Evaluated articles

eLife Assessment

The authors address a fundamental question for cell and tissue biology. They use the skin epidermis as a paradigm and ask how stratifying self-renewing epithelia induce differentiation and upward migration in basal dividing progenitor cells to generate suprabasal barrier-forming cells that are essential for a functional barrier formed by such an epithelium. The authors provide compelling evidence time that an increase in intracellular actomyosin contractility, a hallmark of barrier-forming keratinocytes, is sufficient to trigger terminal differentiation, providing in vivo evidence of the interdependency of cell mechanics and differentiation. To illustrate their points, the authors use a combination of genetic mouse models, RNA sequencing, and immunofluorescence analysis. Precisely how the changes in gene expression, cell morphology, mechanics, and cell position are instructive and whether consecutive changes in differentiation are required still remain unclear, but the paper takes a nice step in advancing our knowledge of the process.

eLife Assessment

This study introduces a novel method for estimating spatial spectra from irregularly sampled intracranial EEG data, revealing cortical activity across all spatial frequencies, which supports the global and integrated nature of cortical dynamics. It showcases important technical innovations and rigorous analyses, including tests to rule out potential confounds. However, further direct evaluation of the model, for example by using simulated cortical activity with a known spatial spectrum (e.g., an iEEG volume-conductor model that describes the mapping from cortical current source density to iEEG signals, and that incorporates the reference electrodes and the particular montage used), would even further strengthen the incomplete evidence.

eLife Assessment

The authors investigated the mechanisms underlying the pause in striatal cholinergic interneurons (SCINs) induced by thalamic input, identifying that Kv1 channels play a key role in this burst-dependent pause. The experimental evidence is convincing.
The study provides important mechanistic insights into how burst activity in SCINs leads to a subsequent pause, highlighting the involvement of D1/D5 receptors.

eLife Assessment

The authors show MRI relaxation time changes that are claimed to originate from cell membrane potential changes. This would be a substantial contribution if true because it may provide a mechanism whereby membrane potential changes could be inferred noninvasively. However, the membrane potential manipulations applied here are performed on a slow time scale and are known to induce cell swelling. Cell swelling has been previously shown to affect relaxation time. Experiments could be performed to rule out this hypothesis, but the authors have chosen not to perform these experiments. The study is therefore useful, but the evidence is incomplete.

eLife Assessment

Seon and Chung investigate changes in own risk-taking behavior, when they are being observed by a "risky" or "safe" player. Using computational modeling and model-informed fMRI, the authors present convincing evidence that participants adjust their choice congruent with the other player's type (either risky or safe). The conclusions of the paper are an important contribution to the field of social decision-making as they show a differentiated adjustment of choices and not just a universally riskier choice behavior when being observed as has been claimed in previous studies.

eLife Assessment

This manuscript establishes a mathematical model to estimate the key parameters that control the repopulation of planarian stem cells after sublethal irradiation as they undergo fate-switching as part of their differentiation and self-renewal process. The findings are important for future investigation of stem cell division in planarians and have implications for analyzing stem cell biology in other systems. The methods are convincing, integrating modeling with perturbations of key transcription factors known to be critical for cell fate decisions, but the authors have only shown that this is the case for a small number of stem cell types.

eLife Assessment

This important study provides convincing evidence that developing neurons in the neocortex regulate glial cell development. The data demonstrates that the transcription factor FOXG1 negatively regulates gliogenesis by controlling the expression of a member of the FGF ligand family and by suppressing the receptor for this ligand in developing neurons. This study leads to a new understanding of the cascade of events regulating the timing of glial development in the neocortex.

eLife Assessment

This study presents important findings that will allow for a better understanding of the role of mitochondria in behaviours of C. elegans. There is convincing evidence that mutants in a subunit of the mitochondrial calcium uniporter (MCU-1) show defects in olfactory adaptation and this gene regulates neuropeptide secretion and allows for behavioural modulation in C. elegans. However, the evidence that mitochondrial calcium modulates odour-based behaviour in C. elegans is incomplete. This claim would require support from calcium imaging in conditioned WT and mcu-1 animals. This work would be of interest to labs working on behaviours across phyla.

eLife Assessment

This important study identifies neurotrophin signaling as a molecular mechanism underlying previous findings of structural plasticity in central dopaminergic neurons of the adult fly brain. The authors present solid evidence for neurotrophin signaling in shaping the structure and synapses of certain dopaminergic circuits. The work suggests an intriguing potential link between neurotrophin signaling and experience-induced structural plasticity but further research will be necessary to establish this connection definitively.

eLife Assessment

This work describes an inference technique for extracting information about relative contributions of excitatory and inhibitory synaptic drive onto single neurons in neural networks. The electrophysiological techniques and results are of high quality, and the analytical work is novel and potentially powerful, yet with several untested assumptions underlying the approach. This is nevertheless solid work that will be valuable to neuroscience labs interested in exploring alternative approaches to studies of integrated synaptic connectivity.

eLife Assessment

This useful study combines multiplexed RNA-FISH with downstream analyses and modelling to describe novel dendritic mRNA distribution and behavioural features. Although the downstream analysis pipeline is novel, the results from this study are as of yet incomplete. Further inclusion of key missing controls, further work to better assess the physiological relevance, or additional modelling to expand their conclusions would make this work of greater interest to RNA biologists.

eLife Assessment

The study is useful for advancing understanding of spinal cord injuries, but it presents inadequate evidence due to the use of multiple datasets. Data were collected from different models of spinal cord injury, various regions of the spinal cord, and an iPSC model, with the differences between these models making it difficult to draw reliable conclusions.

eLife Assessment

In this revised work, Barzó et al. assessed the electrophysiological and anatomical properties of a large number of layer 2/3 pyramidal neurons in brain slices of human neocortex across a wide range of ages, from infancy to elderly individuals, using whole-cell patch clamp recordings and anatomical reconstructions. This large data set represents an important contribution to our understanding of how these properties change across the human lifespan, supported by convincing data and analyses. The authors have addressed the concerns raised in previous reviews. Overall, this study strengthens our understanding of how the neural properties of human cortical neurons change with age and will contribute to building more realistic models of human cortical function.

eLife Assessment

The study by Power and colleagues is important, as elucidating the dynamic immune responses to photoreceptor damage in vivo potentiates future work in the field to better understand the disease process. The evidence supporting the authors' claims is compelling.

eLife Assessment

Abdelmageed et al. demonstrate POLK expression in neurons and report an important observation that POLK exhibits an age-dependent change in subcellular localization, from the nucleus in young tissue to the cytoplasm in old tissue. Despite potentially exciting and novel findings, many of the authors' claims are provided with incomplete support (e.g. lack of validation of the POLK antibody, characterization of the subcellular compartment, etc).

eLife Assessment

This paper represents an important contribution to the field. Summarizing results from neural recording experiments in mice across ten labs, the work provides compelling evidence that basic electrophysiology features, single-neuron functional properties, and population-level decoding are fairly reproducible across labs with proper preprocessing. The results and suggestions regarding preprocessing and quality metrics may be of significant interest to investigators carrying out such experiments in their own labs.

eLife Assessment

The manuscript explores how bacterial evolution in the presence of lytic phages modulates b-lactams resistance and virulence properties in methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). This important work improves our knowledge of how mutation in genes required for phage infection confers sensitivity to b-lactams and alter virulence properties. Altogether, the findings are convincing.

eLife Assessment

Oor and colleagues report the potentially independent effects of the spatial and feature-based selection history on visuomotor choices. They outline compelling evidence, tracking the dynamic history effects based on their extremely clever experimental design (urgent version of the search task). Their finding is of fundamental significance, broadening the framework to identify variables contributing to choice behavior and their neural correlates in future studies.