Evaluated articles

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.

eLife Assessment

This important study, which will be of interest to those studying the evolution and maintenance of antibiotic resistance, addresses the hypothesis that antibiotic resistance arising de novo during treatment will carry a higher fitness cost and will revert to susceptibility more readily than resistance that has been transmitted between hosts. There are, however, concerns that the 'putatively transmitted isolates' in this study do not necessarily represent resistant isolates that have been transmitted between hosts. The support for the central claim of different patterns of reversion between isolates with de novo resistance and putatively transmitted resistant isolates is currently incomplete.

eLife Assessment

This useful work reveals differential activity to food and shock outcomes in central amygdala GABAergic neurons. Evidence supports claims of unconditioned stimulus activity that changes with learning. Compelling evidence that the circular shift method rigorously identifies functional neuron types is also presented. However, the evidence regarding claims related to valence or salience signaling in these neurons is incomplete. This work will be of interest to neuroscientists studying sensory processing and learning in the amygdala.

eLife Assessment

This important study reveals that Excitatory Amino Acid Transporters play a role in chromatic information processing in the retina. The combination of (double) mutants, behavioral assays, immunohistochemistry, and electroretinograms provides solid evidence supporting the appropriately conservative conclusions. The work will be of interest to neurobiologists working on color vision or retinal processing.

eLife Assessment

The authors present three transgenic models carrying three representative exon deletions of the dystrophin gene. The findings presented are valuable to the field of muscle diseases, particularly muscular dystrophies. The evidence provided in the manuscript is convincing, with rigorous biochemical assays and state-of-the-art microscopy methods.

eLife Assessment

This is a valuable study that uses single-cell RNA sequencing to define tumor-intrinsic transcriptional programs that characterize distinct types of small intestine neuroendocrine tumors. The evidence supporting the claims of the authors is solid, but would benefit from a larger sample size. The work will be of interest to cancer biologists studying neuroendocrine tumors, as well as those studying tumor heterogeneity more broadly.

eLife Assessment

This important work shows that fine particulate matter exposure to the lungs led to nociceptor-dependent neutrophilic inflammation. Likely macrophage-neuronal crosstalk, via release of artemin from macrophages and activation of Gfra3 on the JNC neuron, potentiated the response. The data convincingly strengthens links between pollutants, immune and neural interactions.

eLife Assessment

The study by Chen and Phillips provides evidence for a dynamic switch in the small RNA repertoire of the Argonaute protein NRDE-3 during embryogenesis in C. elegans. The work is supported by convincing experimental data, shedding light on RNA regulation during development. While the functional relevance of this process warrants further investigation, this study provides valuable insights into small RNA pathways with broader implications for developmental biology and gene regulation in other systems.

eLife Assessment

This important work by Diallo et al. substantially advances our understanding of the chemosensory system of a non-hymenopteran eusocial insect by identifying the first olfactory receptor for the trail pheromone in termites. The evidence supporting the conclusions that the receptor PsimOR14 is very narrowly tuned for the pheromone neocembrene is compelling. The work will be of broad interest to entomologists, chemical ecologists, neuroscientists, and molecular biologists.

eLife Assessment

This valuable study builds on previous work by the authors by presenting a potentially key method for correcting optical aberrations in GRIN lens-based microendoscopes used for imaging deep brain regions. By combining simulations and experiments, the authors provide convincing evidence showing that the obtained field of view is significantly increased with corrected, versus uncorrected microendoscopes. Because the approach described in this paper does not require any microscope or software modifications, it can be readily adopted by neuroscientists who wish to image neuronal activity deep in the brain.

eLife Assessment

This study provides a valuable perspective on visual cortex architecture by identifying two cortical gradients that change across the lifespan and have distinct functional and structural features. The first gradient captures well-mapped variations in cortical thickness and myelination markers from early sensory to higher-order cortex, while the second gradient shows divergence in these measures with a more localized structure, notably predicting a previously unknown cluster of visual field maps in the anterior temporal lobe. The large-scale lifespan data are compelling, but the evidence overall is incomplete with key questions around methodical checks and implementation, the standard of evidence for the new visual maps, and how the gradient model relates to sharp tissue boundaries parcellating the cortex.

eLife Assessment

This study presents valuable findings on changes in neuronal alpha activity elicited by prolonged pain in healthy human participants. The evidence supporting the claims of the authors, however, is incomplete and would benefit from clarifications of analytical strategies, additional statistical analyses, and shaping of the interpretations. With the methodological and interpretative parts strengthened, the work will be of interest to neuroscientists investigating the brain mechanisms of pain to identify new approaches to pain treatment

eLife Assessment

This important paper employs multiple experimental approaches and presents evidence that changes in membrane voltage directly affect ERK signaling to regulate cell division. This result is relevant because it supports an ion channel-independent pathway by which changes in membrane voltage can affect cell growth. The evidence now presented is solid and the data support the conclusions. This paper should be of interest to a broad readershp in the areas of cell and developemental biology and electrophysiology.