Evaluated articles

eLife Assessment

This study presents valuable findings related to seasonal brain size plasticity in the Eurasian common shrew (Sorex araneus), which is an excellent model system for these studies. The evidence supporting the authors' claims is convincing. The work will be of interest to biologists working on neuroscience, plasticity, and evolution.

eLife Assessment

This study developed a novel continuous dot-motion decision-making task, in which participants can see another player's responses as well as their own, to measure perceptual performance and confidence judgments in a social context. The study is a valuable contribution to social decision-making primarily by introducing a new task and offering convincing evidence on how participants are impacted by others' decisions during continuous perceptual choices. The manuscript delivers clear evidence that participants judgements are driven by metacognitive confidence over simpler primary uncertainty.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study uses consensus-independent component analysis to highlight transcriptional components (TC) in high-grade serous ovarian cancers (HGSOC). The study presents a convincing preliminary finding by identifying a TC linked to synaptic signaling that is associated with shorter overall survival in HGSOC patients, highlighting the potential role of neuronal interactions in the tumour microenvironment. This finding is corroborated by comparing spatially resolved transcriptomics in a small-scale study; a weakness is it being descriptive, non-mechanistic, and requires experimental validation.

eLife Assessment

This study presents a valuable finding on the molecular mechanisms that govern GABAergic inhibitory synapse function. The authors propose that Endophilin A1 serves as a novel regulator of GABAergic synapses by acting as a component of the inhibitory postsynaptic density. The findings are convincing and likely to interest a broad audience of scientists focusing on inhibitory synaptic transmission, the excitation-inhibition balance, and its disruption in disorders such as epilepsy.

eLife Assessment

Computational simulation of neuron function depends on a collection of morphological properties and ion channel biophysics. This manuscript introduces DendroTweaks, a valuable web application and Python library that eases interactive exploration, development, and validation of single-neuron models in an easily installable and well-documented package. The authors provide a convincing demonstration that their software aids with building intuition and rapid prototyping of biophysical models of neurons, which improves the accessibility of dendritic simulation.

eLife Assessment

This important paper takes a novel approach to the problem of automatically reconstructing long-range axonal projections from stacks of images. The key innovation is to separate the identification of sections of an axon from the statistical rules used to constrain global structure. The authors provide compelling evidence that their method is a significant improvement over existing measures in circumstances where the labelling of axons and dendrites is relatively dense.

eLife Assessment

This revised paper provides valuable findings that altruistic tendency during moral decision-making is gain/loss context-dependent and oxytocin can restore the absence of altruistic choices in the loss domain. The methods and analyses are solid, yet the study could still benefit from better overall framing and more clarity and precision in the definition of key constructs, as pointed out by reviewers. If these concerns are addressed, this study would be of interest to social scientists and neuroscientists who work on moral decision-making and oxytocin.

eLife Assessment

The study presents important findings on inositol-requiring enzyme (IRE1α) inhibition on diet-induced obesity (overnutrition) and insulin resistance where IRE1α inhibition enhances thermogenesis and reduces the metabolically active and M1-like macrophages in adipose tissue. The evidence supporting the conclusions is convincing. The work will be of interest to cell biologists and biochemists working in metabolism, insulin resistance and inflammation with a broad eLife readership.

eLife Assessment

This study provides important insights as to how interacting brain areas produce movement during the execution of a skilled multi-directional reaching task. Using a combination of single neuron and neural population analysis, optogenetic stimulation, and computational models, the authors provide convincing evidence of an asymmetrical influence between mouse premotor and motor cortex during the execution of a well-practiced behaviour. This asymmetry can only be captured by some but not all population analysis methods, which is a key lesson to the field in and of itself. Analyzing how activity that is shared and private to these areas relates to different aspects of movements, and why different methods provide different outcomes regarding the nature of inter-area interactions would further strengthen this work.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study combined whole-head magnetoencephalography (MEG) and subthalamic (STN) local field potential (LFP) recordings in patients with Parkinson's disease undergoing deep brain stimulation surgery. The paper provides convincing evidence that cortical and STN beta oscillations are sensitive to movement context.

eLife Assessment

The authors provide a valuable contribution by documenting the role of microglia in pruning the axon terminals of AgRP neurons. The analysis of microglial axonal pruning is solid; however, the analysis of the effects inhibiting microglia on subsequent food consumption is not fully complete.

eLife Assessment

This study aims to clarify the effects of cochlear neural degeneration on auditory processing in listeners with normal audiograms (sometimes referred to as 'hidden hearing loss'). The authors provide important new data demonstrating associations between cochlear neural degeneration, non-invasive assays of auditory processing, and speech perception. Based on a cross-species comparison, the findings pose compelling evidence that cochlear synaptopathy is associated with a significant part of hearing difficulties in complex environments.

eLife Assessment

This valuable contribution combines high-resolution histology with magnetic resonance imaging in a novel way to study the organisation of the human amygdala. The main findings convincingly show the axes of microstructural organisation within the amygdala and how they map onto the functional organisation. Overall, the approach taken in this paper showcases the utility of combining multiple modalities at different spatial scales to help understand brain organisation.

eLife Assessment

The authors provide a compelling method for characterizing communication within brain networks. The study engages important, biologically pertinent, concerns related to the balance of dynamics and structure in assessing the focal points of brain communication. It will be of interest to researchers trying to dissect structure of complex interaction networks across scales, from cells to regions.

eLife Assessment

This study provides useful information on the potential role of ERbB4 expression in parvalbumin-positive cells on olfactory behaviour and circuit dynamics in the olfactory bulb. The question is timely and novel, and findings could shed light on the critical role that ErbB4 may play in modulating olfactory bulb cell function and olfactory perception. Although the authors use a comprehensive set of experiments for their analysis, the evidence is incomplete as many of the experiments are underpowered and the model for selective knockout of ErbB4 in olfactory parvalbumin cells is not validated.

eLife Assessment

The study is important to show the role of MED26 in red cell formation. Linking transcription pausing with erythropoiesis is a key discovery. The data are solid although there are still spaces to improve. The in vivo data are limited by specificity concerns on their Cre model. Having RNA-seq, using more erythroid markers such as band3 and a4-integrin, and orthogonal validation with iPSC-erythropoiesis model will improve the study.

eLife Assessment

This manuscript makes an important contribution to the understanding of protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks by challenging the widely held assumption that their degree distributions uniformly follow a power law. The authors present convincing evidence that biases in study design, such as data aggregation and selective research focus, may contribute to the appearance of power-law-like distributions. While the power law assumption has already been questioned in network biology, the methodological rigor and correction procedures introduced here are valuable for advancing our understanding of PPI network structure.

eLife Assessment

This is an important work and it correlates capsid stability with mutations that promote heparan sulfate binding. The data is solid, but there is a need for further analysis and experiments to support the claims and to propose a more detailed mechanism that could explain how these mutations altered capsid stability.

eLife Assessment

This is a valuable work that convincingly reveals that place cells in the hippocampus that exhibit repeated firing fields incorporate information about non-positional variables in each firing field. They reveal that individual firing fields of a single place cell can exhibit tuning to different head orientations, suggesting hippocampal neurons are flexible in terms of how they incorporate non-positional inputs.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study advances our understanding of how bactofilin cytoskeletal proteins associate with cell membranes by identifying and characterizing a conserved membrane-targeting sequence. The evidence is solid, with a well-integrated combination of mutagenesis, biophysical analysis, molecular simulations, and bioinformatics supporting the mechanistic model. The work will be of particular interest to microbiologists and structural biologists studying bacterial cytoskeletons and membrane-protein interactions.