Evaluated articles

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

This manuscript details important findings that DNA polymerase kappa shows age-related changes in subcellular localization within different cell types in the brains of mice, from the nucleus in young cells to the cytoplasm in old cells. The authors' findings suggest that age-related alterations in POLK localization could drive mechanistic and functional changes in the aging brain. The authors provide solid evidence for their study, with data broadly supporting their claims with minor weaknesses.

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.