but the evidence for the abstraction findings is currently incomplete. This work will be of interest to researchers studying metacognition and computational approaches to psychiatry.

eLife Assessment

This important study investigated the effects of the nutrient microenvironment on key elements of cellular morphology, function, and metabolism in both human iPSC-derived and human fetal RPE cultures. The analysis compared commonly used iPSC-RPE media formulations (MEMα, DMEM-HG/F12 basal media), alongside human plasma-like medium (HPLM) in an effort to model a more physiologically relevant culture environment. The authors provide compelling evidence that standard culture media differ significantly in key aspects of retinal pigment epithelium biology, particularly regarding metabolic profiles. Further clarification of the biological replicates and data normalization methods will help maximize the impact of this manuscript.

eLife Assessment

This study provides a useful investigation of machine learning approaches that can lessen potential gaps in the prediction of behaviour from brain imaging data across majority and minority samples. The authors provide incomplete evidence to suggest that domain adaptation methods can mitigate these gaps. The analysis would benefit from further testing of model generalisability and the inclusion of recommended workflows for how the tested approaches can be used in future research. This work will be of interest to scientists using machine learning in brain imaging.

eLife Assessment

The cell wall and plasma membrane are tightly associated in plant cells, and even after plasmolysis, sites of strong contact remain between the plasma membrane and cell wall. Here, the authors provide solid data to implicate an Arabidopsis lectin-like receptor kinase in plasma-membrane-to-cell-wall contact sites, and propose that these attachment sites are of importance for plant resistance to hyperosmotic stress, yet the evidence remains incomplete without key controls. These important results broaden our view on dynamic modulation of plasma membrane topology and its physiological consequences.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study compares the anti-HIV activity of human natural killer cell subsets and identifies CD56^dimCD16^dim cells as a potentially key effector population against HIV-infected autologous T cells. The evidence supporting the central conclusions seems incomplete because the interpretation may be substantially confounded by activation-induced CD16 downregulation, making it difficult to distinguish intrinsic functional differences from phenotypic changes that occur during target-cell engagement. Additional experiments using purified NK-cell subsets and appropriate controls would substantially strengthen the evidence supporting the major conclusions.