Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

This study used whole genome data to investigate Beefalo ancestry for the first time, filling the gap in the field of Beefalo ancestry. The authors used preserved semen samples to generate genomic data on 47 registered Beefalo and 3 bison hybrids, further questioning the ABA's stated goal of ⅜ bison ancestry. In addition, the authors also show that ancestry profiles of Beefalo and bison hybrid genomes are consistent with repeated backcrossing to either parental species, demonstrating the value of genomic information in examining gene flow between species in the genus Bison. This is an interesting study that still has some major weaknesses that exist, but overall, the work demonstrates the utility of genomic information in validating specific breeding claims for a more complete understanding of gene flow and genetic variation among bovine species.

Strengths:

Numerous genetic analysis methods such as PCA, ADMIXTURE, F4 ratios, and local ancestry inference techniques revealed that no single Beefalo set meets the ancestry requirements set by the American Beefalo Association (ABA) and some beefalo had detectable indicine cattle ancestry.

Weaknesses:

While this study contributes to our knowledge of Beefalo ancestry, there are some key issues that need to be addressed in terms of analysing the specific results as well as writing the article.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

In this paper, the authors reveal that the MK2 inhibitor CMPD1 can inhibit the growth, migration, and invasion of breast cancer cells both in vitro and in vivo by inducing microtubule depolymerization, preferentially at the microtubule plus-end, leading to cell division arrest, mitotic defects, and apoptotic cell death. They also showed that CMPD1 treatment upregulates genes associated with cell migration and cell death, and downregulates genes related to mitosis and chromosome segregation in breast cancer cells, suggesting a potential mechanism of CMPD1 inhibition in breast cancer. Besides, they used the combination of an MK2-specific inhibitor, MK2-IN-3, with the microtubule depolymerizer vinblastine to simultaneously disrupt both the MK2 signaling pathway and microtubule dynamics, and they claim that inhibiting the p38-MK2 pathway may help to enhance the efficacy of MTAs in the treatment of breast cancer. However, there are a few concerns, including:

(1) What is the effect of CMPD1 on breast cancer metastasis?

(2) The mechanism is lacking as to how MK2 inhibitors enhance the efficacy of MTAs.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

By using an established NAFLD model, choline-deficient high-fat diet, Barros et al show that LPS challenge causes excessive IFN-γ production by hepatic NK cells which further induces recruitment and polarization of a PD-L1 positive neutrophil subset leading to massive TNFα production and increased host mortality. Genetic inhibition of IFN-γ or pharmacological blockade of PD-L1 decreases recruitment of these neutrophils and TNFα release, consequently preventing liver damage and decreasing host death.

Since NAFLD is often accompanied by chronic, low-grade inflammation, it can lead to an overactive but dysfunctional immune response and increase the body's overall susceptibility to infections, therefore this is a very important research question.

Weaknesses:

I have quite a lot of concerns with this manuscript. One of those is that the authors did not indeed show that the seen effect is really due to NAFLD itself. The role of choline is already known in the context of sepsis since its deficiency (which can be observed in about two weeks through deterioration of liver structure and function) leads to body organ dysfunction both in humans and animals. Nolan and Vilayat in 1968 showed that the hepatic injury and mortality due to endotoxinaemic shock induced by intraperitoneal injection of LPS was significantly increased in adult female Holtzman rats fed on a choline-deficient diet. Therefore, in order to really show that the effect is mediated due to NAFLD some other diet model must be used (e.g. high-fat, high-fructose, and high-cholesterol diet).

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

The authors are trying to determine if SFN treatment results in dephosphorylation of TFEB, subsequent activation of autophagy-related genes, exocytosis of lysosomes, and reduction in lysosomal cholesterol levels in models of NPC disease.

Strengths:

(1) Clear evidence that SFN results in translocation of TFEB to the nucleus.

(2) In vivo data demonstrating that SFN can rescue Purkinje neuron number and weight in NPC1-/- animals.

Weaknesses:

(1) Lack of molecular details regarding how SFN results in dephosphorylation of TFEB leading to activation of the aforementioned pathways. Currently, datasets represent correlations.

(2) Based on the manuscript narrative, discussion, and data it is unclear exactly how steady-state cholesterol would change in models of NPC disease following SFN treatment. Yes, there is good evidence that lysosomal flux to (and presumably across) the plasma membrane increases with SFN. However, lysosomal biogenesis genes also seem to be increasing. Given that NPC inhibition, NPC1 knockout, or NPC1 disease mutations are constitutively present and the cell models of NPC disease contain lysosomes (even with SFN) how could a simple increase in lysosomal flux decrease cholesterol levels? It would seem important to quantify the number of lysosomes per cell in each condition to begin to disentangle differences in steady state number of lysosomes, number of new lysosomes, and number of lysosomes being exocytosed.

(3) Lack of evidence supporting the authors' premise that "SFN could be a good therapeutic candidate for neuropathology in NPC disease".

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:

The work from Petazzi et al. aimed at identifying novel factors supporting the differentiation of human hematopoietic progenitors from induced-pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). The authors developed an inducible CRISPR-mediated activation strategy (iCRISPRa) to test the impact of newly identified candidate factors on the generation of hematopoietic progenitors in vitro. They first compared previously published transcriptomic data of iPSC-derived hemato-endothelial populations with cells isolated ex vivo from the aorta-gonad-mesonephros (AGM) region of the human embryo and they identified 9 transcription factors expressed in the aortic hemogenic endothelium that were poorly expressed in the in vitro differentiated cells. They then tested the activation of these candidate factors in an iPSC-based culture system supporting the differentiation of hematopoietic progenitors in vitro. They found that the IGF binding protein 2 (IGFBP2) was the most upregulated gene in arterial endothelium after activation and they demonstrated that IGFBP2 promotes the generation of functional hematopoietic progenitors in vitro.

Strengths:

The authors developed a very useful doxycycline-inducible system to activate the expression of specific candidate genes in human iPSC. This approach allows us to simultaneously test the impact of 9 different transcription factors on in vitro differentiation of hematopoietic cells, and the system appears to be very versatile and applicable to a broad variety of studies. Using this approach, the authors exhaustively demonstrated the role of IGFBP2 in promoting the generation of functional hematopoietic progenitors in vitro from iPSCs.

Weaknesses:

The authors performed a very thorough characterization of the system in proof-of-principle experiments activating a single transcription factor. However, when 9 independent factors were used, it is not always clear whether the observed results were the consequence of the simultaneous activation of all 9 TF or just a subset of them.

Reviewer #3 (Public review):

Summary:

Machhua et al. in their work focused on unravelling the molecular mechanism of daptomycin binding and interaction with bacterial cell membranes. Daptomycin (Dap) is an acidic, cyclic lipopeptide composed of 13 amino acids, known for preferential binding to anionic lipids, particularly phosphatidylglycerol (PG), which are prevalent components in the membranes of Gram-positive bacteria. The process of binding and antimicrobial efficacy of Dap are significantly influenced by the ionic composition of the surrounding environment, especially the presence of Ca2+ ions. The authors underscore the presence of significant knowledge gaps in our understanding of daptomycin's mode of action. Several critical questions remain unanswered, including the basis for selective recognition and accumulation in membranes of Gram-positive strains, the specific role of Ca2+ ions in this process, and the mechanisms by which daptomycin binds to and inserts into the cell membrane.

Dap is intrinsically fluorescent due to its kynurenine residue (Kyn-13) and this property allows direct imaging of Dap binding to model cell membranes without the need of additional labeling. Taking advantage of this Dap autofluorescence, authors monitored the emission intensity of micelles, composed of varying DMPG content upon their exposure to Dap and compared it with the kinetics of fluorescence observed for zwitterionic DMPC and other negatively charged lipids such as cardiolipin (CA), POPA and POPS. The authors noted that the linear relationship between DMPG content and Dap fluorescence is strongly lipid-specific, as it was not observed for other anionic lipids. The manuscript sheds light on the specificity of Dap's interaction with CA and DMPG lipids. Through Ca2+ sequestration with EGTA, the authors demonstrated that the binding of Dap with CA is reversible, while its interaction with DMPG results in the irreversible insertion of Dap into the lipid membrane structure, caused by the significant conformational change of this lipopeptide. The formation of a stable DMPG-Dap complex was also verified in bacterial cells isolated from Gram-positive bacteria B. subtilis, where Dap exhibited a permanent binding to PG lipids.

Altogether, the authors endeavored to illuminate novel insights into the molecular basis of Dap binding, interaction, and the mechanism of insertion into bacterial cell membranes. Such understanding holds promise for the development of innovative strategies in combating drug resistance and the emerging of the so-called superbugs.

Strengths:

- The manuscript by Machhua et al. provides a comprehensive analysis of the Dap mechanism of binding and interaction with the membrane. It discusses various aspects of this, only apparently trivial interaction such as the importance of PG presence in the membrane, the impact of Ca2+ ions, and different mechanisms of Dap binding with other negatively charged lipids.<br /> - The authors focused not only on model membranes (micelles) but also extended their research to bacterial cell membranes obtained from B. subtilis<br /> - The research is not only a report of the experimental findings but tries to give potential hypotheses explaining the molecular mechanisms behind the observed results

Weaknesses:

- The authors overestimate their findings, stating that they propose a novel mechanism of Dap interaction with bacterial cell membranes. This research is the extension of the hypotheses that have already been reported.<br /> - The literature study and overall discussion about the mechanism of action of Ca2+ ions or conformational changes of daptomycin could be improved.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

This work used a comprehensive dataset to compare the effects of species diversity and genetic diversity within each trophic level and across three trophic levels. The results stated that species diversity had negative effects on ecosystem functions, while genetic diversity had positive effects. Additionally, these effects were observed only within each trophic level and not across the three trophic levels studied. Although the effects of biodiversity, especially genetic diversity across multi-trophic levels, have been shown to be important, there are still very few empirical studies on this topic due to the complex relationships and difficulty in obtaining data. This study collected an excellent dataset to address this question, enhancing our understanding of genetic diversity effects in aquatic ecosystems.

Strengths:

The study collected an extensive dataset that includes species diversity of primary producers (riparian trees), primary consumers (macroinvertebrate shredders), and secondary consumers (fish). It also includes genetic diversity of the dominant species in each trophic level, biomass production, decomposition rates, and environmental data. The writing is logical and easy to follow.

Weaknesses:

The two main conclusions-(1) species diversity had negative effects on ecosystem functions, while genetic diversity had positive effects, and (2) these effects were observed only within each trophic level, not across the three levels-are overly generalized. Analysis of the raw data shows that species and genetic diversity have different effects depending on the ecosystem function. For example, neither affected invertebrate biomass, but species diversity positively influenced fish biomass, while genetic diversity had no effect. Furthermore, Table S2 reveals that only four effect sizes were significant (P < 0.05): one positive genetic effect, one negative genetic effect, and two negative species effects, with two effects within a trophic level and two across trophic levels. Additionally, using a P < 0.2 threshold to omit lines in the SEMs is uncommon and was not adequately justified. A more cautious interpretation of the results, with acknowledgment of the variability observed in the raw data, would strengthen the manuscript.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

This manuscript reports the substrate-bound structure of SiaQM from F. nucleatum, which is the membrane component of a Neu5Ac-specific Tripartite ATP-dependent Periplasmic (TRAP) transporter. Until recently, there was no experimentally derived structural information regarding the membrane components of TRAP transporter, limiting our understanding of the transport mechanism. Since 2022, there have been 3 different studies reporting the structures of the membrane components of Neu5Ac-specific TRAP transporters. While it was possible to narrow down the binding site location by comparing the structures to proteins of the same fold, a structure with substrate bound has been missing. In this work, the authors report the Na+-bound state and the Na+ plus Neu5Ac state of FnSiaQM, revealing information regarding substrate coordination. In previous studies, 2 Na+ ion sites were identified. Here, the authors also tentatively assign a 3rd Na+ site. The authors reconstitute the transporter to assess the effects of mutating the binding site residues they identified in their structures. Of the 2 positions tested, only one of them appears to be critical to substrate binding.

Strengths:

The main strength of this work is the capture of the substrate bound state of SiaQM, which provides insight into an important part of the transport cycle.

Weaknesses:

The main weakness is the lack of experimental validation of the structural findings. The authors identified the Neu5Ac binding site, but only test 2 residues for their involvement in substrate interactions, which is quite limited. However, comparison with previous mutagenesis studies on homologues supports the location of the Neu5Ac binding site. The authors tentatively identified a 3rd Na+ binding site, which if true would be an impactful finding, but this site was not sufficiently experimentally tested for its contribution to Na+ dependent transport. This lack of experimental validation prevents the authors from unequivocally assigning this site as a Na+ binding site. However, the reporting of these new data is important as it will facilitate follow up studies by the authors or other researchers.

Comments on revisions:

Overall, the authors have done a good job of addressing the reviewers' comments. It's good to know that the authors are working on the characterisation of the potential metal binding site mutants - characterising just a few of these will provide much needed experimental support for this potential Na+ site.<br /> The new MD simulations provide some additional support for the new Na+ site and could be included. However, as the authors know, direct experimental characterisation of mutants is the ideal evidence of the Na+ site.

Aside from the characterisation of mutants, which seems to be held up by technical issues, the only remaining issue is the comparison of the Na+- and Na+/Neu5Ac-bound states with ASCT2.<br /> It still does not make sense to me why the authors are not directly comparing their Na+ only and Na+/Neu5Ac states with the structures of VcINDY in the Na+-only and Na+/succinate bound states. These VcINDY structures also revealed no conformational changes in the HP loops upon binding succinate, as the authors see for SiaQM. Therefore, this comparison is very supportive. It is understood that the similarity to the DASS structure is mentioned on p.17, but it is also interesting and useful to note that TRAP and DASS transporters also share a lack of substrate-induced local conformational changes, to the extent these things have been measured.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

The authors analyzed the bacterial colonization of human sperm using 16S rRNA profiling. Patterns of microbiota colonization were subsequently correlated with clinical data, such as spermiogram analysis, presence of reactive oxygen species (ROS), and DNA fragmentation. The authors identified three main clusters dominated by Streptococcus, Prevotella, and Lactobacillus & Gardnerella, respectively, which aligns with previous observations. Specific associations were observed for certain bacterial genera, such as Flavobacterium and semen quality. Overall, it is a well-conducted study that further supports the importance of the seminal microbiota.

Strengths:

- The authors performed the analysis on 223 samples, which is the largest dataset in semen microbiota analysis so far<br /> - Inclusion of negative controls to control contaminations.<br /> - Inclusion of a positive control group consisting of men with proven fertility.

Weaknesses:

- The manuscript needs comprehensive proofreading for language and formatting. In many instances spaces are missing or not required.<br /> - Could the authors explore correlation network analyses to get additional insights in the structure of different clusters?<br /> - The github link is not correct.<br /> - It is not possible to access the dataset on ENA.<br /> - Add the graphs obtained with decontam analysis as a supplementary figure.<br /> - There is nothing about the RPL group in the results section, while the authors discuss this issue in the introduction. What about the controls with proven fertility?<br /> - While correctly stated in the title, the term microbiota should be used throughout the manuscript instead of "microbiome"

Comments on revised version:

Discussion: Could the authors discuss more the findings about Flavobacterium? Has it ever been associated with the urogenital tract? What is the relative abundance in the present study: this type of bacterium has been previously associated with contaminations (PMID: 25387460, 30497919).

Figure 1: Increase the size of panel A.

Figure 3: Can the authors indicate the relative abundance of each genus/species by the size of the node?

Supplementary data: I don't see anywhere the decontam plots.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

The research study under review investigated the relationship between gut and identified potential biomarkers derived from the nasopharyngeal and gut microbiota-based that could aid predicting COVID-19 severity. The study reported significant changes in the richness and Shannon diversity index in nasopharyngeal microbiome associated with severe symptoms.

Strengths:

The study successfully identified differences in the microbiome diversity that could indicate or predict disease severity. Furthermore, the authors demonstrated a link between individual nasopharyngeal organisms and the severity of SARS-CoV-2 infection. The density of the nasopharyngeal organism was shown to be a potential predictors of severity of COVID-19.

Weaknesses:

The authors claimed an association between nasopharyngeal organisms and severity of of SARS-CoV-2 infection but omitted essential data on the actual p-values and percentages to show significance of their results.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

In the manuscript entitled "Magnesium modulates phospholipid metabolism to promote bacterial phenotypic resistance to antibiotics", Li et al demonstrated the role of magnesium in promoting phenotypic resistance in V. alginolyticus. Using standard microbiological and metabolomic techniques, the authors have shown the significance of fatty acid biosynthesis pathway behind the resistance mechanism. This study is significant as it sheds light on the role of an exogenous factor in altering membrane composition, polarization and fluidity which ultimately leads to antimicrobial resistance.

Strengths:

Authors have used different approaches to demonstrate the effect of Mg+2 on drug resistance in Vibrio alginolyticus. The revised version of the manuscript is much improved, with a very informative introduction and a variety of methodologies with clear explanation of the experiments performed. Also, additional experiments were performed as suggested by the reviewers which certainly enhanced the quality of the paper. I believe the findings of this study will be of high impact in the bacterial community.

Weaknesses:

There are a few grammatical mistakes.

Comments on revisions:

The authors have done a comprehensive job of addressing all my concerns in their revised version.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

In this paper Homan et al used mouse models of Metabolic Dysfunction-Associated Steatotic Liver Disease and different specific target deletions in cells to rule out the role of Complement 3a Receptor 1 in the pathogenesis of disease. They provided limited evidence and only descriptive results that despite C3aR being relevant in different contexts of inflammation, however, these tenets did not hold true.

Comments on revisions:

The revised version fulfilled my queries.

Reviewer #2 (Public review):

Summary:

The manuscript by Bock and colleagues describes generation of an AAV-delivered adenine base editing strategy to knockdown PTBP1 and the behavioral and neurorestorative effects of specifically knocking down striatal or nigral PTBP1 in astrocytes or neurons in a mouse model of Parkinson disease. The authors found that knocking down PTBP1 in neurons, but not astrocytes, and in striatum, but not nigra, results in the phenotypic reorganization of neurons to TH+ cells sufficient to rescue motor phenotypes, though insufficient to normalize responses to dopaminomimetic drugs.

Strengths:

The manuscript is well-written and adds to the growing literature challenging previous findings by Qian et al., 2020 and Zhou et al., 2020 indicating that astrocytic downregulation of PTBP1 can induce conversion to dopaminergic neurons in the midbrain and improve parkinsonian symptoms. The base editing approach is interesting and potentially more therapeutically relevant than previous approaches.

Weaknesses:

The animal model utilized, the 6-OHDA model, though useful to examine dopaminergic cell loss, exhibits accelerated neurodegeneration and none of the typical pathological hallmarks (synucleinopathy, Lewy bodies, etc.) compared to the typical etiology of Parkinson disease, limiting its translational interpretation. The identity of the converted neurons is unclear. Though the immunohistochemical methodology indicates they may be MSNs and/or interneurons, a more comprehensive identity is still lacking. There remains no real evidence that these cells actually release dopamine. Since striatal dopamine was assessed by whole-tissue analysis, which is not necessarily reflective of synaptic dopamine availability, it is difficult to assess whether the ~10% increase in TH+ cells in the striatum was sufficient to improve dopamine function. However, the improvement in motor activity suggests that it was.

Reviewer #2 (Public review):

Summary:

The authors aimed to investigate the functionality of the GnRH (gonadotropin-releasing hormone) pulse generator in different mouse models to understand its role in reproductive physiology and its implications for conditions like polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). They compared the GnRH pulse generator activity in control mice, peripubertal androgen (PPA) treated mice, and prenatal androgen (PNA) exposed mice. The study sought to elucidate how androgen exposure affects the GnRH pulse generator and subsequent LH (luteinizing hormone) secretion, contributing to the pathophysiology of PCOS.

Strengths:

(1) Comprehensive Model Selection: The use of both PPA and PNA mouse models allows for a comparative analysis that can distinguish the effects of different timings of androgen exposure.

(2) Detailed Methodology: The methods employed, such as photometry recordings and serial blood sampling, are robust and allow for precise measurement of GnRH pulse generator activity and LH secretion.

(3) Clear Results Presentation: The experimental results are well-documented with appropriate statistical analyses, ensuring the findings are reliable and reproducible.

(4) Relevance to PCOS: The study addresses a significant gap in understanding the neuroendocrine mechanisms underlying PCOS, making the findings relevant to both basic science and potentially clinical research.

Weaknesses

(1) Model Limitations: While the PNA mouse model is suggested as the most appropriate for studying PCOS, the authors acknowledge that it does not completely replicate the human condition, particularly the elevated LH response seen in women with PCOS.

(2) Complex Data Interpretation: The reduced progesterone feedback and its effects on the GnRH pulse generator in PNA mice add complexity to data interpretation, making it challenging to draw straightforward conclusions.

(3) Machine Learning (ML) Selection and Validation: While k-means clustering is a useful tool for pattern recognition, the manuscript lacks detailed justification for choosing this specific algorithm over other potential methods. The robustness of clustering results has not been validated.

(4) Biological Interpretability: Although the machine learning approach identified cyclical patterns, the biological interpretation of these clusters in the context of PCOS is not thoroughly discussed. A deeper exploration of how these clusters correlate with physiological and pathological states could enhance the study's impact.

(5) Sample Size: The study uses a relatively small number of animals (n=4-7 per group), which may limit the generalisability of the findings. Larger sample sizes could provide more robust and statistically significant results.

(6) Scope of Application: The findings, while interesting, are primarily applicable to mouse models. The translation to human physiology requires cautious interpretation and further validation.

Comments on revised version:

I did not find the response to my main concerns regarding justification for the choice of the number of clusters (k) and providing evidence of cluster robustness satisfactory at all. It sounds contradictory to me to state that the authors have used unsupervised ML approach when at the same time had clear understanding of the data and the features they wanted to capture. Unsupervised approaches are meant to reveal features that are not apparent by eye... however in their response the authors state, "...our aim was to develop an unsupervised approach that would automatically detect the onset and existence of the key features of pulse generator cyclicity that were apparent by eye...". This sounds like a rather supervised ML approach to me.<br /> Furthermore, I am still unsure why did the authors choose k=5, i.e. assumed there are 5 clusters in the data, and did they explore other possible values for k?<br /> - If not why not? How does this fit with the claims that their ML approach is unsupervised, in other words purely data-driven without making any assumptions?<br /> - If yes did they compare the robustness of their clustering results obtained for different values of k?

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:

This paper presents an innovative decoding approach for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), introducing a new method named MINT. The authors develop a trajectory-centric approach to decode behaviors across several different datasets, including eight empirical datasets from the Neural Latents Benchmark. Overall, the paper is well written and their method shows impressive performance compared to more traditional decoding approaches that use a simpler approach. While there are some concerns (see below), the paper's strengths, particularly its emphasis on a trajectory-centric approach and the simplicity of MINT, provide a compelling contribution to the field.

Strengths:

The adoption of a trajectory-centric approach that utilizes statistical constraints presents a substantial shift in methodology, potentially revolutionizing the way BCIs interpret and predict neural behaviour. This is one of the strongest aspects of the paper.

The thorough evaluation of the method across various datasets serves as an assurance that the superior performance of MINT is not a result of overfitting. The comparative simplicity of the method in contrast to many neural network approaches is refreshing and should facilitate broader applicability.

Weaknesses:

Scope: Despite the impressive performance of MINT across multiple datasets, it seems predominantly applicable to M1/S1 data. Only one of the eight empirical datasets comes from an area outside the motor/somatosensory cortex. It would be beneficial if the authors could expand further on how the method might perform with other brain regions that do not exhibit low tangling or do not have a clear trial structure (e.g. decoding of position or head direction from hippocampus)

When comparing methods, the neural trajectories of MINT are based on averaged trials, while the comparison methods are trained on single trials. An additional analysis might help in disentangling the effect of the trial averaging. For this, the authors could average the input across trials for all decoders, establishing a baseline for averaged trials. Note that inference should still be done on single trials. Performance can then be visualized across different values of N, which denotes the number of averaged trials used for training.

Comments on revisions:

I have looked at the responses and they are thorough and answer all of my questions.

Reviewer #2 (Public review):

Summary:

This work proposes a synaptic plasticity rule which explains the generation of learned stochastic dynamics during spontaneous activity. The proposed plasticity rule assumes that excitatory synapses seek to minimize the difference between the internal predicted activity and stimulus-evoked activity, and inhibitory synapses tries to maintain the E-I balance by matching the excitatory activity. By implementing this plasticity rule in a spiking recurrent neural network, the authors show that the state-transition statistics of spontaneous excitatory activity agrees with that of the learned stimulus patterns, which is reflected in the learned excitatory synaptic weights. The authors further demonstrate that inhibitory connections contribute to well-defined state-transitions matching the transition patterns evoked by the stimulus. Finally, they show that this mechanism can be expanded to more complex state-transition structures including songbird neural data.

Strengths:

This study makes an important contribution to computational neuroscience, by proposing a possible synaptic plasticity mechanism underlying spontaneous generations of learned stochastic state-switching dynamics that are experimentally observed in the visual cortex and hippocampus. This work is also very clearly presented and well-written, and the authors conducted comprehensive simulations testing multiple hypotheses. Overall, I believe this is a well-conducted study providing interesting and novel aspects on the capacity of recurrent spiking neural networks with local synaptic plasticity.

Weaknesses:

This study is very well-thought out and theoretically valuable to the neuroscience community, and I think the main weaknesses are in regard to how much biological realism is taken into account. For example, the proposed model assumes that only synapses targeting excitatory neurons are plastic, and uses an equal number of excitatory and inhibitory neurons.<br /> The model also assumes Markovian state dynamics while biological systems can depend more on history. This limitation, however, is acknowledged in the Discussion.<br /> Finally, to simulate spontaneous activity, the authors use a constant input of 0.3 throughout the study. Different amplitudes of constant input may correspond to different internal states, so it will be more convincing if the authors test the model with varying amplitudes of constant inputs.

Comments on revisions:

The authors have addressed all of the previously raised concerns satisfactorily, by running extra simulations with a biologically plausible composition of excitatory and inhibitory neurons, plasticity assumed for all synapses, and varied amounts of constant inputs representing internal states or background activities. While in some of these cases the stochastic dynamics during spontaneous activity change or do not replicate those of the learned stimulus patterns as well as before, these extended studies provide thorough evaluations of the strengths and limitations of the proposed plasticity rule as the underlying mechanism of stochastic dynamics during spontaneous activity. Overall, the revision has strengthened the paper significantly.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

The authors aimed to quantify feral pig interactions in eastern Australia to inform disease transmission networks. They used GPS tracking data from 146 feral pigs across multiple locations to construct proximity-based social networks and analyze contact rates within and between pig social units.

Strengths:

(1) Addresses a critical knowledge gap in feral pig social dynamics in Australia.

(2) Uses robust methodology combining GPS tracking and network analysis.

(3) Provides valuable insights into sex-based and seasonal variations in contact rates.

(4) Effectively contextualizes findings for disease transmission modeling and management.

(5) Includes comprehensive ethical approval for animal research.

(6) Utilizes data from multiple locations across eastern Australia, enhancing generalizability.

Weaknesses:

(1) Limited discussion of potential biases from varying sample sizes across populations

(2) Some key figures are in supplementary materials rather than the main text.

(3) Economic impact figures are from the US rather than Australia-specific data.

(4) Rationale for spatial and temporal thresholds for defining contacts could be clearer.

(5) Limited discussion of ethical considerations beyond basic animal ethics approval.

The authors largely achieved their aims, with the results supporting their conclusions about the importance of sex and seasonality in feral pig contact networks. This work is likely to have a significant impact on feral pig management and disease control strategies in Australia, providing crucial data for refining disease transmission models.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

The paper explored cross-species variance in albumin glycation and blood glucose levels in the function of various life-history traits. Their results show that<br /> (1) blood glucose levels predict albumin gylcation rates<br /> (2) larger species have lower blood glucose levels<br /> (3) lifespan positively correlates with blood glucose levels and<br /> (4) diet predicts albumin glycation rates.

The data presented is interesting, especially due to the relevance of glycation to the ageing process and the interesting life-history and physiological traits of birds. Most importantly, the results suggest that some mechanisms might exist that limit the level of glycation in species with the highest blood glucose levels.

While the questions raised are interesting and the amount of data the authors collected is impressive, I have some major concerns about this study:

(1) The authors combine many databases and samples of various sources. This is understandable when access to data is limited, but I expected more caution when combining these. E.g. glucose is measured in all samples without any description of how handling stress was controlled for. E.g glucose levels can easily double in a few minutes in birds, potentially introducing variation in the data generated. The authors report no caution of this effect, or any statistical approaches aiming to check whether handling stress had an effect here, either on glucose or on glycation levels.

(2) The database with the predictors is similarly problematic. There is information pulled from captivity and wild (e.g. on lifespan) without any confirmation that the different databases are comparable or not (and here I'm not just referring to the correlation between the databases, but also to a potential systematic bias (e.g. captivate-based sources likely consistently report longer lifespans). This is even more surprising, given that the authors raise the possibility of captivity effects in the discussion, and exploring this question would be extremely easy in their statistical models (a simple covariate in the MCMCglmms).

(3) The authors state that the measurement of one of the primary response variables (glycation) was measured without any replicability test or reference to the replicability of the measurement technique.

(4) The methods and results are very poorly presented. For instance, new model types and variables are popping up throughout the manuscript, already reporting results, before explaining what these are e.g. results are presented on "species average models" and "model with individuals", but it's not described what these are and why we need to see both. Variables, like "centered log body mass", or "mass-adjusted lifespan" are not explained. The results section is extremely long, describing general patterns that have little relevance to the questions raised in the introduction and would be much more efficiently communicated visually or in a table.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

This manuscript explores the RNA binding activities of the fission yeast Swi6 (HP1) protein and proposes a new role for Swi6 in RNAi-mediated heterochromatin establishment. The authors claim that Swi6 has a specific and high affinity for short interfering RNAs (siRNAs) and recruits the Clr4 (Suv39h) H3K9 methyltransferases to siRNA-DNA hybrids to initiate heterochromatin formation. These claims are not in any way supported by the incomplete and preliminary RNA binding or the in vivo experiments that the authors present. The proposed model also lacks any mechanistic basis as it remains unclear (and unexplored) how Swi6 might bind to specific small RNA sequences or RNA-DNA hybrids. Work by several other groups in the field has led to a model in which siRNAs produced by the RNAi pathway load onto the Ago1-containing RITS complex, which then binds to nascent transcripts at pericentromeric DNA repeats and recruits Clr4 to initiate heterochromatin formation. Swi6 facilitates this process by promoting the recruitment of the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase leading to siRNA amplification.

Weaknesses:

(1) The claims that Swi6 binds to specific small RNAs or to RNA-DNA hybrids are not supported by the evidence that the authors present. Their experiments do not rule out non-specific charged-based interactions. Claims about different affinities of Swi6 for RNAs of different sizes are based on a comparison of KD values derived by the authors for a handful of S. pombe siRNAs with previous studies from the Buhler lab on Swi6 RNA binding. The authors need to compare binding affinities under identical conditions in their assays. The regions of Swi6 that bind to siRNAs need to be identified and evidence must be provided that Swi6 binds to RNAs of a specific length, 20-22 mers, to support the claim that Swi6 binds to siRNAs. This is critical for all the subsequent experiments and claims in the study.

(2) The in vivo results do not validate Swi6 binding to specific RNAs, as stated by the authors. Swi6 pulldowns have been shown to be enriched for all heterochromatic proteins including the RITS complex. The sRNA binding observed by the authors is therefore likely to be mediated by Ago1/RITS.

Most of the binding in Figure S8C seems to be non-specific.

In Figure S8D, the authors' data shows that Swi6 deletion does not derepress the rev dh transcript while dcr1 delete cells do, which is consistent with previous reports but does not relate to the authors' conclusions.

Previous results have shown that swi6 delete cells have 20-fold fewer dg and dh siRNAs than swi6+ cells due to decreased RNA-dependent RNA polymerase complex recruitment and reduced siRNA amplification.

(3) The RIP-seq data are difficult to interpret as presented. The size distribution of bound small RNAs, and where they map along the genome should be shown as for example presented in previous Ago1 sRNA-seq experiments.

It is also unclear whether the defects in sRNA binding observed by the authors represent direct sRNA binding to Swi6 or co-precipitation of Ago1-bound sRNAs.

The authors should also sequence total sRNAs to test whether Swi6-3A affects sRNA synthesis, as is the case in swi6 delete cells.

(4) The authors examine the effects of Swi6-3A mutant by overexpression from the strong nmt1 promoter. Heterochromatin formation is sensitive to the dosage of Swi6. These experiments should be performed by introducing the 3A mutations at the endogenous Swi6 locus and effects on Swi6 protein levels should be tested.

(5) The authors' data indicate an impairment of silencing in Swi6-3A mutant cells but whether this is due to a general lower affinity for nucleosomes, DNA, RNA, or as claimed by the authors, siRNAs is unclear. These experiments are consistent with previous findings suggesting an important role for basic residues in the HP1 hinge region in gene silencing but do not reveal how the hinge region enhances silencing.

(6) RNase H1 overexpression may affect Swi6 localization and silencing indirectly as it would lead to a general reduction in R loops and RNA-DNA hybrids across the genome. RNaseH1 OE may also release chromatin-bound RNAs that act as scaffolds for siRNA-Ag1/RITS complexes that recruit Clr4 and ultimately Swi6.

(7) Examples of inaccurate presentation of the literature.<br /> a. The authors state that "RNA binding by the murine HP1 through its hinge domains is required for heterochromatin assembly (Muchardt et al, 2002). The cited reference provides no evidence that HP1 RNA binding is required for heterochromatin assembly. Only the hinge region of bacterially produced HP1 contributes to its localization to DAPI-stained heterochromatic regions in fixed NIH 3T3 cells.<br /> b. "... This scenario is consistent with the loss of heterochromatin recruitment of Swi6 as well as siRNA generation in rnai mutants (Volpe et al, 2002)." Volpe et al. did not examine changes in siRNA levels in swi6 mutant cells. In fact, no siRNA analysis of any kind was reported in Volpe et al., 2002.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

Brdar, Osterburg, Munick, et al. present an interesting cellular and biochemical investigation of different p53 isoforms. The authors investigate the impact of different isoforms on the in-vivo transcriptional activity, protein stability, induction of the stress response, and hetero-oligomerization with WT p53. The results are logically presented and clearly explained. Indeed, the large volume of data on different p53 isoforms will provide a rich resource for researchers in the field to begin to understand the biochemical effects of different truncations or sequence alterations.

Strengths:

The authors achieved their aims to better understand the impact/activity of different p53 is-forms, and their data will support their statements. Indeed, the major strengths of the paper lie in its comprehensive characterization of different p53 isoforms and the different assays that are measured. Notably, this includes p53 transcriptional activity, protein degradation, induction of the chaperone machinery, and hetero-oligomerization with wtp53. This will provide a valuable dataset where p53 researchers can evaluate the biological impact of different isoforms in different cell lines. The authors went to great lengths to control and test for the effect of (1) p53 expression level, (2) promotor type, and (3) cell type. I applaud their careful experiments in this regard.

Weaknesses:

One thing that I would have liked to see more of is the quantification of the various pull-down/gel assays - to better quantify the effect of, e.g., hetero-oligomerization among the various isoforms. In addition, a discussion about the role of isoforms that contain truncations in the IDRs is not available. It is well known that these regions function in an auto-inhibitory manner (e.g. work by Wright/Dyson) and also mediate many PPIs, which likely have functional roles in vivo (e.g. recruiting p53 to various complexes). The discussion could be strengthened by focusing on some of these aspects of p53 as well.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

The authors' goal was to advance the understanding of metabolic flux in the bradyzoite cyst form of the parasite T. gondii, since this is a major form of transmission of this ubiquitous parasite, but very little is understood about cyst metabolism and growth.

Nonetheless, this is an important advance in understanding and targeting bradyzoite growth.

Strengths:

The study used a newly developed technique for growing T. gondii cystic parasites in a human muscle-cell myotube format, which enables culturing and analysis of cysts. This enabled the screening of a set of anti-parasitic compounds to identify those that inhibit growth in both vegetative (tachyzoite) forms and bradyzoites (cysts). Three of these compounds were used for comparative Metabolomic profiling to demonstrate differences in metabolism between the two cellular forms.

One of the compounds yielded a pattern consistent with targeting the mitochondrial bc1 complex and suggests a role for this complex in metabolism in the bradyzoite form, an important advance in understanding this life stage.

Weaknesses:

Studies such as these provide important insights into the overall metabolic differences between different life stages, and they also underscore the challenge of interpreting individual patterns caused by metabolic inhibitors due to the systemic level of some of the targets, so that some observed effects are indirect consequences of the inhibitor action. While the authors make a compelling argument for focusing on the role of the bc1 complex, there are some inconsistencies in the patterns that underscore the complexity of metabolic systems.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

Wang et al. investigate sexual dimorphic changes in the transcriptome of aged humans. This study relies upon analysis of the Genotype-Tissue Expression dataset that includes 54 tissues from human donors. The authors investigate 17,000 transcriptomes from 35 tissues to investigate the effect of age and sex on transcriptomic variation, including the analysis of alternative splicing. Alternative splicing is becoming more appreciated as an influence in the aging process, but how it is affected by sexual dimorphism is still largely unclear. The authors investigated multiple tissues but ended up distilling brain tissue down to four separate regions: decision, hormone, memory, and movement. Building upon prior work, the authors used an analysis method called principal component-based signal-to-variation ratio (pcSVR) to quantify differences between sex or age by considering data dispersion. This method also considers differentially expressed genes and alternative splicing events.

Strengths:

(1) The authors investigate sexual dimorphism on gene expression and alternative splicing events with age in multiple tissues from a large publicly available data set that allows for reanalysis.

(2) Furthermore, the authors take into account the ethnic background of donors. Identification of aging-modulating genes could be useful for the reanalysis of prior data sets.

Weaknesses:

The models built off of the GTEx dataset should be tested in another data set (ex. Alzheimer's disease) where there are functional changes that can be correlated. Gene-length-dependent transcription decline, which occurs with age and disease, should also be investigated in this data set for potential sexual dimorphism.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

Hurtado et al. show that Sox9 is essential for retinal integrity, and its null mutation causes the loss of the outer nuclear layer (ONL). The authors then show that this absence of the ONL is due to apoptosis of photoreceptors and a reduction in the numbers of other retinal cell types such as ganglion cells, amacrine cells, and horizontal cells. They also describe that Müller Glia undergoes reactive gliosis by upregulating the Glial Fibrillary Acidic Protein. The authors then show that Sox9+ progenitors proliferate and differentiate to generate the corneal cells through Sox9 lineage-tracing experiments. They validate Sox9 expression and characterize its dynamics in limbal stem cells using an existing single-cell RNA sequencing dataset. Finally, the authors argue that Sox9 deletion causes progenitor cells to lose their clonogenic capacity by comparing the sizes of control and Sox9-null clones. Overall, Hurtado et al. underline the importance of Sox9 function in retinal and corneal cells.

Strengths:

The authors have characterized a myriad of striking phenotypes due to Sox9 deletion in the retina and limbal stem cells which will serve as a basis for future studies.

Weaknesses:

Hurtado et al. investigate the importance of Sox9 in the retina and limbal stem cells. However, the overall experimental narrative appears dispersed.

The authors begin by characterizing the phenotype of Sox9 deletion in the retina and show that the absence of the ON layer is due to photoreceptor apoptosis and a reduction in other retinal cell types. The authors also note that Müller glia undergoes gliosis in the Sox9 deletion condition. These striking observations are never investigated further, and instead, the authors switch to lineage-tracing experiments in the limbus that seem disconnected from the first three figures of the paper. Another example of this disconnect is the comparison of Sox9 high and Sox9 low populations using an existing scRNA-seq dataset and the subsequent GO term analysis, which does not directly tie in with the lineage-tracing data of the succeeding Sox9∆/∆ experiments.

A major concern is that a single Sox9∆/∆ limbal clone has a sufficiently large size, comparable to wild-type clones, as seen in Figure 6D. This singular result is contrary to their conclusion, which states that Sox9-deficient stem cells minimally contribute to the maintenance of the cornea.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

This work investigates numerically the propagation of subthreshold waves in a model neural network that is derived from the C. elegans connectome. Using a scattering formalism and tight-binding description of the network -- approximations which are commonplace in condensed matter physics -- this work attempts at showing the relevance of interference phenomena, such as wavenumber-dependent propagation, for the dynamics of subthreshold waves propagating in a network of electrical synapses.

Strengths:

The primary strength of the work is in trying to use theoretical tools from a far-away corner of fundamental physics to shed light on the properties of a real neural system.

Weaknesses:

The authors provide a good introduction and motivation for studying the propagation of subthreshold oscillations in the inferior olive nuclei. However, they chose to use the C elegans connectome for their study, and the implications of this work for C elegans neuroscience remain unclear by the end of the preprint. The authors should also give more evidence for the claim that their study may give a mechanism for synchronized rhythmic activity in the mammalian inferior olive nucleus, or refrain from making this conclusion. In the same vein, since the work emphasizes the dependence on the wavenumber for the propagation of subthreshold oscillations, they should make an attempt at estimating the wavenumber of subthreshold oscillations in C elegans if they were to exist and be observed. Next, the presence of two "mobility edges" in the transmission coefficient calculated in this work is unmistakably due to the discrete nature of the system, coming from the tight-binding approximation, and it is unclear to me if this approximation is justified in the current system. Similarly, it is possible that the wavenumber-dependent transmission observed depends strongly on the addition of a large number of virtual nodes (VNs) in the network, which the authors give little to no motivation for. As these nodes are not present in the C elegans connectome, the authors should explain the motivation for their inclusion in the model and should discuss their consequences on the transmission properties of the network. As it stands, I think the work would only have a very limited impact on the understanding of subthreshold oscillations in the rat or in C elegans. Indeed, the preprint falls short of relating its numerical results to any phenomena which could be observed in the lab.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

What neurophysiological changes support the learning of new sensorimotor transformations is a key question in neuroscience. Many studies have attempted to answer this question at the neuronal population level - with varying degrees of success - but few, if any, have studied the change in activity of the apical dendrites of layer 5 cortical neurons. Neurons in the layer 5 of the sensory cortex appear to play a key role in sensorimotor transformations, showing important decision and reward-related signals, and being the main source of cortical and subcortical projections from the cortex. In particular, pyramidal track (PT) neurons project directly to subcortical regions related to motor activity, such as the striatum and brainstem, and could initiate rapid motor action in response to given sensory inputs. Additionally, layer 5 cortical neurons have large apical dendrites that extend to layer 1 where different neuromodulatory and long-range inputs converge, providing motor and contextual information that could be used to modulate layer 5 neurons output and/or to establish the synaptic plasticity required for learning a new association.

In this study, the authors aimed to test whether the learning of a new sensorimotor transformation could be supported by a change in the evoked response of the apical dendrites of layer 5 neurons in the mouse whisker primary somatosensory cortex. To do this, they performed longitudinal functional calcium imaging of the apical dendrites of layer 5 neurons while mice learned to discriminate between two multiwhiskers stimuli. The authors used a simple conditioning task in which one whisker stimulus (upward or backward air puff, CS+) is associated with reward after a short delay, while the other whisker stimulus (CS-) is not. They found that task learning (measured by the probability of anticipatory licking just after the CS+) was not associated with a significant change of the average population response evoked by the CS+ or the CS-, nor change in the average population selectivity. However, when considering individual dendritic tufts, they found interesting changes in selectivity, with approximately equal numbers of dendrites becoming more selective for CS+ and dendrites becoming more selective for CS-.

One of the major challenges when assessing changes in neural representation during the learning of such Go/NoGo tasks is that the movements and rewards themselves may elicit strong neural responses that may be a confounding factor, that is, inexperienced mice do not lick in response to the CS+, while trained mice do. In this study, the authors addressed this issue in three ways: first, they carefully monitor the orofacial movements of mice and show that task learning is not associated with changes in evoked whisker movements. Second, they show that whisking or licking evokes very little activity in the dendritic tufts compared to whisker stimuli (CS+ and CS-). Finally, the authors introduced into the design of their task a post-conditioning session after the last conditioning session during which the CS+ and the CS- are presented but no reward is delivered. During this post-session, the mice gradually stopped licking in response to the CS+. A better design might have been to perform the pre-conditioning and post-conditioning sessions in non-water-restricted, unmotivated mice to completely exclude any lick response, but the fact that the change in selectivity persists after the mice stopped licking in the last blocks of the post-conditioning session (in mice relying only on their whiskers to perform the task) is convincing.

The clever task design and careful data analysis provide compelling evidence that learning this whisker discrimination task does not result in a massive change in sensory representation in the apical dendritic tufts of layer 5 neurons in the primary somatosensory cortex on average. Nevertheless, individual dendritic tufts do increase their selectivity for one or the other sensory stimulus, likely enhancing the ability of S1 neurons to accurately discriminate the two stimuli and trigger the appropriate motor response (to lick or not to lick).

One limitation of the present study is the lack of evidence for the necessity of the primary somatosensory cortex in the learning and execution of the task. As the authors have strongly emphasized in their previous publications, the primary somatosensory cortex may not be necessary for the learning and execution of simple whisker detection tasks, especially when the stimulus is very salient. Although this new task requires the discrimination between two whisker stimuli, the simplicity and salience of the whisker stimuli used could make this task cortex independent. Especially when considering that some mice seem to not rely entirely on their whiskers to execute the task.

Nevertheless, this is an important result that shows for the first-time changes in the selectivity to sensory stimuli at the level of individual apical dendritic tufts in correlation with the learning of a discrimination task. This study sheds new light on the cortical cellular substrates of reward-based learning, and opens interesting perspectives for future research in this area. In future studies, it will be important to determine whether the change in selectivity of dendritic calcium spikes is causally involved in the learning the task or whether it simply correlates with learning, as a consequence of changes in synaptic inputs caused by reward. The dendritic calcium spikes may be involved in the establishment of synaptic plasticity required for learning and impact the output of layer 5 pyramidal neurons to trigger the appropriate motor response. It would be important also to study the changes in selectivity in the apical dendrite of the identified projection neurons.

Comments on revisions:

The authors have addressed all my questions. I have no further recommendations.

Reviewer #2 (Public review):

Summary:

The manuscript proposes a new technology to survey insects. They deployed optical sensors in agricultural landscapes and contrast their results to those in classical malaise and sweep nets survey methodologies. They found the results of optical sensors to be comparable with classical survey methodologies. The authors discuss pros and cons of their near-infrared sensor.

Strengths:

Contrasting the results with optical sensors with those in classical malaise and sweep nets was a clever idea.

Weaknesses:

The submitted materials on Revision 1 (in particular the response to reviewers) are difficult to follow. I encourage the authors to provide a point-by-point response to the first set of comments, as well as to this second review.

A new version of the manuscript needs to make sure that variability in the system (different crops) is taken into consideration. Also, stronger analysis including our current understanding of biodiversity metrics (including measures of sample coverage, sample completeness, Hill numbers, among others) will be important to make sure your new methodology is properly capable to be used as a new standard methodology.

While this new version is stronger and much clearer, I also agree with Reviewer 1 that the usage of terminology is weak. The paper and the new methodology is sound. It is is the application to real ecosystems/questions and datasets that is not properly addressed in the manuscript.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

This paper explores how diverse forms of inhibition impact firing rates in models for cortical circuits. In particular, the paper studies how the network operating point affects the balance of direct inhibition from SOM inhibitory neurons to pyramidal cells, and disinhibition from SOM inhibitory input to PV inhibitory neurons. This is an important issue as these two inhibitory pathways have largely been studies in isolation. Support for the main conclusions is generally solid, but could be strengthened by additional analyses.

Strengths

The paper has improved in revision, and the new intuitive summary statements added to the end of each results section are quite helpful.

Weaknesses

The concern about whether the results hold outside of the range in which neural responses are linear remains. This is particularly true given the discontinuity observed in the stability measure. I appreciate the concern (provided in the response to the first round of reviews) that studying nonlinear networks requires a lot of work. A more limited undertaking would be to test the behavior of a spiking network at a few key points identified by your linearization approach. Such tests could use relatively simple (and perhaps imperfect) measures of gain and stability. This could substantially enhance the paper, regardless of the outcome.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

In this preprint, Madrigal et al present "Tom1p ubiquitin ligase structure, interaction with Spt6p, and function in maintaining normal transcript levels and the stability of chromatin in promoters" which describes the identification of Tom1p, a conserved ubiquitin ligase, as a potential binding partner for the transcription elongation/histone chaperone Spt6p, and reveal the Tom1p structure as determined by CryoEM. Tom1p is a homolog of human HUWE1, which has been implicated in decay for a variety of basic protein substrates such as ribosomal proteins and histones. Structure-function analyses identify regions required for Spt6p interaction, suggesting that the interaction with Spt6p is phosphorylation dependent, and for interactions with histones, the latter of which confers phenotypes in vivo when mutated, suggesting that the Tom1p acidic region is important for its function. What is less clear is the function or interaction with Spt6p. The manuscript speculates that Spt6p-Tom1p interactions may tune Tom1p localization, and it is shown that Tom1p is recruited to transcribed genes by chromatin IP. In addition, the Tom1p structure will be valuable to those trying to understand the mechanisms of this very large ubiquitin ligase. Here, structures of homologs from other organisms have already been described elsewhere, however, the authors here indicate some details potentially not previously visualized in other structures.

Strengths:

It has not previously been known that the Spt6p tSH2 had any additional targets. Interaction with a ubiquitin ligase already implicated in histone turnover given Spt6p's role as histone chaperone is interesting. A structure of Tom1p also provides insight into this very large, conserved protein and structure-function analysis in a model system is a good start towards mechanistic dissection.

Weaknesses:

Some aspects of the manuscript seem less cohesive in that there are two halves of the manuscript and both don't quite solidify insights into the Spt6p relationship to Tom1p or deepen our understanding of Tom1p mechanism extensively, though results are a great start on both sides of the paper. There are several points that are less clear in that it is not known if Spt6p interacts with Tom1p and in what context. The interaction surface of Spt6p able to interact with Tom1p is the identical tSH2 that would be predicted to be occupied by phosphorylated RNAPII when Spt6p is incorporated into the RNAPII elongation complex. This means how and when Spt6p might be available to interact with Tom1p is not clear. Previous work from the Hill and Formosa groups on the tSH2 domain and its RNAPII linker target have suggested that phenotypes of mutants in the two are similar, suggesting that their main function is to interact with each other. A simple test of examining Tom1p interaction with genes in the tSH2 mutant was not done. Additionally, the Spt6p interacting surface on Tom1p is not narrowed to a specific putatively phosphorylated residue that it might target. It remains possible that mutations in other regions of Tom1p affect potential phosphorylation of this target, and therefore it is possible that some mutations that alter Spt6p interaction could do so indirectly. Finally, the authors might consider additional models for their discussion where Spt6p potentially could function to deliver histones to Tom1p.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

The aim of the experiment reported in this paper is to examine the nature of the representation of a template of an upcoming target. To this end, participants were presented with compound gratings (consisting of tilted to the right and tilted to the left lines) and were cued to a particular orientation - red left tilt or blue right tilt (counterbalanced across participants). There are two directly compared conditions: (i) no ping: where there was a cue, that was followed by a 5.5-7.5s delay, then followed by a target grating in which the cued orientation deviated from the standard 45 degrees; and (ii) ping condition in which all aspects were the same with the only difference that a ping (visual impulse presented for 100ms) was presented after the 2.5 seconds following the cue. There was also a perception task in which only the 45 degrees to the right or to the left lines were presented. It was observed that during the delay, only in the ping condition, were the authors able to decode the orientation of the to-be-reported target using the cross-task generalization. Attention decoding, on the other hand, was decoded in both ping and non-ping conditions. It is concluded that the visual system has two different functional states associated with a template during preparation: a predominantly non-sensory representation for guidance and a latent sensory-like for prospective stimulus processing.

Strengths:

There is so much to be impressed with in this report. The writing of the manuscript is incredibly clear. The experimental design is clever and innovative. The analysis is sophisticated and also innovative - the cross-task decoding, the use of Mahalanobis distance as a function of representational similarity, the fact that the question is theoretically interesting, and the excellent figures.

Weaknesses:

While I think that this is an interesting study that addresses an important theoretical question, I have several concerns about the experimental paradigm and the subsequent conclusions that can be drawn.

(1) Why was V1 separated from the rest of the visual cortex, and why the rest of the areas were simply lumped into an EVC ROI? It would be helpful to understand the separation into ROIs.

(2) It would have been helpful to have a behavioral measure of the "attended" orientation to show that participants in fact attended to a particular orientation and were faster in the cued condition. The cue here was 100% valid, so no such behavioral measure of attention is available here.

(3) As I was reading the manuscript I kept thinking that the word attention in this manuscript can be easily replaced with visual working memory. Have the authors considered what it is about their task or cognitive demand that makes this investigation about attention or working memory?

(4) If I understand correctly, the only ROI that showed a significant difference for the cross-task generalization is V1. Was it predicted that only V1 would have two functional states? It should also be made clear that the only difference where the two states differ is V1.

(5) My primary concern about the interpretation of the finding is that the result, differences in cross-task decoding within V1 between the ping and no-ping condition might simply be explained by the fact that the ping condition refocuses attention during the long delay thus "resharpening" the template. In the no-ping condition during the 5.5 to 7.5 seconds long delay, attention for orientation might start getting less "crisp." In the ping condition, however, the ping itself might simply serve to refocus attention. So, the result is not showing the difference between the latent and non-latent stages, rather it is the difference between a decaying template representation and a representation during the refocused attentional state. It is important to address this point. Would a simple tone during the delay do the same? If so, the interpretation of the results will be different.

(6) The neural pattern distances measured using Mahalanobis values are really great! Have the authors tried to use all of the data, rather than the high AMI and low AMI to possibly show a linear relationship between response times and AMI?

(7) After reading the whole manuscript I still don't understand what the authors think the ping is actually doing, mechanistically. I would have liked a more thorough discussion, rather than referencing previous papers (all by the co-author).

Joint Public Review:

Summary:

The authors aimed to identify the neural sources of behavioral variation in fruit flies deciding between odor and air, or between two odors.

Strengths:

- The question is of fundamental importance.<br /> - The behavioral studies are automated, and high-throughput.<br /> - The data analyses are sophisticated and appropriate.<br /> - The paper is clear and well-written aside from some initially strong wording.<br /> - The figures beautifully illustrate their results.<br /> - The modeling efforts mechanistically ground observed data correlations.

Weaknesses:

-The correlations between behavioral variations and neural activity/synapse morphology are relatively weak, and sometimes overstated in the wording that describes them.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

Using gene deletion analysis, the authors confirm the molecular function of putative components of an N-glycan-dependent endoplasmic reticulum protein quality control (ERQC) system (UGG1, MNS1, MNS101, MNL1, and MNL2), in the basidiomycetous fungal pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans. Specifically, they confirm the essential role of these components in the ERQC system and their role in ER stress which contributes to cellular fitness and pathogenicity.

The second part of the study links the components to secretion, mainly EV biogenesis and composition. However, this part of the study is less convincing.

Strengths:

Although it is unclear why ER stress in the mutants would not manifest into a classical secretion defect, this is a rigorous, well-controlled study, with the use of complemented strains that demonstrate phenotypic restoration. The diagram in Figure 1 is very useful in orientating the reader to a complex subject matter, although the legend could be more descriptive.

Weaknesses:

A major weakness is the sheer volume of data presented (in the main text and supplement), which makes the results difficult to follow and retain: the work could essentially be two separate studies.<br /> Another major weakness is the lack of mechanistic insight into the role of the ERQC system in EV secretion and its disconnection to "classical" secretion, which is difficult to reconcile. Some insight into why EV secretion is decreased, and classical secretion is unaffected, would strengthen the significance of the findings. No mechanism is provided to explain why the ERQC mutants (Ugg1 mutant in particular) would have reduced and heterogeneously sized EVs. Furthermore, it is not convincing that the EV content changes would greatly impact fitness and virulence. The proteomics data showing reduced cargo in the Ugg1 mutant is not convincing and difficult to follow.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

The authors have created a new model of KCNC1-related DEE in which a pathogenic patient variant (A421V) is knocked into a mouse in order to better understand the mechanisms through which KCNC1 variants lead to DEE.

Strengths:

(1) The creation of a new DEE model of KCNC1 dysfunction.

(2) InVivo phenotyping demonstrates key features of the model such as early lethality and several types of electrographic seizures.

(3) The ex vivo cellular electrophysiology is very strong and comprehensive including isolated patches to accurately measure K+ currents, paired recording to measure evoked synaptic transmission, and the measurement of membrane excitability at different time points and in two cell types.

Weaknesses:

(1) The assertion that membrane trafficking is impaired by this variant could be bolstered by additional data.

(2) In some experiments details such as the age of the mice or cortical layer are emphasized, but in others, these details are omitted.

(3) The impairments in PV neuron AP firing are quite large. This could be expected to lead to changes in PV neuron activity outside of the hypersynchronous discharges that could be detected in the 2-photon imaging experiments, however, a lack of an effect on PV neuron activity is only loosely alluded to in the text. A more formal analysis is lacking. An important question in trying to understand mechanisms underlying channelopathies like KCNC1 is how changes in membrane excitability recorded at the whole cell level manifest during ongoing activity in vivo. Thus, the significance of this work would be greatly improved if it could address this question.

(4) Myoclonic jerks and other types of more subtle epileptiform activity have been observed in control mice, but there is no mention of littermate control analyzed by EEG.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

In this manuscript, Javid and colleagues worked to understand the molecular mechanisms involved in mistranslation in mycobacteria. They had previously discovered that mistranslation is an important mechanism underlying antibiotic tolerance in mycobacteria. Using a clever genetic screen they identify that deletion of gidB, a 16S ribosomal RNA methyltransferase, leads to lowered mistranslation (i.e. higher translational fidelity), but only in genetic backgrounds or environmental conditions that increase mistranslation rates.

Strengths:

The strengths of this manuscript are the clever genetic screen, the powerful mistranslation assays, and the clear writing and figures explaining a complex biological problem. Their identification of gidB as a factor important for mistranslation deepens our knowledge about this interesting phenomenon.

Weaknesses:

The structural work at the end feels like both an afterthought in terms of the science and the writing. I would suggest re-writing that section to be clearer about what the figure says and does not say. For example, the caption of Figure 6 appears to be more informative than the text and refers to concepts not present in the main text. In general, I found this section to be the most difficult to understand.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

In this manuscript the authors follow up on their published observation that providing a lower glucose parental nutrition (PN) reduces sepsis from a common pathogen [Staphylococcus epidermitis (SE)] in preterm piglets. Here they found that a slightly higher dose of glucose could thread the needle and get the protective effects of low glucose without incurring significant hypoglycemia. They then investigate whether change in low glucose PN impacts metabolism to confer this benefit. The finding that lower glucose reduces sepsis is important as sepsis is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in preterm infants, and adjusting PN composition is a feasible intervention.

Strengths:

(1) They address a highly significant problem of neonatal sepsis in preterm infants using a preterm piglet model.<br /> (2) They have compelling data in this paper (and in a previous publication, ref 27) that low glucose PN confers a survival advantage. A downside of the low glucose PN is hypoglycemia which they mitigate in this paper by using a slightly high amount of glucose in the PN.<br /> (3) The experiment where they change PN from high to low glucose after infection is very important to determine if this approach might be used clinically. Unfortunately, this did not show an ability to reduce sepsis risk with this approach.<br /> (4) They produce an impressive multiomics data set from this model of preterm piglet sepsis which is likely to provide additional insights into the pathogenesis of preterm neonatal sepsis.

Weaknesses:

(1) Piglets on the low glucose PN had consistently lower density of SE (~1 log) across all timepoints. This may be due to changes in immune response leading to better clearance or it could be due to slower growth in lower glucose environment. These possibilities are not fully disentangled in this study.

(2) Many differences in the different omics (transcriptomics, metabolomics, proteomics) were identified in the SE-LOW vs SE-HIGH comparison. Since the bacterial load is very different between these conditions, could the changes be due to bacterial load rather than metabolic reprograming from the low glucose PN? The authors argue in supplementary figure 1F that density of SE in blood does not correlate with sepsis implying that bacterial load is not the driver of outcome. The authors recently published some additional analysis that may be helpful to reference in this manuscript.

(3) Further, expanding upon a model to better understand the complex relationship between differences in supplemental glucose infusion, blood glucose levels, bacterial load, host responses and how they impact the development of sepsis would be helpful. These complex relationships are difficult to fully disentangle, but one could consider infusing the same quantity of heat-killed bacteria under different glucose conditions to see if the glucose levels drive outcomes independently of bacterial burden.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

In this work, Harpring et al. investigated divisome assembly in Chlamydia trachomatis serovar L2 (Ct), an obligate intracellular bacterium that lacks FtsZ, the canonical master regulator of bacterial cell division. They find that divisome assembly is initiated by the protein FtsK in Ct by showing that it forms discrete foci at the septum and future division sites. Additionally, knocking down ftsK prevents divisome assembly and inhibits cell division, further supporting their hypothesis that FtsK regulates divisome assembly. Finally, they show that MreB is one of the last chlamydial divisome proteins to arrive at the site of division and is necessary for the formation of septal peptidoglycan rings but does not act as a scaffold for division assembly as previously proposed.

Strengths:

The authors use microscopy to clearly show that FtsK forms foci both at the septum as well as at the base of the progenitor cell where the next septum will form. They also show that the Ct proteins PBP2, PBP3, MreC, and MreB localize to these same sites suggesting they are involved in the divisome complex.

Using CRISPRi the authors knock down ftsK and find that most cells are no longer able to divide and that PBP2 and PBP3 no longer localized to sites of division suggesting that FtsK is responsible for initiating divisome assembly. They also performed a knockdown of pbp2 using the same approach and found that this also mostly inhibited cell division. Additionally, FtsK was still able to localize in this strain, however PBP3 did not, suggesting that FtsK acts upstream of PBP2 in the divisome assembly process while PBP2 is responsible for the localization of PBP3.

The authors also find that performing a knockdown of ftsK also prevents new PG synthesis further supporting the idea that FtsK regulates divisome assembly. They also find that inhibiting MreB filament formation using A22 results in diffuse PG, suggesting that MreB filament formation is necessary for proper PG synthesis to drive cell division.

Overall the authors propose a new hypothesis for divisome assembly in an organism that lacks FtsZ and use a combination of microscopy and genetics to support their model that is rigorous and convincing. The finding that FtsK, rather than a cytoskeletal or "scaffolding" protein is the first division protein to localize to the incipient division site is unexpected and opens up a host of questions about its regulation. The findings will progress our understanding of how cell division is accomplished in bacteria with non-canonical cell wall structure and/or that lack FtsZ.

Weaknesses:

No major weaknesses were noted in the data supporting the main conclusions. However, there was a claim of novelty in showing that multiple divisome complexes can drive cell wall synthesis simultaneously that was not well-supported (i.e. this has been shown previously in other organisms). In addition, there were minor weaknesses in data presentation that do not substantially impact interpretation (e.g. presenting the number of cells rather than the percentage of the population when quantifying phenotypes and showing partial western blots instead of total western blots).

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

This manuscript uses molecular dynamics simulations to understand how forces felt by the intracellular domain are coupled to the opening of the mechanosensitive ion channel NOMPC. The concept is interesting - as the only clearly defined example of an ion channel that opens due to forces on a tethered domain, the mechanism by which this occurs is yet to be fully elucidated. The main finding is that twisting of the transmembrane portion of the protein - specifically via the TRP domain that is conserved within the broad family of channels- is required to open the pore. That this could be a common mechanism utilised by a wide range of channels in the family, not just mechanically gated ones, makes the result significant. It is intriguing to consider how different activating stimuli can produce a similar activating motion within this family. However, the support for the finding can be strengthened as the authors cannot yet exclude that other forces could open the channel if given longer or at different magnitudes. In addition, they do not see the full opening of the channel, only an initial dilation. Even if we accept that twist is essential for this, it may be that it is not sufficient for full opening, and other stimuli are required.

Strengths:

Demonstrating that rotation of the TRP domain is the essential requirement for channel opening would have significant implications for other members of this channel family.

Weaknesses:

The manuscript centres around 3 main computational experiments. In the first, a compression force is applied on a truncated intracellular domain and it is shown that this creates both a membrane normal (compression) and membrane parallel (twisting) force on the TRP domain. This is a point that was demonstrated in the authors' prior eLife paper - so the point here is to quantify these forces for the second experiment.

The second experiment is the most important in the manuscript. In this, forces are applied directly to two residues on the TRP domain with either a membrane normal (compression) or membrane parallel (twisting) direction, with the magnitude and directions chosen to match that found in the first experiment. Only the twisting force is seen to widen the pore in the triplicate simulations, suggesting that twisting, but not compression can open the pore. This result is intriguing and there appears to be a significant difference between the dilation of pore with the two force directions. However, there are two caveats to this conclusion. Firstly, is the magnitude of the forces - the twist force is larger than the applied normal force to match the result of experiment 1. However, it is possible that compression could also open the pore at the same magnitude or if given longer. It may be that twist acts faster or more easily, but I feel it is not yet possible to say it is the key and exclude the possibility that compression could do something similar. I also note that when force was applied to the AR domain in experiment 1, the pore widened more quickly than with the twisting force alone, suggesting that compression is doing something to assist with opening. Given that the forces are likely to be smaller in physiological conditions it could still be critical to have both twist and compression present. As this is the central aspect of the study, I believe that examining how the channel responds to different force magnitudes could strengthen the conclusions and recommend additional simulations be done to examine this.

The second important consideration is that the study never sees a full pore opening, but rather a widening that is less than that seen in open state structures of other TRP channels and insufficient for rapid ion currents. This is something the authors acknowledge in their prior manuscript in eLife 2021. While this may simply be due to the limited timescale of the simulations, it needs to be clearly stated as a caveat to the conclusions. Twist may be the key to getting this dilation, but we don't know if it is the key to full pore opening. To demonstrate that the observed dilation is a first step in pore opening, then a structural comparison to open-state TRP channels would be beneficial to provide evidence that this motion is along the expected pathway of channel gating.

Experiment three considers the intracellular domain and determines the link between compression and twisting of the intracellular AR domain. In this case, the end of the domain is twisted and it is shown that the domain compresses, the converse to the similar study previously done by the authors in which compression of the domain was shown to generate torque. While some additional analysis is provided on the inter-residue links that help generate this, this is less significant than the critical second experiment.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

The manuscript examines the role of Naa10 in cKO animals, in immortalized neurons, and in primary neurons. Given that Naa10 mutations in humans produce defects in nervous system function, the authors used various strategies to try to find a relevant neuronal phenotype and its potential molecular mechanism.

This work contains valuable findings that suggest that the depletion of Naa10 from CA1 neurons in mice exacerbates anxiety-like behaviors. Using neuronal-derived cell lines authors establish a link between N-acetylase activity, Btbd3 binding to CapZb, and F-actin, ultimately impinging on neurite extension. The evidence demonstrating this is in most cases incomplete, since some key controls are missing and clearly described or simply because claims are not supported by the data. The manuscript also contains biochemical, co-immunoprecipitation, and proteomic data that will certainly be of value to our knowledge of the effects of protein N--acetylation in neuronal development and function.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

In "Drift in Individual Behavioral Phenotype as a Strategy for Unpredictable Worlds," Maloney et al. (2024) investigate changes in individual responses over time, referred to as behavioral drift within the lifespan of an animal. Drift, as defined in the paper, complements stable behavioral variation (animal individuality/personality within a lifetime) over shorter timeframes, which the authors associate with an underlying bet-hedging strategy. The third timeframe of behavioral variability that the authors discuss occurs within seasons (across several generations of some insects), termed "adaptive tracking." This division of "adaptive" behavioral variability over different timeframes is intuitively logical and adds valuable depth to the theoretical framework concerning the ecological role of individual behavioral differences in animals.

Strengths:

While the theoretical foundations of the study are strong, the connection between the experimental data (Figure 1) and the modeling work (Figure 2-4) is less convincing.

Weaknesses:

In the experimental data (Figure 1), the authors describe the changes in behavioral preferences over time. While generally plausible, I identify three significant issues with the experiments:

(1) All of the subsequent theoretical/simulation data is based on changing environments, yet all the experiments are conducted in unchanging environments. While this may suffice to demonstrate the phenomenon of behavioral instability (drift) over time, it does not properly link to the theory-driven work in changing environments. An experiment conducted in a changing environment and its effects on behavioral drift would improve the manuscript's internal consistency and clarify some points related to (3) below.

(2) The temporal aspect of behavioral instability. While the analysis demonstrates behavioral instability, the temporal dynamics remain unclear. It would be helpful for the authors to clarify (based on graphs and text) whether the behavioral changes occur randomly over time or follow a pattern (e.g., initially more right turns, then more left turns). A proper temporal analysis and clearer explanations are currently missing from the manuscript.

(3) The temporal dimension leads directly into the third issue: distinguishing between drift and learning (e.g., line 56). In the neutral stimuli used in the experimental data, changes should either occur randomly (drift) or purposefully, as in a neutral environment, previous strategies do not yield a favorable outcome. For instance, the animal might initially employ strategy A, but if no improvement in the food situation occurs, it later adopts strategy B (learning). In changing environments, this distinction between drift and learning should be even more pronounced (e.g., if bananas are available, I prefer bananas; once they are gone, I either change my preference or face negative consequences). Alternatively, is my random choice of grapes the substrate for the learning process towards grapes in a changing environment? Further clarification is needed to resolve these potential conflicts.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Zhu and colleagues used high-density Neuropixel probes to perform laminar recordings in V1 while presenting either small stimuli that stimulated the classical receptive field (CRF) or large stimuli whose border straddled the RF to provide nonclassical RF (nCRF) stimulation. Their main question was to understand the relative contribution of feedforward (FF), feedback (FB), and horizontal circuits to border ownership (Bown), which they addressed by measuring cross-correlation across layers. They found differences in cross-correlation between feedback/horizontal (FH) and input layers during CRF and nCRF stimulation.

Although the data looks high quality and analyses look mostly fine, I had a lot of difficulty understanding the logic in many places. Examples of my concerns are written below.

(1) What is the main question? The authors refer to nCRF stimulation emerging from either feedback from higher areas or horizontal connections from within the same area (e.g. lines 136 to 138 and again lines 223-232). I initially thought that the study would aim to distinguish between the two. However, the way the authors have clubbed the layers in 3D, the main question seems to be whether Bown is FF or FH (i.e., feedback and horizontal are clubbed). Is this correct? If so, I don't see the logic, since I can't imagine Bown to be purely FF. Thus, just showing differences between CRF stimulation (which is mainly expected to be FF) and nCRF stimulation is not surprising to me.

(2) Choice of layers for cross-correlation analysis: In the Introduction, and also in Figure 3C, it is mentioned that FF inputs arrive in 4C and 6, while FB/Horizontal inputs arrive at "superficial" and "deep", which I take as layer 2/3 and 5. So it is not clear to me why (i) layer 4A/B is chosen for analysis for Figure 3D (I would have thought layer 6 should have been chosen instead) and (ii) why Layers 5 and 6 are clubbed.

(3) Addressing the main question using cross-correlation analysis: I think the nice peaks observed in Figure 3B for some pairs show how spiking in one neuron affects the spiking in another one, with the delay in cross-correlation function arising from the conduction delay. This is shown nicely during CRF stimulation in Figure 3D between 4C -> 2/3, for example. However, the delay (positive or negative) is constrained by anatomical connectivity. For example, unless there are projections from 2/3 back to 4C which causes firing in a 2/3 layer neuron to cause a spike in a layer 4 neuron, we cannot expect to get a negative delay no matter what kind of stimulation (CRF versus nCRF) is used.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

The paper by Fournier et al. investigates the sensitivity of neural circuits to changes in intrinsic and synaptic conductances. The authors use models of the stomatogastric ganglion (STG) to compare how perturbations to intrinsic and synaptic parameters impact network robustness. Their main finding is that changes to intrinsic conductances tend to have a larger impact on network function than changes to synaptic conductances, suggesting that intrinsic parameters are more critical for maintaining circuit function.

The paper is well-written and the results are compelling, but I have several concerns that need to be addressed to strengthen the manuscript. Specifically, I have two main concerns:<br /> (1) It is not clear from the paper what the mechanism is that leads to the importance of intrinsic parameters over synaptic parameters.<br /> (2) It is not clear how general the result is, both within the framework of the STG network and its function, and across other functions and networks. This is crucial, as the title of the paper appears very general.

I believe these two elements are missing in the current manuscript, and addressing them would significantly strengthen the conclusions. Without a clear understanding of the mechanism, it is difficult to determine whether the results are merely anecdotal or if they depend on specific details such as how the network is trained, the particular function being studied, or the circuit itself. Additionally, understanding how general the findings are is vital, especially since the authors claim in the title that "Circuit function is more robust to changes in synaptic than intrinsic conductances," which suggests a broad applicability.

I do not wish to discourage the authors from their interesting result, but the more we understand the mechanism and the generality of the findings, the more insightful the result will be for the neuroscience community.

Major comments

(1) Mechanism<br /> While the authors did a nice job of describing their results, they did not provide any mechanism for why synaptic parameters are more resilient to changes than intrinsic parameters. For example, from Figure 5, it seems that there is mainly a shift in the sensitivity curves. What is the source of this shift? Can something be changed in the network, the training, or the function to control it? This is just one possible way to investigate the mechanism, which is lacking in the paper.

(2) Generality of the results within the framework of the STG circuit<br /> (a) The authors did show that their results extend to multiple networks with different parameters (the 100 networks). However, I am still concerned about the generality of the results with respect to the way the models were trained. Could it be that something in the training procedure makes the synaptic parameters more robust than intrinsic parameters? For example, the fact that duty cycle error is weighted as it is in the cost function (large beta) could potentially affect the parameters that are more important for yielding low error on the duty cycle.<br /> (b) Related to (a), I can think of a training scheme that could potentially improve the resilience of the network to perturbations in the intrinsic parameters rather than the synaptic parameters. For example, in machine learning, methods like dropout can be used to make the network find solutions that are robust to changes in parameters. Thus, in principle, the results could change if the training procedure for fitting the models were different, or by using a different optimization algorithm. It would be helpful to at least mention this limitation in the discussion.

(3) Generality of the function<br /> The authors test their hypothesis based on the specific function of the STG. It would be valuable to see if their results generalize to other functions as well. For example, the authors could generate non-oscillatory activity in the STG circuit, or choose a different, artificial function, maybe with different duty cycles or network cycles. It could be that this is beyond the scope of this paper, but it would be very interesting to characterize which functions are more resilient to changes in synapses, rather than intrinsic parameters. In other words, the authors might consider testing their hypothesis on at least another 'function' and also discussing the generality of their results to other functions in the discussion.

(4) Generality of the circuit<br /> The authors have studied the STG for many years and are pioneers in their approach, demonstrating that there is redundancy even in this simple circuit. This approach is insightful, but it is important to show that similar conclusions also hold for more general network architectures, and if not, why. In other words, it is not clear if their claim generalizes to other network architectures, particularly larger networks. For example, one might expect that the number of parameters (synaptic vs intrinsic) might play a role in how resilient the function is with respect to changes in the two sets of parameters. In larger models, the number of synaptic parameters grows as the square of the number of neurons, while the number of intrinsic parameters increases only linearly with the number of neurons. Could that affect the authors' conclusions when we examine larger models?

In addition, how do the authors' conclusions depend on the "complexity" of the non-linear equations governing the intrinsic parameters? Would the same conclusions hold if the intrinsic parameters only consisted of fewer intrinsic parameters or simplified ion channels? All of these are interesting questions that the authors should at least address in the discussion.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

The paper proposes that the placement of criteria for determining whether a stimulus is 'seen' or 'unseen' can significantly impact the validity of neural measures of consciousness. The authors found that conservative criteria, which require stronger evidence to classify a stimulus as 'seen,' tend to inflate effect sizes in neural measures, making conscious processing appear more pronounced than it is. Conversely, liberal criteria, which require less evidence, reduce these effect sizes, potentially underestimating conscious processing. This variability in effect sizes due to criterion placement can lead to misleading conclusions about the nature of conscious and unconscious processing.

Furthermore, the study highlights that the Perceptual Awareness Scale (PAS), a commonly used tool in consciousness research, does not effectively mitigate these criterion-related confounds. This means that even with PAS, the validity of neural measures can still be compromised by how criteria are set. The authors emphasize the need for careful consideration and standardization of criterion placement in experimental designs to ensure that neural measures accurately reflect the underlying cognitive processes. By addressing this issue, the paper aims to improve the reliability and validity of findings in the field of consciousness research.

Strengths:

(1) This research provides a fresh perspective on how criterion placement can significantly impact the validity of neural measures in consciousness research.

(2) The study employs robust simulations and EEG experiments to demonstrate the effects of criterion placement, ensuring that the findings are well-supported by empirical evidence.

(3) By highlighting the limitations of the PAS and the impact of criterion placement, the study offers practical recommendations for improving experimental designs in consciousness research.

Weaknesses:

The primary focused criterion of PAS is a commonly used tool, but there are other measures of consciousness that were not evaluated, which might also be subject to similar or different criterion limitations. A simulation could applied to these metrics to show how generalizable the conclusion of the study is.

for - climate crisis - planetary tipping points - irreversible? - Hansen disagrees - part 1

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

Urination requires precise coordination between the bladder and external urethral sphincter (EUS), while the neural substrates controlling this coordination remain poorly understood. In this study, Li et al. identify estrogen receptor 1-expressing neurons (ESR1+) in Barrington's nucleus as key regulators that faithfully initiate or suspend urination. Results from peripheral nerve lesions suggest that BarEsr1 neurons play independent roles in controlling bladder contraction and relaxation of the EUS. Finally, the authors performed region-specific retrograde tracing, claiming that distinct populations of BarEsr1 neurons target specific spinal nuclei involved in regulating the bladder and EUS, respectively.

Strength:

Overall, the work is of high quality. The authors integrate several cutting-edge technologies and sophisticated, thorough analyses, including opto-tagged single unit recordings, combined optogenetics, and urodynamics, particularly those following distinct peripheral nerve lesions.

Weakness:

(1) My major concern is the novelty of this study. Keller et al. 2018 have shown that BarEsr1 neurons are active during urination and play an essential role in relaxing the external urethral sphincter (EUS). Minimally, substantial content that merely confirms previous findings (e.g. Figures 1A-E; Figures 3A-E) should be move to the supplementary datasets.

(2) I also have concerns regarding the results showing that the inactivation of BarEsr1 neurons led to the cessation of EUS muscle firing (Figures 2G and S5C). As shown in the cartoon illustration of Figure 8, spinal projections of BarEsr1 neurons contact interneurons (presumably inhibitory) that innervate motor neurons, which in turn excite the EUS. I would therefore expect that the inactivation of BarEsr1 should shift the EUS firing pattern from phasic (as relaxation) to tonic (removal of relaxation), rather than stopping their firing entirely. Could the authors comment on this and provide potential reasons or mechanisms for this finding?

(3) Current evidence is insufficient to support the claim that the majority of BarEsr1 neurons innervate the SPN but not DGC. The current spinal images are uninformative, as the fluorescence reflects the distribution of Esr1- or Crh-expressing neurons in the spinal cord, along with descending BarEsr1 or BarCrh axons. Given the close anatomical proximity of these two nuclei, a more thorough histological analysis is required to demonstrate that the spinal injections were accurately confined to either the SPN or the DGC.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:

The study aimed to better understand the role of the H3 protein of the Monkeypox virus (MPXV) in host cell adhesion, identifying a crucial α-helical domain for interaction with heparan sulfate (HS). Using a combination of advanced computational simulations and experimental validations, the authors discovered that this domain is essential for viral adhesion and potentially a new target for developing antiviral therapies.

Strengths:

The study's main strengths include the use of cutting-edge computational tools such as AlphaFold2 and molecular dynamics simulations, combined with robust experimental techniques like single-molecule force spectroscopy and flow cytometry. These methods provided a detailed and reliable view of the interactions between the H3 protein and HS. The study also highlighted the importance of the α-helical domain's electric charge and the influence of the Mg(II) ion in stabilizing this interaction. The work's impact on the field is significant, offering new perspectives for developing antiviral treatments for MPXV and potentially other viruses with similar adhesion mechanisms. The provided methods and data are highly useful for researchers working with viral proteins and protein-polysaccharide interactions, offering a solid foundation for future investigations and therapeutic innovations.

Comments on revised version:

The authors have successfully addressed the questions raised in my review.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

This study of mixed glutamate/GABA transmission from axons of the supramammillary nucleus to dentate gyrus seeks to sort out whether the two transmitters are released from the same or different synaptic vesicles. This conundrum has been examined in other dual-transmission cases and even in this particular pathway there are different views. The authors use a variety of electrophysiological and immunohistochemical methods to reach the surprising (to me) conclusion that glutamate and GABA filled vesicles are distinct yet released from the same nerve terminals. While the strength of the conclusion rests on the abundance of data (approaches) rather than the decisiveness of any one approach, I came away believing that the boutons may indeed produce and release distinct types of vesicles. Accepting the conclusion, one is now left with another conundrum: how can a single bouton sort out VGLUTs and VIAATs to different vesicles, position them in distinct locations with nm precision and recycle them without mixing? And why do it this way instead of with single vesicles having mixed chemical content? For example, could a quantitative argument be made that separate vesicles allow for higher transmitter concentrations? Hopefully, future studies will probe these issues.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

This paper reports fossil soft-tissue structures (tail vanes) of pterosaurs, and attempts to relate this to flight performance and other proposed functions for the tail

The paper presents new evidence for soft-tissue strengthening of vanes using exciting new methods.

There is now some discussion of bias in the sample selection method as well as some theory to show how the lattice could have functioned, other than a narrative description.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

Lodhiya et al. demonstrate that antibiotics with distinct mechanisms of action, norfloxacin and streptomycin, cause similar metabolic dysfunction in the model organism Mycobacterium smegmatis. This includes enhanced flux through the TCA cycle and respiration as well as a build-up of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and ATP. Genetic and/or pharmacologic depression of ROS or ATP levels protect M. smegmatis from norfloxacin and streptomycin killing. Because ATP depression is protective, but in some cases does not depress ROS, the authors surmise that excessive ATP is the primary mechanism by which norfloxacin and streptomycin kill M. smegmatis. In general, the experiments are carefully executed; alternative hypotheses are discussed and considered; the data are contextualized within the existing literature.

Strengths:

The authors tackle a problem that is both biologically interesting and medically impactful, namely, the mechanism of antibiotic-induced cell death.

Experiments are carefully executed, for example, numerous dose- and time-dependency studies; multiple, orthogonal readouts for ROS; and several methods for pharmacological and genetic depletion of ATP.

There has been a lot of excitement and controversy in the field, and the authors do a nice job of situating their work in this larger context.

Inherent limitations to some of their approaches are acknowledged and discussed e.g., normalizing ATP levels to viable counts of bacteria.

Weaknesses:

All of the experiments performed here were in the model organism M. smegmatis. As the authors point out, the extent to which these findings apply to other organisms (most notably, slow-growing pathogens like M. tuberculosis) is to be determined. To avoid the perception of overreach, I would recommend substituting "M. smegmatis" for Mycobacteria (especially in the title and abstract).

At first glance, a few of the results in the manuscript seem to conflict with what has been previously reported in the (referenced) literature. In their response to reviewers, the authors addressed my concerns. It would also be ideal to include a few lines in the manuscript briefly addressing these points. (Other readers may have similar concerns)

In the first round of review, I suggested that the authors consider removing Figs. 9 and 10A-B as I believe they distract from the main point of the paper and appear to be the beginning of a new story rather than the end of the current one. I still hold this opinion. However, one of the strengths of the eLife model is that we can agree to disagree.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

This is a very nice paper in which the authors addressed the potential for NK cell cellular therapy to treat and potentially eliminate previously established metastases after surgical resections, which are a major cause of death in human cancer patients. To do so they developed a model using the EO771 breast cancer cell line, in which they establish and then resect tumors and the draining lymph node, after which the majority of mice eventually succumb to metastatic disease. They found that when the initiating tumors were resected when still relatively small, adoptive transfers of IL-15/12-conditioned NK cells substantially enhanced the survival of tumor-bearing animals. They then delved into the cellular mechanisms involved. Interestingly and somewhat unexpectedly, the therapeutic effect of the transferred NK cells was dependent on the host's CD8+ T cells. Accordingly, the NK cell therapy contributed to the formation of tumor-specific CD8+ T cells, which protected the recipient animals against tumor re-challenge and were effective in protecting mice from tumor formation when transferred to naive mice. Mechanistically, they used Ifng knockout NK cells to provide evidence that IFNgamma produced by the transferred NK cells was crucial for the accumulation and activation of DCs in the metastatic lung, including expression of CD86, CD40 and MHC genes. In turn, IFNgamma production by NK cells was essential for the induced accumulation of activated CD8 effector T cells and stem cell-like CD8 T cells in the metastatic lung. The authors then expanded their findings from the mouse model to a small clinical trial. They found that inoculations of IL-15/12-conditioned autologous NK cells in patients with various malignancies after resection was safe and showed signs of efficacy.

Strengths:

- Monitoring of long-term metastatic disease and survival after resection used in this paper is a physiological model that closely resembles clinical scenarios more than the animal models usually used, a great strength of the approach.<br /> - Previous literature focused on the notion that NK cells clear metastatic lesions directly, within a short period. The authors' use of a more relevant model and time frame revealed the previously unexplored T cell-dependent mechanism of action of infused NK cells for long-term control of metastatic diseases.<br /> - Also important, the paper provides solid evidence for the contribution of IFNgamma produced by NK cells for activation of dendritic cells and T cells. This is an interesting finding that provokes additional questions concerning the action of the interferon gamma in this context.<br /> - The results from the clinical trial in cancer patients based on the same type of IL-15/12-conditioned NK cell infusions, was encouraging with respect to safety and showed signals of efficacy, which support the translatability of the author's findings.

Future studies in this model could shed even more light on the mechanisms. The authors do not address whether the IL-12 in their cocktail is essential for the effects they see. Relatedly, it was of interest that despite the effectiveness of the transferred IL-15/IL-12 cultured NK cells, the cells failed to persist very long after transfer. Published studies have reported that so-called memory-like NK cells, which are pre-activated with a cocktail of IL-12, IL-18 and IL-15, persist much longer in lympho-depleted mice and patients than IL-2 cultured NK cells. It would be illuminating to compare these two types of NK cell products in the author's model system, and with, or without, lymphodepletion, to identify the critical parameters. If greater persistence occurred with the memory-like NK cell product, it is possible that the NK cells might provide greater benefit, including by directly targeting the tumor.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

Previous work has shown that the evolutionarily-conserved division-orienting protein LGN/ Pins/ GPR1/2 (vertebrates/flies/nematodes) participates in division orientation across a variety of cell types, perhaps most importantly those that undergo asymmetric divisions (ACDs). Micromere formation in echinoids relies on asymmetric cell division at the 16-cell stage, and these authors previously demonstrated a role for the LGN/Pins homolog AGS (Activator of G-protein signaling) in that ACD process. Here they extend that work by investigating and exploiting the question of why echinoids but not other echinoderms form micromeres. Using an impressive combination of phylogenetics and molecular experiments, they determine that much of the difference in ACD and micromere formation in echinoids can be attributed to differences in the AGS C-terminus, in particular a GoLoco domain (GL1) that is missing in most other echinoderms. This work helps explain how AGS works and thereby enhances our understanding of a conserved player in division orientation.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

The authors aimed to classify hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients into distinct subtypes using a comprehensive multi-omics approach. They employed an innovative consensus clustering method that integrates multiple omics data types, including mRNA, lncRNA, miRNA, DNA methylation, and somatic mutations. The study further sought to validate these subtypes by developing prognostic models using machine learning algorithms and extending the findings through single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) to explore the cellular mechanisms driving subtype-specific prognostic differences.

Strengths:

(1) Comprehensive Data Integration: The study's integration of various omics data provides a well-rounded view of the molecular characteristics underlying HCC. This multi-omics approach is a significant strength, as it allows for more accurate and detailed classification of cancer subtypes.

(2) Innovative Methodology: The use of a consensus clustering approach that combines results from 10 different clustering algorithms is a notable methodological advancement. This approach reduces the bias that can result from relying on a single clustering method, enhancing the robustness of the findings.

(3) Machine Learning-Based Prognostic Modeling: The authors rigorously apply a wide array of machine learning algorithms to develop and validate prognostic models, testing 101 different algorithm combinations. This comprehensive approach underscores the study's commitment to identifying the most predictive models, which is a considerable strength.

(4) Validation Across Multiple Cohorts: The external validation of findings in independent cohorts is a critical strength, as it increases the generalizability and reliability of the results. This step is essential for demonstrating the clinical relevance of the proposed subtypes and prognostic models.

Weaknesses:

(1) Inconsistent Storyline:<br /> Despite the extensive data mining and rigorous methodologies, the manuscript suffers from a lack of a coherent and consistent narrative. The transition between different sections, particularly from multi-omics data integration to single-cell validation, feels disjointed. A clearer articulation of how each analysis ties into the overall research question would improve the manuscript.

(2) Questionable Relevance of Immune Cell Activity Analysis:<br /> The evaluation of immune cell activities within the cancer cell model raises concerns about its meaningfulness. The methods used to assess immune function in the tumor microenvironment may not be fully appropriate, potentially limiting the insights gained from this part of the study.

(3) Incomplete Single-Cell RNA-Seq Validation:<br /> The validation of the findings using single-cell RNA-seq data appears insufficient to fully support the study's claims. While the authors make an effort to extend their findings to the single-cell level, the analysis lacks depth. A more comprehensive validation is necessary to substantiate the robustness of the identified subtypes.

(4) Figures and Visualizations:<br /> Several figures in the manuscript are missing necessary information, which affects the clarity of the results. For instance, the pathways in Figure 3A could be clustered to enhance interpretability, the blue bar in Figure 4A is unexplained, and Figure 4B is not discussed in the text. Additionally, the figure legend in Figure 7C lacks detail, and many figure descriptions merely repeat the captions without providing deeper insights.

(5) Appraisal of the Study's Aims and Results:<br /> The authors have set out to achieve an ambitious goal of classifying HCC patients into distinct prognostic subtypes and validating these findings through both bulk and single-cell analyses. While the methodologies employed are innovative and the data integration comprehensive, the study falls short of fully achieving its aims due to inconsistencies in the narrative and incomplete validation. The results partially support the conclusions, but the lack of coherence and depth in certain areas limits the overall impact of the study.

(6) Impact on the Field:<br /> If the identified weaknesses are addressed, this study has the potential to significantly impact the field of HCC research. The multi-omics approach combined with machine learning is a powerful framework that could set a new standard for cancer subtype classification. However, the current state of the manuscript leaves some uncertainty regarding the practical applicability of the findings, particularly in clinical settings.

(6) Additional Context<br /> For readers and researchers, this study offers a valuable look into the potential of integrating multi-omics data with machine learning to improve cancer classification and prognostication. However, readers should be aware of the noted weaknesses, particularly the need for more consistent narrative development and comprehensive validation of the methods. Addressing these issues could greatly enhance the study's utility and relevance to the community.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

Debeuf et al. introduce a new, fast method for the selection of suitable T cell clones to generate TCR transgenic mice, a method claimed to outperform traditional hybridoma-based approaches. Clone selection is based on the assessment of the expansion and phenotype of cells specific for a known epitope following immune stimulation. The analysis is facilitated by a new software tool for TCR repertoire and function analysis termed DALI. This work also introduces a potentially invaluable TCR transgenic mouse line specific for SARS-CoV-2.

Strengths:

The newly introduced method proved successful in the quick generation of a TCR transgenic mouse line. Clone selection is based on more comprehensive phenotypical information than traditional methods, providing the opportunity for a more rational T-cell clone selection.

The study provides a software tool for TCR repertoire analysis and its linkage with function.

The findings entail general practical implications in the preclinical study of a potentially very broad range of infectious diseases or vaccination.

A novel SARS-CoV-2 spike-specific TCR transgenic mouse line was generated.

Weaknesses:

The authors present a novel method to develop TCR transgenic mice and overcome the limitations of the more traditional method based on hybridomas.

The authors indicate that they did not intend to directly compare their new method with the traditional hybridoma-based approach. However, such comparison becomes inevitable when the classical method is presented as suboptimal and an alternative approach is introduced to address its limitations. Nevertheless, the explanations provided in their rebuttal have helped clarify their position. The intention behind supplementary figure 1 is to illustrate that a clone that appears suitable using traditional assays may fail to produce a successful TCR transgenic line. This is a valid point that I think should be emphasized more clearly in the manuscript, as it highlights the limitations of the traditional method.

However, the main question that remains is whether the proposed new method will reliably resolve this issue. As previously noted, only one mouse line was generated (successfully) from a single candidate, and the method presented to generate their new TCR transgenic line starts from a more advanced point (a well characterized epitope is already known, and tetramers are available to preselect specific clones). Although this approach likely increases the chances of success, it also limits applicability.

The authors suggest that tetramers are not absolutely necessary to select a clone of interest. Testing this hypothesis would have added value to this manuscript, demonstrating the ability to rapidly generate new TCR transgenic lines in response to emerging pathogens, as outlined in the introduction. They propose that, in such cases, mice could be immunised and expanded clones retested for reactivity. However, it is unclear how this strategy differs from the classic method in increasing the chances of selecting an optimal clone.

Regarding the practical value and cost-effectiveness of extensive expression profiling for T cell clone selection, it remains unclear how well a clone chosen for specific traits will retain these features when developed into a TCR transgenic line, or what traits are ideal for different applications. T cell fate is plastic, and various parameters could influence marker expression.

Issues remain concerning the statistical analysis. Data are said to have been analyzed using both parametric and non-parametric tests. The described approach of performing a normality test followed by either parametric or non-parametric tests is not a correct method for statistical data analysis.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

Jin et al. investigated how the bacterial DNA damage (SOS) response and its regulator protein RecA affects the development of drug resistance under short-term exposure to beta-lactam antibiotics. Canonically, the SOS response is triggered by DNA damage, which results in the induction of error-prone DNA repair mechanisms. These error-prone repair pathways can increase mutagenesis in the cell, leading to the evolution of drug resistance. Thus, inhibiting the SOS regulator RecA has been proposed as means to delay the rise of resistance.

In this paper, the authors deleted the RecA protein from E. coli and exposed this ∆recA strain to selective levels of the beta-lactam antibiotic, ampicillin. After an 8h treatment, they washed the antibiotic away and allowed the surviving cells to recover in regular media. They then measured the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of ampicillin against these treated strains. They note that after just 8 h treatment with ampicillin, the ∆recA had developed higher MICs towards ampicillin, while by contrast, wild-type cells exhibited unchanged MICs. This MIC increase was also observed subsequent generations of bacteria, suggesting that the phenotype is driven by a genetic change.

The authors then used whole genome sequencing (WGS) to identify mutations that accounted for the resistance phenotype. Within resistant populations, they discovered key mutations in the promoter region of the beta-lactamase gene, ampC; in the penicillin-binding protein PBP3 which is the target of ampicillin; and in the AcrB subunit of the AcrAB-TolC efflux machinery. Importantly, mutations in the efflux machinery can impact the resistances towards other antibiotics, not just beta-lactams. To test this, they repeated the MIC experiments with other classes of antibiotics, including kanamycin, chloramphenicol, and rifampicin. Interestingly, they observed that the ∆recA strains pre-treated with ampicillin showed higher MICs towards all other antibiotic tested. This suggests that the mutations conferring resistance to ampicillin are also increasing resistance to other antibiotics.

The authors then performed an impressive series of genetic, microscopy, and transcriptomic experiments to show that this increase in resistance is not driven by the SOS response, but by independent DNA repair and stress response pathways. Specifically, they show that deletion of the recA reduces the bacterium's ability to process reactive oxygen species (ROS) and repair its DNA. These factors drive accumulation of mutations that can confer resistance towards different classes of antibiotics. The conclusions are reasonably well-supported by the data, but some aspects of the data and the model need to be clarified and extended.

Strengths:

A major strength of the paper is the detailed bacterial genetics and transcriptomics that the authors performed to elucidate the molecular pathways responsible for this increased resistance. They systemically deleted or inactivated genes involved in the SOS response in E. coli. They then subjected these mutants the same MIC assays as described previously. Surprisingly, none of the other SOS gene deletions resulted an increase in drug resistance, suggesting that the SOS response is not involved in this phenotype. This led the authors to focus on the localization of DNA PolI, which also participates in DNA damage repair. Using microscopy, they discovered that in the RecA deletion background, PolI co-localizes with the bacterial chromosome at much lower rates than wild-type. This led the authors to conclude that deletion of RecA hinders PolI and DNA repair. Although the authors do not provide a mechanism, this observation is nonetheless valuable for the field and can stimulate further investigations in the future.

In order to understand how RecA deletion affects cellular physiology, the authors performed RNA-seq on ampicillin-treated strains. Crucially, they discovered that in the RecA deletion strain, genes associated with antioxidative activity (cysJ, cysI, cysH, soda, sufD) and Base Excision Repair repair (mutH, mutY, mutM), which repairs oxidized forms of guanine, were all downregulated. The authors conclude that down-regulation of these genes might result in elevated levels of reactive oxygen species in the cells, which in turn, might drive the rise of resistance. Experimentally, they further demonstrated that treating the ∆recA strain with an antioxidant GSH prevents the rise of MICs. These observations will be useful for more detailed mechanistic follow-ups in the future.

Weaknesses:

Throughout the paper, the authors use language suggesting that ampicillin treatment of the ∆recA strain induces higher levels of mutagenesis inside the cells, leading to the rapid rise of resistance mutations. However, as the authors note, the mutants enriched by ampicillin selection can play a role in efflux and can thus change a bacterium's sensitivity to a wide range of antibiotics, in what is known as cross-resistance. The current data is not clear on whether the elevated "mutagenesis" is driven ampicillin selection or by a bona fide increase in mutation rate.

Furthermore, on a technical level, the authors employed WGS to identify resistance mutations in the treated ampicillin-treated wild-type and ∆recA strains. However, the WGS methodology described in the paper is inconsistent. Notably, wild-type WGS samples were picked from non-selective plates, while ΔrecA WGS isolates were picked from selective plates with 50 μg/mL ampicillin. Such an approach biases the frequency and identity of the mutations seen in the WGS and cannot be used to support the idea that ampicillin treatment induces higher levels of mutagenesis.

Finally, it is important to establish what the basal mutation rates of both the WT and ∆recA strains are. Currently, only the ampicillin-treated populations were reported. It is possible that the ∆recA strain has inherently higher mutagenesis than WT, with a larger subpopulation of resistant clones. Thus, ampicillin treatment might not in fact induce higher mutagenesis in ∆recA.

Comments on revisions:

Thank you for responding to the concerns raised previously. The manuscript overall has improved.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

In this manuscript Spott et al. combine SARS-CoV-2 genomic data alongside granular mobility data to retrospectively evaluate the spread of SARS-CoV-2 alpha lineages throughout Germany and specifically Thuringia. They further prospectively identified districts with strong mobility links to the first district in which BQ.1.1 was observed to direct additional surveillance efforts to these districts. The additional surveillance effort resulted in the earlier identification of BQ.1.1 in districts with strong links to the district in which BQ.1.1 was first observed.

Strengths:

There are two important strengths of this work. The first, is the scale and detail in the data that has been generated an analyzed as part of this study. Specifically, the authors use 6,500 SARS-CoV-2 sequences and district level mobility data within Thuringia. I applaud the authors for making a subset of their analyses public e.g. on the associated micro react page.

Further, the main focus of the article is on the potential utility of mobility-directed surveillance sequence. While I may certainly be mistaken, I have not seen this proposed elsewhere, at least in the context of SARS-CoV-2. The authors were further able to test this concept in a real world setting during the emergence of BQ.1.1 and compare it to the "gold standard" of random sampling. This is a unique real-world evaluation of a novel surveillance sequencing strategy and there is considerable value in publishing this analysis. Given the increased focus on optimizing sampling strategies for genomic surveillance, this work provides a novel strategy and will hopefully motivate additional modeling and real-world implementations.

Weaknesses:

The article is quite strong and I find the analyses to generally be rigorous. Limitations of the analysis, particularly due to the fact that BQ.1.1 remained a low-prevalence variant, are adequately addressed. The results do not provide quantitative, definitive proof that mobility-guided sampling is an optimal strategy, but they also do not claim to nor do I think they need to to make an important contribution to the field.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

This paper describes a new in vitro model for DRG neurons that recapitulates several key differences between the peripheral and central branches of DRG axons in vivo. These differences include morphology (with one branch being thinner than the other), and regenerative capacity (with the peripheral branch displaying higher regenerative capacity). The authors analyze the abundance of various microtubule-associated protein (MAPs) in each branch, as well as the microtubule dynamics in each branch, and find significant differences between branches. Importantly, they found that a well-known conditioning paradigm (prior lesion of the peripheral branch improves the regenerative capacity of the central branch) is not only reproduced in this system but also leads to loss of the asymmetry of MAPs between branches. Zooming in on one MAP that shows differential abundance between the axons, they find that the severing enzyme Spastin is required for the asymmetry in microtubule dynamics and in regenerative capacity following a conditioning lesion.

Strengths:

The establishment of an experimental system that recapitulates DRG axon asymmetry in vitro is an important step that is likely to be useful for other studies. In addition, identifying key molecular signatures that differ between central and peripheral branches, and determining how they are lost following a conditioning lesion adds to our understanding of why peripheral axons have a better regenerative capacity. Last, the author's use of an in vivo model system to support some of their in vitro findings is a strength of this work.

Weaknesses:

The main weakness of the manuscript is that to a large degree, one of its main conclusions (MAP symmetry underlies differences in regenerative capacity) relies mainly on a correlation, without firmly establishing a causal link. However, this weakness is relatively minor because (1) it is partially addressed with the Spastin KO and (2) there isn't a trivial way to show a causal relationship in this case.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary of Key Findings:

The authors identified 20 ancient molluscan linkage groups (MLGs) that are largely conserved in other molluscan groups but highly dynamic and rearranged in chitons. This contrasts with the stability seen in other animal groups.

Significant chromosome rearrangements, fusions, and duplications were observed in chitons, particularly in the most basal clades like Lepidopleurida, indicating that chitons undergo more extensive genomic changes than expected.

Chitons exhibit extremely high levels of genomic heterozygosity, exceeding that of other molluscan species and even Lepidoptera. This presents challenges for assembling high-quality genomes but also points to genetic diversity as a driver of evolutionary processes.

Partial genome duplications, particularly in Liolophura japonica, extend the knowledge of gene duplication events within the broader Mollusca clade.

The paper speculates that these genomic rearrangements may contribute to maintaining species boundaries in sympatric and parapatric radiations, as observed in certain Acanthochitona species.

Strengths:

The use of high-quality genomic data, including four de novo genome assemblies, provides robust evidence for the conclusions.

The research challenges the common assumption that chitons are evolutionarily conservative, showing that their genomes are highly dynamic despite their morphological stasis.

The study adds to the understanding of how chromosomal rearrangements might contribute to speciation, a concept that can be applied to other taxa.

Limitations:

The paper acknowledges that the limited availability of high-quality genomes across molluscs may restrict the scope of comparative analyses. More genomic data from other molluscan groups could strengthen the conclusions.

The role of high heterozygosity in chitons is highlighted, but more information is needed to clarify how this affects genome assembly and evolutionary outcomes.

Implications for Future Research:

The research raises important questions about the relationship between genomic instability and phenotypic stasis, which can inform studies in other animal groups.

The findings call for a re-evaluation of how we define and measure biodiversity, particularly in "neglected" clades like chitons. Further studies could focus on linking the observed genomic changes to specific adaptive traits or ecological niches.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

The authors attempted to dissect the function of a long non-coding RNA, lnc-FANCI-2, in cervical cancer. They profiled lnc-FANCI-2 in different cell lines and tissues, generated knockout cell lines, and characterized the gene using multiple assays.

Strengths:

A large body of experimental data has been presented and can serve as a useful resource for the scientific community, including transcriptomics and proteomics datasets. The reported results also span different parts of the regulatory network and open up multiple avenues for future research.

Weaknesses:

The write-up is somewhat unfocused and lacks deep mechanistic insights in some places.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

The manuscript by Rühling et al analyzes the mode of entry of S. aureus into mammalian cells in culture. The authors propose a novel mechanism of rapid entry that involves the release of calcium from lysosomes via NAADP-stimulated activation of TPC1, which in turn causes lysosomal exocytosis; exocytic release of lysosomal acid sphingomyelinase (ASM) is then envisaged to convert exofacial sphingomyelin to ceramide. These events not only induce the rapid entry of the bacteria into the host cells but are also described to alter the fate of the intracellular S. aureus, facilitating escape from the endocytic vacuole to the cytosol.

Strengths:

The proposed mechanism is novel and could have important biological consequences.

Weaknesses:

Unfortunately, the evidence provided is unconvincing and insufficient to document the multiple, complex steps suggested. In fact, there appear to be numerous internal inconsistencies that detract from the validity of the conclusions, which were reached mostly based on the use of pharmacological agents of imperfect specificity.

Firstly, the release of calcium from lysosomes is not demonstrated. Localized changes in the immediate vicinity of lysosomes need to be measured to ascertain that these organelles are the source of cytosolic calcium changes. In fact, 9-phenantrol, which the authors find to be the most potent inhibitor of invasion and hence of the putative calcium changes, is not a blocker of lysosomal calcium release but instead blocks plasmalemmal TRPM4 channels. On the other hand, invasion is seemingly independent of external calcium. These findings are inconsistent with each other and point to non-specific effects of 9-phenantrol. The fact that ionomycin decreases invasion efficiency is taken as additional evidence of the importance of lysosomal calcium release. It is not clear how these observations support involvement of lysosomal calcium release and exocytosis; in fact treatment with the ionophore should itself have induced lysosomal exocytosis and stimulated, rather than inhibited invasion. Yet, manipulations that increase and others that decrease cytosolic calcium both inhibited invasion.

The proposed role of NAADP is based on the effects of "knocking out" TPC1 and on the pharmacological effects of Ned-19. It is noteworthy that TPC2, rather than TPC1, is generally believed to be the primary TPC isoform of lysosomes. Moreover, the gene ablation accomplished in the TPC1 "knockouts" is only partial and rather unsatisfactory. Definitive conclusions about the role of TPC1 can only be reached with proper, full knockouts. Even the pharmacological approach is unconvincing because the high doses of Ned-19 used should have blocked both TPC isoforms and presumably precluded invasion. Instead, invasion is reduced by only ≈50%. A much greater inhibition was reported using 9-phenantrol, the blocker of plasmalemmal calcium channels. How is the selective involvement of lysosomal TPC1 channels justified?

Invoking an elevation of NAADP as the mediator of calcium release requires measurements of the changes in NAADP concentration in response to the bacteria. This was not performed. Instead, the authors analyzed the possible contribution of putative NAADP-generating systems and reported that the most active of these, CD38, was without effect, while the elimination of SARM1, another potential source of NAADP, had a very modest (≈20%) inhibitory effect that may have been due to clonal variation, which was not ruled out. In view of these data, the conclusion that NAADP is involved in the invasion process seems unwarranted.

The involvement of lysosomal secretion is, again, predicated largely on the basis of pharmacological evidence. No direct evidence is provided for the insertion of lysosomal components into the plasma membrane, or for the release of lysosomal contents to the medium. Instead, inhibition of lysosomal exocytosis by vacuolin-1 is the sole source of evidence. However, vacuolin-1 is by no means a specific inhibitor of lysosomal secretion: it is now known to act primarily as a PIKfyve inhibitor and to cause massive distortion of the endocytic compartment, including gross swelling of endolysosomes. The modest (20-25%) inhibition observed when using synaptotagmin 7 knockout cells is similarly not convincing proof of the requirement for lysosomal secretion.

ASM is proposed to play a central role in the rapid invasion process. As above, most of the evidence offered in this regard is pharmacological and often inconsistent between inhibitors or among cell types. Some drugs affect some of the cells, but not others. It is difficult to reach general conclusions regarding the role of ASM. The argument is made even more complex by the authors' use of exogenous sphingomyelinase (beta-toxin). Pretreatment with the toxin decreased invasion efficiency, a seemingly paradoxical result. Incidentally, the effectiveness of the added toxin is never quantified/validated by directly measuring the generation of ceramide or the disappearance of SM.

The use of fluorescent analogs of sphingomyelin and ceramide is not well justified and it is unclear what conclusions can be derived from these observations. Despite the low resolution of the images provided, it appears as if the labeled lipids are largely in endomembrane compartments, where they would presumably be inaccessible to the secreted ASM. Moreover, considering the location of the BODIPY probe, the authors would be unable to distinguish intact sphingomyelin from its breakdown product, ceramide. What can be concluded from these experiments? Incidentally, the authors report only 10% of BODIPY-positive events after 10 min. What are the implications of this finding? That 90% of the invasion events are unrelated to sphingomyelin, ASM, and ceramide?

It is also unclear how the authors can distinguish lysenin entry into ruptured vacuoles from the entry of RFP-CWT, used as a criterion of bacterial escape. Surely the molecular weights of the probes are not sufficiently different to prevent the latter one from traversing the permeabilized membrane until such time that the bacteria escape from the vacuole.

Both SMase inhibitors (Figure 4C) and SMase pretreatment increased bacterial escape from the vacuole. The former should prevent SM hydrolysis and formation of ceramide, while the latter treatment should have the exact opposite effects, yet the end result is the same. What can one conclude regarding the need and role of the SMase products in the escape process?

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

Liang and Guan have studied the transport mechanism of Melbiose transporter MelB using the string method in collective variables and replica-exchange umbrella sampling simulations. The authors study the mechanism of substrate binding to the outward-facing state, conformational change of the transporter from outward-facing to inward-facing, and substrate unbinding from inward-facing state. In their analysis, they also highlight the effects of mutant D59C and the effect of sodium binding on the substrate transport process.

Strengths:

The authors employ a combination of string method and replica-exchange umbrella sampling simulation techniques to provide a complete map of the free energy landscape for sodium-coupled melibiose transport in MelB.

Weaknesses:

(1) Free energy barriers appear to be very high for a substrate transport process. In Figure 3, the transitions from IF (Inward facing) to OF (Outward facing) state appear to have a barrier of 12 kcal/mol. Other systems with mutant or sodium unbound have even higher barriers. This does not seem consistent with previous studies where transport mechanisms of transporters have been explored using molecular dynamics.

(2) Figure 2b: The PMF between images 20-30 shows the conformation change from OF to IF, where the occluded (OC) state is the highest barrier for transition. However, OC state is usually a stable conformation and should be in a local minimum. There should be free energy barriers between OF and OC and in between OC and IF.

(3) String method pathway is usually not the only transport pathway and alternate lower energy pathways should be explored. The free energy surface looks like it has not deviated from the string pathway. Longer simulations can help in the exploration of lower free energy pathways.

(4) The conformational change in transporters from OF to IF state is a complicated multi-step process. First, only 10 images in the string pathway are used to capture the transition from OF to IF state. I am not sure is this number is enough to capture the process. Second, the authors have used geodesic interpolation algorithm to generate the intermediate images. However, looking at Figure 3B, it looks like the transition pathway has not captured the occluded (OC) conformation, where the transport tunnel is closed at both the ends. Transporters typically follow a stepwise conformational change mechanism where OF state transitions to OC and then to IF state. It appears that the interpolation algorithm has created a hourglass-like state, where IF gates are opening and OF gates are closing simultaneously thereby creating a state where the transport tunnel is open on both sides of the membrane. These states are usually associated with high energy. References 30-42 cited in the manuscript reveal a distinct OC state for different transporters.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

In their manuscript "PDGFRRa signaling regulates Srsf3 transcript binding to affect PI3K signaling and endosomal trafficking" Forman and colleagues use iMEPM cells to characterize the effects of PDGF signaling on alternative splicing. They first perform RNA-seq using a one-hour stimulation with Pdgf-AA in control and Srsf3 knockdown cells. While Srsf3 manipulation results in a sizeable number of DE genes, PDGF does not. They then turn to examine alternative splicing, due to findings from this lab. They find that both PDGF and Srsf3 contribute much more to splicing than transcription. They find that the vast majority of PDGF-mediated alternative splicing depends upon Srsf3 activity and that skipped exons are the most common events with PDGF stimulation typically promoting exon skipping in the presence of Srsf3. They used eCLIP to identify RNA regions bound to Srsf3. Under both PDGF conditions, the majority of peaks were in exons with +PDGF having a substantially greater number of these peaks. Interestingly, they find differential enrichment of sequence motifs and GC content in stimulated versus unstimulated cells. They examine 2 transcripts encoding PI3K pathway (enriched in their GO analysis) members: Becn1 and Wdr81. They then go on to examine PDGFRRa and Rab5, an endosomal marker, colocalization. They propose a model in which Srsf3 functions downstream of PDGFRRa signaling to, in part, regulate PDGFRa trafficking to the endosome. The findings are novel and shed light on the mechanisms of PDGF signaling and will be broadly of interest. This lab previously identified the importance of PDGF naling on alternative splicing. The combination of RNA-seq and eCLIP is an exceptional way to comprehensively analyze this effect. The results will be of great utility to those studying PDGF signaling or neural crest biology.

Comments on the revised version:

The authors have fully addressed my previous comments and I have no further concerns.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

The manuscript titled "Household clustering and seasonal genetic variation of Plasmodium falciparum at the community-level in The Gambia" presents a valuable genetic spatio-temporal analysis of malaria-infected individuals from four villages in The Gambia, covering the period between December 2014 and May 2017. The majority of samples were analyzed using a SNP barcode with the Spotmalaria panel, with a subset validated through WGS. Identity-by-descent (IBD) was calculated as a measure of genetic relatedness and spatio-temporal patterns of the proportion of highly related infections were investigated. Related clusters were detected at the household level, but only within a short time period.

Strengths:

This study offers a valuable dataset, particularly due to its longitudinal design and the inclusion of asymptomatic cases. The laboratory analysis using the Spotmalaria platform combined and supplemented with WGS is solid, and the authors show a linear correlation between the IBD values determined with both methods, although other studies have reported that at least 200 SNPs are required for IBD analysis. Data-analysis pipelines were created for (1) variant filtering for WGS and subsequent IBD analysis, and (2) creating a consensus barcode from the spot malaria panel and WGS data and subsequent SNP filtering and IBD analysis.

Weaknesses:

Further refining the data could enhance its impact on both the scientific community and malaria control efforts in The Gambia.

(1) The manuscript would benefit from improved clarity and better explanation of results to help readers follow more easily. Despite familiarity with genotyping, WGS, and IBD analysis, I found myself needing to reread sections. While the figures are generally clear and well-presented, the text could be more digestible. The aims and objectives need clearer articulation, especially regarding the rationale for using both SNP barcode and WGS (is it to validate the approach with the barcode, or is it to have less missing data?). In several analyses, the purpose is not immediately obvious and could be clarified.

(2) Some key results are only mentioned briefly in the text without corresponding figures or tables in the main manuscript, referring only to supplementary figures, which are usually meant for additional detail, but not main results. For example, data on drug resistance markers should be included in a table or figure in the main manuscript.

(3) The study uses samples from 2 different studies. While these are conducted in the same villages, their study design is not the same, which should be addressed in the interpretation and discussion of the results. Between Dec 2014 and Sept 2016, sampling was conducted only in 2 villages and at less frequent intervals than between Oct 2016 to May 2017. The authors should assess how this might have impacted their temporal analysis and conclusions drawn. In addition, it should be clarified why and for exactly in which analysis the samples from Dec 2016 - May 2017 were excluded as this is a large proportion of your samples.

(4) Based on which criteria were samples selected for WGS? Did the spatiotemporal spread of the WGS samples match the rest of the genotyped samples? I.e. were random samples selected from all times and places, or was it samples from specific times/places selected for WGS?

(5) The manuscript would benefit from additional detail in the methods section.

(6) Since the authors only do the genotype replacement and build consensus barcode for 199 samples, there is a bias between the samples with consensus barcode and those with only the genotyping barcode. How did this impact the analysis?

(7) The linear correlation between IBD-values of barcode vs genome is clear. However, since you do not use absolute values of IBD, but a classification of related (>=0.5 IBD) vs. unrelated (<0.5), it would be good to assess the agreement of this classification between the 2 barcodes. In Figure S6 there seem to be quite some samples that would be classified as unrelated by the consensus barcode, while they have IBD>0.5 in the Genome-IBD; in other words, the barcode seems to be underestimating relatedness.<br /> a. How sensitive is this correlation to the nr of SNPs in the barcode?

(8) With the sole focus on IBD, a measure of genetic relatedness, some of the conclusions from the results are speculative.<br /> a. Why not include other measures such as genetic diversity, which relates to allele frequency analysis at the population level (using, for example, nucleotide diversity)? IBD and the proportion of highly related pairs are not a measure of genetic diversity. Please revise the manuscript and figures accordingly.<br /> b. Additionally, define what you mean by "recombinatorial genetic diversity" and explain how it relates to IBD and individual-level relatedness.<br /> c. Recombination is one potential factor contributing to the loss of relatedness over time. There are several other factors that could contribute, such as mobility/gene flow, or study-specific limitations such as low numbers of samples in the low transmission season and many months apart from the high transmission samples.<br /> d. By including other measures such as linkage disequilibrium you could further support the statements related to recombination driving the loss of relatedness.

(9) While the authors conclude there is no seasonal pattern in the drug-resistant markers, one can observe a big fluctuation in the dhps haplotypes, which go down from 75% to 20% and then up and down again later. The authors should investigate this in more detail, as dhps is related to SP resistance, which could be important for seasonal malaria chemoprofylaxis, especially since the mutations in dhfr seem near-fixed in the population, indicating high levels of SP resistance at some of the time points.

(10) I recommend that raw data from genotyping and WGS should be deposited in a public repository.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

This manuscript describes a novel magnetic steering technique to target human adipose derived mesenchymal stem cells (hAMSC) or induce pluripotent stem cells to the TM (iPSC-TM). The authors show that delivery of the stem cells lowered IOP, increased outflow facility, and increased TM cellularity.

Strengths:

The technique is novel and shows promise as a novel therapeutic to lower IOP in glaucoma. hAMSC are able to lower IOP below the baseline as well as increase outflow facility above baseline with no tumorigenicity. These data will have a positive impact on the field and will guide further research using hAMSC in glaucoma models.

Weaknesses:

The transgenic mouse model of glaucoma the authors used did not show ocular hypertensive phenotypes at 6-7 months of age as previously reported. Therefore, if there is no pathology in these animals the authors did not show a restoration of function, but rather a decrease in pressure below normal IOP.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

The manuscript "Interplay of condensate material properties and chromatin heterogeneity governs nuclear condensate ripening" presents experiments and theory to explain the dynamic behavior of nuclear condensates. The authors present experimental data that shows the size of multiple artificially induced condensates as a function of time for various conditions. They identify different dynamic regimes, which all differ from traditional Ostwald ripening. By careful analysis and comparison with a quantitative model, the authors conclude that the elastic effects of the chromatin are relevant and the interplay between (heterogeneous) elasticity and surface tension governs the droplets' behavior. However, since they apply a simple model to a complex system, I think that the work is sometimes prone to over-interpretation, which I detail below. In summary, since droplet growth in a heterogeneous, elastic environment is unavoidable for condensates, this work achieves an important step toward understanding this complex setting. The work will likely stimulate more experiments (using different methods or alternative settings) as well as theory (accounting for additional effects, like spatial correlations).

Strengths:

A particularly strong point of the work is the tight integration between experiment and theory. Both parts are explained well at an appropriate level with more details in the methods section and the supplementary information. I cannot comment much on the experiments, but they seem convincing to me and the authors quantify the relevant parameters. Concerning the theory, they derive a model at the appropriate level of description. The analysis of the model is performed and explained well. Even though spatial correlations are not taken into account, the model will serve as a useful basis for developing more complicated models in the future. It is also worth mentioning that the clear classification into different growth regimes is helpful since such results, with qualitative predictions for parameter dependencies, likely also hold in more complex scenarios.

Weaknesses:

I think that the manuscript would profit from more precise definitions and explanations in multiple points, as detailed below. Clearly, not all these points can be fully incorporated in a model at this point, but I think it would be helpful to mention weaknesses in the manuscript and to discuss the results a bit more carefully.

(1) The viscosity analysis likely over-interprets the data. First, the FRAP curves do not show clear exponential behavior. For Figure 1C, there are at least two time scales and it is not clear to me why the shorter time scale right after bleaching is not analyzed. If the measured time scale were based on the early recovery, the differences between the two cases would likely be very small. For Figure 1D, the recovery is marginal, so it is not clear how reliable the measurements are. More generally, the analysis was performed on condensates of very different sizes, which can surely affect the measurements; see https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.68620 for many details on using FRAP to analyze condensate dynamics. Second, the relaxation dynamics are likely not purely diffusive in a viscous environment since many condensates show elastic properties (https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaw4951). I could very well imagine that the measured recovery time is related to the viscoelastic time scale. Third, the assumption of the Stokes-Einstein-Sutherland equation to relate diffusivity and viscosity is questionable because of viscoelasticity and the fact that the material is clearly interacting, so free diffusion is probably not expected.

(2) A large part of the paper is spent on the difference between different dynamic regimes, which are called "fusion", "ripening", and "diffusion-based" (with slightly different wording in different parts). First, I would welcome consistent language, e.g., using either fusion or coalescence. Second, I would welcome an early, unambiguous definition of the regimes. A definition is given at the end of page 2, but this definition is not clear to me: Does the definition pertain to entire experiments (e.g., is something called "fusion" if any condensates fuse at any time in the experiment?), or are these labels used for different parts of the experiment (e.g., would the data in Figure 1H first be classified as "ripening" and then "diffusion-based")? More generally, the categorization seems to depend on the observed system size (or condensate count) and time scale. Third, I find the definition of the ripening time a bit strange since it is clearly correlated with droplet size. Is this dependency carefully analyzed in the subsequent parts?

(3) The effect of the elastic properties of the chromatin is described by a Neo-Hookean model, but the strains R/\xi used in the theory are of the order of 100, which is huge. At such high strains, the Neo-Hookean model essentially has a constant pressure 5E/6, so the mesh size \xi does not matter. It is not clear to me whether chromatin actually exhibits such behavior, and I find it curious that the authors varied the stiffness E but not the mesh size \xi when explaining the experiments in the last section although likely both parameters are affected by the experimental perturbations. In any case, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2102014118 shows that non-linear elastic effects related to breakage and cavitation could set in, which might also be relevant to the problem described here. In particular, the nucleation barrier discussed in the later part of the present manuscript might actually be a cavitation barrier due to elastic confinement. In any case, I would welcome a more thorough discussion of these aspects (in particular the large strains).

(4) The description of nucleation on page 7 is sloppy and might be misleading. First, at first reading I understood the text as if droplets of any radius could nucleate with probability p_nuc related to Eq. 7. This must be wrong since large droplets have ΔG<0 implying p_nuc > 1. Most likely, the nucleation rate only pertains to the critical radius (which is what might be meant by R_0, but it is unclear from the description). In this case, the critical radius and its dependence on parameters should probably be discussed. It might also help to give the value of the supersaturation S in terms of the involved concentrations, and it should be clarified whether P_E depends on R_0 or not (this might also relate to the cavitation barrier raised in point 3 above). Secondly, it is a bit problematic that E is sampled from a normal distribution, which allows for negative stiffnesses! More importantly, the exact sampling protocol is important since sampling more frequently (in the simulations) leads to a larger chance of hitting a soft surrounding, which facilitates nucleation. I could not find any details on the sampling in the numerical simulations, but I am convinced that it is a crucial aspect. I did find a graphical representation of the situation in Figure S4A, but I think it is misleading since there is no explicit space in the model and stiffnesses are not correlated.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

Enterobacteriaceae produce microcins to target their competitors. Using informatics approaches, the authors identified 12 new microcins. They expressed them in E. coli, demonstrating that the microcins have antimicrobial activity against other microbes, including plant pathogens and the ESKAPE pathogens Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Acinetobacter baumannii.

Strengths:

Overall, this study has the merit of identifying new potential antimicrobial molecules that could be used to target important pathogens. The bioinformatics analysis, the expression system used, and the antimicrobial assays performed are solid, and the data presented are convincing. This work will set the basis for new studies to investigate the potential role of these microcins in vivo.

Weaknesses:

The work has been performed in vitro, which is a valid approach for identifying the antimicrobial peptides and assessing their antimicrobial activity. Future studies will need to address whether these new microcins exhibit antimicrobial activity in vivo (e.g., in the context of infection models), and to identify the targets (receptor and mechanisms of action) for the new microcins.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

This study investigates the role of CD131, a receptor subunit for GM-CSF and IL-3, in ulcerative colitis pathogenesis using a DSS-induced murine colitis model. By comparing wild-type and CD131-deficient mice, the authors demonstrate that CD131 contributes to DSS-induced colitis, working in concert with tissue-infiltrating macrophages.

Strengths:

The research shows that CD131's influence on macrophage and T cell chemotaxis is mediated by CCL4. The authors conclude by proposing a pro-inflammatory role for CD131 in murine colitis and suggest potential clinical relevance in human inflammatory bowel disease.

Weaknesses:

The statistical association between increased CD131 expression and clinical IBD was not observed in Table 1, indicating that the main results from animal experiments were not reproduced in human subjects. Additionally, due to the absence of experimental results regarding the downstream signaling pathways through CD131, it is difficult to infer the precise differentiated outcomes of this study. Furthermore, the effects of CD131 on immune cells other than macrophages were not presented, and the results specific to macrophage-selective CD131 were not shown. Therefore, I conclude that it is challenging to provide a detailed review as there is a lack of supporting evidence for the core arguments made in this paper.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

In their manuscript entitled 'The domesticated transposon protein L1TD1 associates with its ancestor L1 ORF1p to promote LINE-1 retrotransposition', Kavaklıoğlu and colleagues delve into the role of L1TD1, an RNA binding protein (RBP) derived from a LINE1 transposon. L1TD1 proves crucial for maintaining pluripotency in embryonic stem cells and is linked to cancer progression in germ cell tumors, yet its precise molecular function remains elusive. Here, the authors uncover an intriguing interaction between L1TD1 and its ancestral LINE-1 retrotransposon.

The authors delete the DNA methyltransferase DNMT1 in a haploid human cell line (HAP1), inducing widespread DNA hypo-methylation. This hypomethylation prompts abnormal expression of L1TD1. To scrutinize L1TD1's function in a DNMT1 knock-out setting, the authors create DNMT1/L1TD1 double knock-out cell lines (DKO). Curiously, while the loss of global DNA methylation doesn't impede proliferation, additional depletion of L1TD1 leads to DNA damage and apoptosis.

To unravel the molecular mechanism underpinning L1TD1's protective role in the absence of DNA methylation, the authors dissect L1TD1 complexes in terms of protein and RNA composition. They unveil an association with the LINE-1 transposon protein L1-ORF1 and LINE-1 transcripts, among others.

Surprisingly, the authors note fewer LINE-1 retro-transposition events in DKO cells compared to DNMT1 KO alone.

Strengths:

The authors present compelling data suggesting the interplay of a transposon-derived human RNA binding protein with its ancestral transposable element. Their findings spur interesting questions for cancer types, where LINE1 and L1TD1 are aberrantly expressed.

Weaknesses:

Suggestions for refinement:

The initial experiment, inducing global hypo-methylation by eliminating DNMT1 in HAP1 cells, is intriguing and warrants more detailed description. How many genes experience mis-regulation or aberrant expression? What phenotypic changes occur in these cells? Why did the authors focus on L1TD1? Providing some of this data would be helpful to understand the rationale behind the thorough analysis of L1TD1.

The finding that L1TD1/DNMT1 DKO cells exhibit increased apoptosis and DNA damage but decreased L1 retro-transposition is unexpected. Considering the DNA damage associated with retro-transposition and the DNA damage and apoptosis observed in L1TD1/DNMT1 DKO cells, one would anticipate the opposite outcome. Could it be that the observation of fewer transposition-positive colonies stems from the demise of the most transposition-positive colonies? Further exploration of this phenomenon would be intriguing.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

The authors used a novel multi-dimensional experience sampling (mDES) approach to identify data-driven patterns of experience samples that they use to interrogate fMRI data collected during naturalistic movie-watching data. They identify a set of multi-sensory features of a set of movies that delineate low-dimensional gradients of BOLD fMRI signal patterns that have previously been linked to fundamental axes of cortical organization.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

This paper represents a huge amount of work on a condition whose patients' health and well-being have not always been prioritized, and only relatively recently has the immune dysregulation seen in patients with Down Syndrome (DS) been garnering major research interest.

This paper provides an unparalleled examination of immune disorder in patients with DS. The authors also report the results from a clinical trial with the JAK inhibitor tofacitinib in DS patients.

Strengths:

This manuscript report an herculean effort and provides an unparalleled examination of immune disorder in a large number of patients with DS.

Weaknesses:

Not a major weakness but, apart from finding an elevation of CD4 T central memory cells and more differentiated plasmablast, several of the alteration reported in this manuscript had already been suggested by a few case reports and very small series. On the other hand, the number of patients (and controls) utilized for this study is remarkable and allows to draw much firmer conclusions.

Comments on revised version:

I don't have any further comments.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

This study by Popli et al. evaluated the function of Atg14, an autophagy protein, in reproductive function using a conditional knockout mouse model. The authors showed that female mice lacking Atg14 were infertile partly due to defective embryo transport function of the oviduct and faulty uterine receptivity and decidualization using PgrCre/+;Atg14f/f mice. The findings from this work are exciting and novel. The authors demonstrated that a loss of Atg14 led to an excessive pyroptosis in the oviductal epithelial cells that compromises cellular integrity and structure, impeding the transport function of the oviduct. In addition, the authors use both genetic and pharmacological approaches to test the hypothesis. Therefore, the findings from this study are high-impact and likely reproducible. However, there are multiple major concerns that need to be addressed to improve the quality of the work.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

The anatomical connectivity of the claustrum and the role of its output projections has, thus far, not been studied in detail. The aim of this study was to map the outputs of the endopiriform (EN) region of the claustrum complex, and understand their functional role. Here the authors have combined sophisticated intersectional viral tracing techniques, and ex vivo electrophysiology to map the neural circuitry of EN outputs to vCA1, and shown that optogenetic inhibition of the EN→vCA1 projection impairs both social and object recognition memory. Interestingly the authors find that the EN neurons target inhibitory interneurons providing a mechanism for feedforward inhibition of vCA1.

Strengths:

The strength of this study was the application of a multilevel analysis approach combining a number of state-of-the-art techniques to dissect the contribution of the EN→vCA1 to memory function.

In addition the authors conducted behavioural analysis of locomotor activity, anxiety and fear memory, and complemented the analysis of discrimination with more detailed description of the patterns of exploratory behaviour.

Reviewer #2 (Public review):

Summary:

This study aimed to test experimentally a theoretical framework that aims to explain the perception of tinnitus, i.e., the perception of a phantom sound in the absence of external stimuli, through differences in auditory predictive coding patterns. To this aim, the researchers compared the neural activity preceding and following the perception of a sound using MEG in two different studies. The sounds could be highly predictable or random, depending on the experimental condition. They revealed that individuals with tinnitus and controls had different anticipatory predictions. This finding is a major step in characterizing the top-down mechanisms underlying sound perception in individuals with tinnitus.

Strengths:

This article uses an elegant, well-constructed paradigm to assess the neural dynamics underlying auditory prediction. The findings presented in the first experiment were partially replicated in the second experiment, which included 80 participants. This large number of participants for an MEG study ensures very good statistical power and a strong level of evidence. The authors used advanced analysis techniques - Multivariate Pattern Analysis (MVPA) and classifier weights projection - to determine the neural patterns underlying the anticipation and perception of a sound for individuals with or without tinnitus. The authors evidenced different auditory prediction patterns associated with tinnitus. Overall, the conclusions of this paper are well supported, and the limitations of the study are clearly addressed and discussed.

Weaknesses:

Even though the authors took care of matching the participants in age and sex, the control could be more precise. Tinnitus is associated with various comorbidities, such as hearing loss, anxiety, depression, or sleep disorders. The authors assessed individuals' hearing thresholds with a pure tone audiogram, but they did not take into account the high frequencies (6 kHz to 16 kHz) in the patient/control matching. Moreover, other hearing dysfunctions, such as speech-in-noise deficits or hyperacusis, could have been taken into account to reinforce their claim that the observed predictive pattern was not linked to hearing deficits. Mental health and sleep disorders could also have been considered more precisely, as they were accounted for only indirectly with the score of the 10-item mini-TQ questionnaire evaluating tinnitus distress. Lastly, testing the links between the individuals' scores in auditory prediction and tinnitus characteristics, such as pitch, loudness, duration, and occurrence (how often it is perceived during the day), would have been highly informative.

Comments on revisions:

Thank you for your responses. There are a few remaining points that, if addressed, could further enhance the manuscript:

- While the manuscript acknowledges the limitation of not matching groups on hearing thresholds in Study 1, a deeper analysis of participants' hearing abilities and their impact on MEG results, similar to that conducted in Study 2, would be valuable. Specifically, including a linear model that considers all frequencies, group membership, and their interactions could highlight differences across groups. Additionally, examining the effect of high-frequency hearing loss on prediction scores, as performed in Study 2, would strengthen the analysis, particularly given the trend noted (line 719). Such an addition could make a significant contribution to the literature by exploring how hearing abilities may influence prediction patterns.

- The connection with the hippocampal regions (line 864) remains somewhat unclear. While the inclusion of the Paquette reference appropriately links temporal region activity with tinnitus, it does not fully support the statement: "An increased focus on hippocampal regions, e.g., in fMRI, patient, or animal studies, could be a worthwhile complement to our MEG work, given the outstanding relevance of medial temporal areas in the formation of associations in statistical learning paradigms"

- Authors should add a comparison of participants mini-TQ scores on both studies<br /> - Authors should add significant level on Fig 6.B as in Fig 3.C, and a n.s on Fig 6.D

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

Kimura et al performed a saturation mutagenesis study of CDKN2A to assess functionality of all possible missense variants and compare them to previously identified pathogenic variants. They also compared their assay result with those from in silico predictors.

Strengths:

CDKN2A is an important gene that modulate cell cycle and apoptosis, therefore it is critical to accurately assess functionality of missense variants. Overall, the paper reads well and touches upon major discoveries in a logical manner.

Weaknesses:

The paper lacks proper details for experiments and basic data, leaving the results less convincing. Analyses are superficial and does not provide variant-level resolution. Many of which were addressed during the revision process.

Comments on revisions

The manuscript was improved during the revision process.

Joint Public Review:

Automatically identifying single cell types in heterogeneous mixed cell populations holds great promise to characterize mixed cell populations and to discover new rules of spatial organization and cell-cell communication. Although the current manuscript focuses on the application of quality control of iPSC cultures, the same approach can be extended to a wealth of other applications including in depth study of the spatial context. The simple and high-content assay democratizes use and enables adoption by other labs.

The authors also propose a new nucleocentric phenotyping pipeline, where a convolutional neural network is trained on the nucleus and some margins around it. This nucleocentric approach improves classification performance at high densities because nuclear segmentation is less prone to errors in dense cultures.

The manuscript is supported by comprehensive experimental and computational validations that raises the bar beyond the current state of the art in the field of high-content phenotyping and makes this manuscript especially compelling. These include (i) Explicitly assessing replication biases (batch effects); (ii) Direct comparison of feature-based (a la cell profiling) versus deep-learning-based classification (which is not trivial/obvious for the application of cell profiling); (iii) Systematic assessment of the contribution of each fluorescent channel; (iv) Evaluation of cell-density dependency; (v) explicit examination of mistakes in classification; (vi) Evaluating the performance of different spatial contexts around the cell/nucleus; (vii) generalization of models trained on cultures containing a single cell type (mono-cultures) to mixed co-cultures; (viii) application to multiple classification tasks.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

In this manuscript, the model's capacity to capture epistatic interactions through multi-point mutations and its success in finding the global optimum within the protein fitness landscape highlights the strength of deep learning methods over traditional approaches.

Strengths:

It is impressive that the authors used AI combined with limited experimental validation to achieve such significant enhancements in protein performance. Besides, the successful application of the designed antibody in industrial settings demonstrates the practical and economic relevance of the study. Overall, this work has broad implications for future AI-guided protein engineering efforts.

Weaknesses:

However, the authors should conduct a more thorough computational analysis to complement their manuscript. While the identification of improved multi-point mutants is commendable, the manuscript lacks a detailed investigation into the mechanisms by which these mutations enhance protein properties. The authors briefly mention that some physicochemical characteristics of the mutants are unusual, but they do not delve into why these mutations result in improved performance. Could computational techniques, such as molecular dynamics simulations, be employed to explore the effects of these mutations? Additionally, the authors claim that their method is efficient. However, the selected VHH is relatively short (<150 AA), resulting in lower computational costs. It remains unclear whether the computational cost of this approach would still be acceptable when designing larger proteins (>1000 AA). Besides, the design process involves a large number of prediction tasks, including the properties of both single-site saturation and multi-point mutants. The computational load is closely tied to the protein length and the number of mutation sites. Could the authors analyze the model's capability boundaries in this regard and discuss how scalable their approach is when dealing with larger proteins or more complex mutation tasks?

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

In this manuscript, Arimura et al describe MagIC-Cryo-EM, an innovative method for immune-selective concentrating of native molecules and macromolecular complexes for Cryo-EM imaging and single-particle analysis. Typically, Cryo-EM imaging requires much larger concentrations of biomolecules than that are feasible to achieve by conventional biochemical fractionation. Overall, this manuscript is meticulously and clearly written and may become a great asset to other electron microscopists and chromatin researchers.

Strengths:

Previously, Arimura et al. (Mol. Cell 2021) isolated from Xenopus extract and resolved by Cryo-EM a sub-class of native nucleosomes conjugated containing histone H1.8 at the on-dyad position, similar to that previously observed by other researchers with reconstituted nucleosomes. Here they sought to analyze immuno-selected nucleosomes aiming to observe specific modes of H1.8 positioning (e.g. on-dyad and off-dyad) and potentially reveal structural motifs responsible for the decreased affinity of H1.8 for the interphase chromatin compared to metaphase chromosomes. The main strength of this work is a clever and novel methodological design, in particular the engineered protein spacers to separate captured nucleosomes from streptavidin beads for a clear imaging. The authors provide a detailed step-by-step description of MagIC-Cryo-EM procedure including nucleosome isolation, preparation of GFP nanobody attached magnetic beads, optimization of the spacer length, concentration of the nucleosomes on graphene grids, data collection and analysis, including their new DUSTER method to filter-out low signal particles. This tour de force methodology should facilitate considering of MagIC-Cryo-EM by other electron microscopists especially for analysis of native nucleosome complexes.<br /> In pursue of biologically important new structures, the immune-selected H1.8-containing nucleosomes were solved at about 4A resolution; their structure appears to be very similar to the previously determined structure of H1.8-reconstituted nucleosomes. There were no apparent differences between the metaphase and interphase complexes suggesting that the on-dyad and off-dyad positioning does not explain the differences in H1.8 - nucleosome binding. However, they were able to identify and solve complexes of H1.8-GFP with histone chaperone NPM2 in a closed and open conformation providing mechanistic insights for H1-NPM2 binding and the reduced affinity of H1.8 to interphase chromatin as compared to metaphase chromosomes.

Weaknesses:

Still, I feel that there are certain limitations and potential artifacts resulting from formaldehyde fixation, use of bacterial-expressed recombinant H1.8-GFP, and potential effects of magnetic beads and/or spacer on protein structure, that should be more explicitly discussed. Also, the GFP-pulled down H1.8 nucleosomes should be better characterized biochemically to determine the actual linker DNA lengths (which are known to have a strong effect of linker histone affinity) and presence or absence of other factors such as HMG proteins that may compete with linker histones and cause the multiplicity of nucleosome structural classes (such as shown on Fig. 3F) for which the association with H1.8 is uncertain.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

The manuscript by Sayeed et al. uses a comprehensive series of multi-omics approaches to demonstrate that late-stage human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) infection leads to a marked disruption of TEAD1 activity, a concomitant loss of TEAD1-DNA interactions, and extensive chromatin remodeling. The data are thoroughly presented and provide evidence for the role of TEAD1 in the cellular response to HCMV infection. However, a key question remains unresolved: is the observed disruption of TEAD1 activity a direct consequence of HCMV infection, or could it be secondary to the broader innate antiviral response? In this respect, the study would benefit from experiments that assess the effect of TEAD1 overexpression or knockdown/deletion on HCMV replication dynamics. Such functional assays could help delineate whether TEAD1 perturbation directly influences viral replication or is part of a downstream/indirect cellular response, providing deeper mechanistic insights.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary<br /> Roseman et al. use a new inhibitor of the maintenance DNA methyltransferase DNMT1 to probe the role of methylation on binding of the CTCF protein, which is known to be involved chromatin loop formation. As previous reported, and as expected based on our knowledge that CTCF binding is methylation-sensitive, the authors find that loss of methylation leads to additional CTCF binding sites and increased loop formation. By comparing novel loops with the binding of the pre-mRNA splicing factor SON, which localizes to the nuclear speckle compartment, they propose that these reactivated loops localize to near speckles. This behavior is dependent on CTCF whereas degradation of two speckle proteins does not affect CTCF binding or loop formation. The authors propose a model in which DNA methylation controls the association of genome regions with speckles via CTCF-mediated insulation.

Strengths<br /> The strengths of the study are 1) the use of a new, specific DNMT1 inhibitor and 2) the observation that genes whose expression is sensitive to DNMT1 inhibition and dependent on CTCF (cluster 2) show higher association with SON than genes which are sensitive to DNMT1 inhibition but are CTCF insensitive, is in line with the authors' general model.

Weaknesses<br /> There are a number of significant weaknesses that as a whole undermine many of the key conclusions, including the overall mechanistic model of a direct regulatory role of DNA methylation on CTCF-mediated speckle association of chromatin loops.

(1) The authors frequently make quasi-quantitative statements but do not actually provide the quantitative data, which they actually all have in hand. To give a few examples: "reactivated CTCF sites were largely methylated (p. 4/5), "many CTCF binding motifs enriched..." (p.5), "a large subset of reactivated peaks..."(p.5), "increase in strength upon DNMT1 inhibition" (p.5); "a greater total number....." (p.7). These statements are all made based on actual numbers and the authors should mention the numbers in the text to give an impression of the extent of these changes (see below) and to clarify what the qualitative terms like "largely", "many", "large", and "increase" mean. This is an issue throughout the manuscript and not limited to the above examples.<br /> Related to this issue, many of the comparisons which the authors interpret to show differences in behavior seem quite minor. For example, visual inspection suggests that the difference in loop strength shown in figure 1E is something like from 0 to 0.1 for K562 cells and a little less for KCT116 cells. What is a positive control here to give a sense of whether these minor changes are relevant. Another example is on p. 7, where the authors claim that CTCF partners of reactivated peaks tend to engage in a "greater number" of looping partners, but inspection of Figure 2A shows a very minor difference from maybe 7 to 7.5 partners. While a Mann-Whitney test may call this difference significant and give a significant P value, likely due to high sample number, it is questionable that this is a biologically relevant difference.

(2) The data to support the central claim of localization of reactivated loops to speckles is not overly convincing. The overlap with SON Cut&Tag (figure 2F) is partial at best and although it is better with the publicly available TSA-seq data, the latter is less sensitive than Cut&Tag and more difficult to interpret. It would be helpful to validate these data with FISH experiments to directly demonstrate and measure the association of loops with speckles (see below).

(3) It is not clear that the authors have indeed disrupted speckles from cells by degrading SON and SRRM2. Speckles contain a large number of proteins and considering their phase separated nature stronger evidence for their complete removal is needed. Note that the data published in ref 58 suffers from the same caveat.

(4) The authors ascribe a direct regulatory role to DNA methylation in controlling the association of some CTCF-mediated loops to speckles (p. 20). However, an active regulatory role of speckle association has not been demonstrated and the observed data are equally explainable by a more parsimonious model in which DNA methylation regulates gene expression via looping and that the association with speckles is merely an indirect bystander effect of the activated genes because we know that active genes are generally associated with speckles. The proposed mechanism of a regulatory role of DNA methylation in controlling speckle association is not convincingly demonstrated by the data. As a consequence, the title of the paper is also misleading.

(5) As a minor point, the authors imply on p. 15 that ablation of speckles leads to misregulation of genes by altering transcription. This is not shown as the authors only measure RNA abundance, which may be affected by depletion of constitutive splicing factors, but not transcription. The authors would need to show direct effects on transcription.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

In organisms with open mitosis, nuclear envelope breakdown at mitotic entry and re-assembly of the nuclear envelope at the end of mitosis are important, highly regulated processes. One key regulator of nuclear envelope re-assembly is the BAF (Barrier-to-Autointegration) protein, which contributes to cross-linking of chromosomes to the nuclear envelope. Crucially, BAF has to be in a dephosphorylated form to carry out this function, and PP2A has been shown to be the phosphatase that dephosphorylates BAF. The Ankle2/LEM4 protein has previously been identified as an important regulator of PP2A in the dephosphorylation of BAF but its precise function is not fully understood, and Li and colleagues set out to investigate the function of Ankle2/LEM4 in both Drosophila flies and Drosophila cell lines.

Strengths:

The authors use a combination of biochemical and imaging techniques to understand the biology of Ankle2/LEM4. On the whole, the experiments are well conducted and the results look convincing. A particular strength of this manuscript is that the authors are able to study both cellular phenotypes and organismal effects of their mutants by studying both Drosophila D-mel cells and whole flies.

The work presented in this manuscript significantly enhances our understanding of how Ankle2/LEM4 supports BAF dephosphorylation at the end of mitosis. Particularly interesting is the finding that Ankle2/LEM4 appears to be a bona fide PP2A regulatory protein in Drosophila, as well as the localisation of Ankle2/LEM4 and how this is influenced by the interaction between Ankle2 and the ER protein Vap33. It would be interesting to see, though, whether these insights are conserved in mammalian cells, e.g. does mammalian Vap33 also interact with LEM4? Is LEM4 also a part of the PP2A holoenzyme complex in mammalian cells?

Weaknesses:

This work is certainly impactful but more discussion and comparison of the Drosophila versus mammalian cell system would be helpful. Also, to attract the largest possible readership, the Ankle2 protein should be referred to as Ankle2/LEM4 throughout the paper to make it clear that this is the same molecule.

A schematic model at the end of the final figure would be very useful to summarise the findings.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

In this manuscript, Azlan et al. identified a novel maternal factor called Sakura that is required for proper oogenesis in Drosophila. They showed that Sakura is specifically expressed in the female germline cells. Consistent with its expression pattern, Sakura functioned autonomously in germline cells to ensure proper oogenesis. In Sakura KO flies, germline cells were lost during early oogenesis and often became tumorous before degenerating by apoptosis. In these tumorous germ cells, piRNA production was defective and many transposons were derepressed. Interestingly, Smad signaling, a critical signaling pathway for GSC maintenance, was abolished in sakura KO germline stem cells, resulting in ectopic expression of Bam in whole germline cells in the tumorous germline. A recent study reported that Bam acts together with the deubiquitinase Otu to stabilize Cyc A. In the absence of sakura, Cyc A was upregulated in tumorous germline cells in the germarium. Furthermore, the authors showed that Sakura co-immunoprecipitated Otu in ovarian extracts. A series of in vitro assays suggested that the Otu (1-339 aa) and Sakura (1-49 aa) are sufficient for their direct interaction. Finally, the authors demonstrated that the loss of otu phenocopies the loss of sakura, supporting their idea that Sakura plays a role in germ cell maintenance and differentiation through interaction with Otu during oogenesis.

Strengths:

To my knowledge, this is the first characterization of the role of CG14545 genes. Each experiment seems to be well-designed and adequately controlled.

Weaknesses:

However, the conclusions from each experiment are somewhat separate, and the functional relationships between Sakura's functions are not well established. In other words, although the loss of Sakura in the germline causes pleiotropic effects, the cause-and-effect relationships between the individual defects remain unclear.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

This study aimed to determine whether bacterial translation inhibitors affect mitochondria through the same mechanisms. Using mitoribosome profiling, the authors found that most antibiotics, except telithromycin, act similarly in both systems. These insights could help in the development of antibiotics with reduced mitochondrial toxicity.<br /> They also identified potential novel mitochondrial translation events, proposing new initiation sites for MT-ND1 and MT-ND5. These insights not only challenge existing annotations but also open new avenues for research on mitochondrial function.

Strengths:

Ribosome profiling is a state-of-the-art method for monitoring the translatome at very high resolution. Using mitoribosome profiling, the authors convincingly demonstrate that most of the analyzed antibiotics act in the same way on both bacterial and mitochondrial ribosomes, except for telithromycin. Additionally, the authors report possible alternative translation events, raising new questions about the mechanisms behind mitochondrial initiation and start codon recognition in mammals.

Weaknesses:

The main weaknesses of this study are:<br /> - While the authors highlight an interesting difference in the inhibitory mechanism of telithromycin on bacterial and mitochondrial ribosomes, mechanistic explanations or hypotheses are lacking.<br /> - The assignment of alternative start codons in MT-ND1 and MT-ND5 is very interesting but does not seem to fully align with structural data.<br /> - The newly proposed translation events in the ncRNAs are preliminary and should be further substantiated with additional evidence or interpreted with more caution.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

Qin and colleagues analysed data from the Human Connectome Project on four right-handed subgroups with different gyrification patterns in Heschl's gyrus. Based on these groups, the authors highlight the structure-function relationship of planum temporale asymmetry in lateralised language processing at the group level and next at the individual level. In particular, the authors propose that especially microstructural asymmetries are related to functional auditory language asymmetries in the planum temporale.

Strengths:

The study is interesting because of an ongoing and long-standing debate about the relationship between structural and functional brain asymmetries, and in particular whether structural brain asymmetries can be seen as markers of functional language brain lateralisation.

In this debate, the relationship between Heschl's gyrus asymmetry and planum temporale asymmetry is rare and therefore valuable here. A large sample size and inter-rater reliability support the findings.

Weaknesses:

The authors highlight the microstructural results, but could also emphasise on their interesting macrostructural results.

Disorder studied: Type 1 von Willebrand disease (T1-VWD).

Type of study: Translational

Model organism: Mouse (inbred strains) Obtained from Jackson Laboratory

Analyses:

VWF plasma protein quantitation (ELISA)

Hertiability calculations

PCR genotyping

QTL analysis

Allele-specific primer extension analysis

Results:

Identified new modifier of VWF known as (Mvwf5). Also found two loci unliked to Vwf known as (Mvwf6-7)

Mice with this variant displayed statistically significant decrease in VWF levels, recapitulating the decreasing patterns displayed in humans.

However, another strain of inbred mice with a different mutation did not show an age-dependent decrease in VWF. Suggests strain-specific differences in regulation of VWF levels over time.

Mvwf5 is a cis-regulatory variant altering Vwf mRNA expression.

This is a natural variant of the Vwf allele among inbred strains of mice. Found this variant causes elevation in steady-state levels of Vwf mRNA.

Authors state findings show equivalent of of type 1 VWD is remarkably common in mice and humans. ALso state the Mvwf1 analysis in wild mouse populations suggest this locus is under selective pressure.

Of the 5 potential modifier loci identified, 3 display conservation of synteny with potential human modifier loci.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

This work from Cui, Pan, Fan et al explores memory impairment in chronic pain mouse models, a topic of great interest for the neurobiology field. In particular, the work starts from a very interesting observation, that WT mice can be divided in susceptible and unsusceptible to memory impairment upon modelling chronic pain with CCI. This observation represents the basis of the work where the authors identify the sphingosine receptor S1PR1 as down-regulated in the dentate gyrus of susceptible animals and demonstrate through an elegant range of experiments involving AAV mediated knockdown or overexpression of S1PR1 that this receptor is involved in the memory impairment observed with chronic pain. Importantly for translational purposes, they also show that activation of S1PR1 through a pharmacological paradigm is able to rescue the memory impairment phenotype.

The authors also link these defects to reduced dendritic branching and reduced number of mature excitatory synapses in the DG to the memory phenotype.

They then proceed to explore possible mechanisms downstream of S1PR1 that could explain this reduction in dendritic spines. They identify integrin α2 as an interactor of S1PR1 and show a reduction in several proteins involved in actin dynamic, which is crucial for dendritic spine formation and plasticity.

They thus hypothesize that the interaction between S1PR1 and Integrin α2 is fundamental for the activation of Rac1 and Cdc42 and consequently for the polymerisation of actin; a reduction in this pathway upon chronic pain would thus lead to impaired actin polymerisation, synapse formation and thus impaired memory.

The work is of great interest and the experiments are of very good quality with results of great importance.

Comments on revisions:

The authors have replied satisfactorily to my previous concerns.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

The paper addresses the knowledge gap between the representation of goal direction in the central complex and how motor systems stabilize movement toward that goal. The authors focused on two descending neurons, DNa01 and 02, and showed that they play different roles in steering the fly toward a goal. They also explored the connectome data to propose a model to explain how these DNs could mediate response to lateralized sensory inputs. They finally used lateralized optogenetic activation/inactivation experiments to test the roles of these neurons in mediating turnings in freely walking flies.

Strengths:

The experiments are well-designed and controlled. The experiment in Figure 4 is elegant, and the authors put a lot of effort into ensuring that ATP puffs do not accidentally activate the DNs. They also have explained complex experiments well. I only have minor comments for the authors.

Weaknesses:

(1) I do not fully understand how the authors extracted the correlation functions from the population data in Figure 1. Since the ipsilateral DNs are anti-correlated with the contralateral ones, I expected that the average will drop to zero when they are pooled together (e.g., 1E-G). Of course, this will not be the case if all the data in Figure 1 are collected from the same brain hemisphere. It would be helpful if the authors could explain this.

(2) What constitutes the goal directions in Figures 1-3 and 8, as the authors could not use EPG activity as a proxy for goal directions? If these experiments were done in the dark, without landmarks, one would expect the fly's heading to drift randomly at times, and they would not engage the DNa01/02 for turning. Do the walking trajectories in these experiments qualify as menotactic bouts?

(3) In Figure 2B, the authors mentioned that DNa02 overpredicts and 01 underpredicts rapid turning and provided single examples. It would be nice to see more population-level quantification to support this claim.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

In this paper, Wu et al. investigated the physiological roles of CCDC113 in sperm flagellum and HTCA stabilization by using CRISPR/Cas knockouts mouse models, co-IP and single sperm imaging. They find that CCDC113 localizes in the linker region among radial spokes, the nexin-dynein regulatory complex (N-DRC), and doublet microtubules (DMTs) RS, N-DRC and DMTs and interacts with axoneme-associated proteins CFAP57 and CFAP91, acting as an adaptor protein that facilitates the linkage between RS, N-DRC and DMTs within the sperm axoneme. They show the disruption of CCDC113 produced spermatozoa with disorganized sperm flagella and CFAP91, DRC2 could not colocalize with DMTs in Ccdc113-/- spermatozoa. Interestingly, the data also indicate that CCDC113 could localize on the HTCA region, and interact with HTCA-associated proteins. The knockout of Ccdc113 could also produce acephalic spermatozoa. By using Sun5 and Centlein knockout mouse models, the authors further find SUN5 and CENTLEIN are indispensable for the docking of CCDC113 to the implantation site on the sperm head. Overall, the experiments were designed properly and performed well to support the authors' observation in each part. Furthermore, the study's findings offer valuable insights into the physiological and developmental roles of CCDC113 in the male germ line, which can provide insight into impaired sperm development and male infertility. The conclusions of this paper are mostly well supported by data, but some points need to be clarified and discussed.

(1) In Fig. 1, a sperm flagellum protein, which is far way from CCDC113, should be selected as a negative control to exclude artificial effects in co-IP experiments.<br /> (2) Whether the detachment of sperm head and tail in Ccdc113-/- mice is a secondary effect of the sperm flagellum defects? The author should discuss this point.<br /> (3) Given that some cytoplasm materials could be observed in Ccdc113-/- spermatozoa (Fig. 5A), whether CCDC113 is also essential for cytoplasmic removal?<br /> (4) Although CCDC113 could not bind to PMFBP1, the localization of CCDC113 in Pmfbp1-/- spermatozoa should be also detected to clarify the relationship between CCDC113 and SUN5-CENTLEIN-PMFBP1.

Comments on revisions:

The authors addressed all my concerns. The manuscript was greatly improved.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

The authors aimed to investigate the oscillatory activity of GnRH neurones in freely behaving mice. By utilising GCaMP fiber photometry, they sought to record real-time neuronal activity to understand the patterns and dynamics of GnRH neuron firing and their implications for reproductive physiology.

Strengths:

- The use of GCaMP fiber photometry allows for high temporal resolution recordings of neuronal activity, providing real-time data on the dynamics of GnRH neurones.<br /> - Recording in freely behaving animals ensures that the findings are physiologically relevant and not artifacts of a controlled laboratory environment.<br /> - The authors used statistical methods to characterise the oscillatory patterns, ensuring the reliability of their findings.

Weaknesses:

- While the study identifies distinct oscillatory patterns in GnRH neurones' calcium dynamics, it falls short in exploring the functional implications of these patterns for GnRH pulsatility and overall reproductive physiology.<br /> - The study lacks broader discussion to include comparisons with existing studies on GnRH neurone activity and pulsatility and highlight how the findings of this study align with or differ from previous research and what novel contributions are made.<br /> - The authors aimed to characterise the oscillatory activity of GnRH neurons and successfully identified distinct oscillatory patterns. The results support the conclusion that GnRH neurons exhibit complex oscillatory behaviours, which are critical for understanding their role in reproductive physiology. However, it has not been made clear what exactly do the authors mean by "multi-dimensional oscillatory patterns" and how has this been shown.

Joint Public Reviews:

Summary:

This paper studies the genetic factors contributing to childhood obesity. Through a comprehensive analysis integrating genome-wide association study (GWAS) data with 3D genomic datasets across 57 human cell types, consisting of Capture-C/Hi-C, ATAC-seq, and RNA-seq, the study identifies significant genetic contributions to obesity using stratified LD score regression, emphasizing the enrichment of genetic signals in pancreatic alpha cells and identification of significant effector genes at obesity-associated loci such as BDNF, ADCY3, TMEM18, and FTO. Additionally, the study implicated ALKAL2, a gene responsive to inflammation in nerve nociceptors, as a novel effector gene at the TMEM18 locus, suggesting a role for inflammatory and neurological pathways in obesity's pathogenesis which was supported through colocalization analysis using eQTL derived from the GTEx dataset. This comprehensive genomic analysis sheds light on the complex genetic architecture of childhood obesity, highlighting the importance of cellular context for future research and the development of more effective strategies.

Strengths:

Overall, the paper has several strengths, including leveraging large-scale, multi-modal datasets, using appropriate computational tools, and in-depth discussion of their significant results.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

In this manuscript, Zhang et al. report a genetic screen to identify novel transcriptional regulators that coordinate mitochondrial biogenesis. They performed an RNAi-based modifier screen wherein they systematically knocked down all known transcription factors in the developing Drosophila eye, which was sensitized and had decreased mitochondrial DNA content. Through this screen, they identify CG1603 as a potential regulator of mitochondrial volume. They show that protein levels of mitochondrial proteins like TFAM, SDHA, and other mitochondrial proteins and mtDNA content are downregulated in CG1603 mutants. RNA-Seq and ChIP-Seq further show that CG1603 binds to the promoter regions of several known nuclear-encoded mitochondrial genes and regulates their expression. Finally, they also identified YL-1 as an upstream regulator of CG1603. Most studies have focused on PGC-1α as a master regulator of mitochondrial biogenesis. which seems to be a context-dependent regulator. Also, PGC-1α mediated regulation does not explain the regulation of 1100 genes that are required for mitochondrial biogenesis. Therefore, identifying new regulators in this work is crucial for the advancement of our understanding of mitochondrial biogenesis.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

This study shows that the pro-inflammatory S1P signaling regulates the responses of muller glial cells to damage. The authors describe the expression of S1P signaling components. Using agonist and antagonist of the pathways they also investigate their effect on the de-differentiation and proliferation of Muller glial cells in damaged retina of postnatal chicks. They show that S1PR1 is highly expressed in resting MG and non-neurogenic MGPCs. This receptor suppresses the proliferation and neuronal activity promotes MGPC cell cycle re-entry and enhanced the number of regenerated amacrine-like cells after retinal damage. The formation of MGPCs in damaged retinas is impaired in the absence of microglial cells. This study further shows that ablation of microglial cells from the retina increases the expression of S1P-related genes in MG, whereas inhibition of S1PR1 and SPHK1 partially rescues the formation of MGPCs in damaged retinas depleted of microglia. The studies also show that expression of S1P-related genes is conserved in fish and human retinas.

Strengths:

This is well-conducted study, with convincing images and statistically relevant data

Weaknesses:

However, given that S1P is upstream N NF-κB signaling, it is unclear if it offers conceptual innovations as compared to previous studies from the same team (Palazzo et al. 2020; 2022, 2023)

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

Shrestha et al report an investigation of mechanisms underlying gustatory preference for carboxylic acids in Drosophila. They begin with a screen of selected IR mutants, identifying 5 candidates - 2 IR co-receptors and 3 other IRs - whose loss of function causes defects in feeding preference for one or more of the three tested carboxylic acids. The requirement for IR51b, IR94a, and IR94h in carboxylic acid responses is evaluated in more detail using behavior, electrophysiology (labellar sensilla), and calcium imaging (pharyngeal neurons). The behavioral valence of IR94a and IR94h neurons is assessed using optogenetics. Overall the study uses a variety of approaches to test and validate the requirement of IRs in pharyngeal carboxylic acid taste.

Strengths:

The involvement of the identified IRs in gustatory responses to carboxylic acids is very clear from this study. The authors use mutants and transgenic rescue experiments and evaluate outcomes using electrophysiology, behavior, and imaging. Complementary approaches of loss-of-function and artificial activation support the main conclusion that the identified pharyngeal neurons sense carboxylic acids and convey a positive behavioral valence.

Weaknesses:

Some aspects of expression analysis and calcium imaging need to be clarified to better support the conclusions.

(1) The conclusion of two parallel IR-mediated pathways rests on expression analysis of Ir94a-GAL4 and Ir94h-GAL4 lines and the observation that Ir51b expression driven by either can rescue the Ir51b mutant phenotype. However, the expression analysis is not as rigorous as it needs to be for such a conclusion. Prior work found co-expression of Ir94a and Ir94h in the LSO. Here, the co-expression of the two drivers has not been examined, and Ir94a-GAL4 does not appear to be expressed in the LSO. Given the challenges in validating expression patterns in pharyngeal organs, the possibility that the drivers do not entirely capture endogenous expression cannot be ruled out. Rescue experiments using feeding preference or single-cell imaging don't suffice as validation. Plus, the expression of Ir51b could not be defined.

(2) The description of methods and results for the ex vivo calcium imaging is not satisfactory. Details about which cells are being analyzed, and in which organs are not included. No solvent stimulus is tested. The temporal dynamics of the responses are not presented. Movies of the imaging are not included as supplementary information - it would be important to visualize those with what was considered modest movement.

(3) The observed differences in phenotypes of Ir25a and Ir76b mutants are intriguing, as are those between the co-receptor mutants and Ir51b, Ir94a, and Ir94h, but have not been sufficiently considered. Prior studies have also found roles for other response modes (OFF response), other IRs and GRs, and other organs (labellum, tarsi) in behavioral responses to carboxylic acids. Overall, the authors' model may be overly simplistic, and the discussion does not do justice to how their model reconciles with the body of work that already exists.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

In this study, the authors used a chronic murine dietary restriction model to study the effects of chronic malnutrition on controls of bacterial infection and overall immunity, including cellularity and functions of different immune cell types. They further attempted to determine whether refeeding can revert the infection susceptibility and immunodeficiency. Although refeeding here improves anthropometric deficits, the authors of this study show that this is insufficient to recover the impairments across the immune cell compartments.

Strengths:

The manuscript is well-written and conceived around a valid scientific question. The data supports the idea that malnutrition contributes to infection susceptibility and causes some immunological changes. The malnourished mouse model also displayed growth and development delays. The work's significance is well justified. Immunological studies in the malnourished cohort (human and mice) are scarce, so this could add valuable information.

Weaknesses:

The assays on myeloid cells are limited, and the study is descriptive and overstated. The authors claim that "this work identifies a novel cellular link between prior nutritional state and immunocompetency, highlighting dysregulated myelopoiesis as a major." However, after reviewing the entire manuscript, I found no cellular mechanism defining the link between nutritional state and immunocompetency.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

The authors aim to assess the effect of salt stress on root:shoot ratio, identify the underlying genetic mechanisms, and evaluate their contribution to salt tolerance. To this end, the authors systematically quantified natural variations in salt-induced changes in root:shoot ratio. This innovative approach considers the coordination of root and shoot growth rather than exploring biomass and the development of each organ separately. Using this approach, the authors identified a gene cluster encoding eight paralog genes with a domain-of-unknown-function 247 (DUF247), with the majority of SNPs clustering into SR3G (At3g50160). In the manuscript, the authors utilized an integrative approach that includes genomic, genetic, evolutionary, histological, and physiological assays to functionally assess the contribution of their genes of interest to salt tolerance and root development.

Comments on revisions:

As the authors correctly noted, variations across samples, genotypes, or experiments make achieving statistical significance challenging. Should the authors choose to emphasize trends across experiments to draw biological conclusions, careful revisions of the text, including titles and figure legends, will be necessary to address some of the inconsistencies between figures (see examples below). However, I would caution that this approach may dilute the overall impact of the work on SR3G function and regulation. Therefore, I strongly recommend pursuing additional experimental evidence wherever possible to strengthen the conclusions.

(1) Given the phenotypic differences shown in Figures S17A-B, 10A-C, and 6A, the statement that "SR3G does not play a role in plant development under non-stress conditions" (lines 680-681) requires revision to better reflect the observed data.<br /> (2) I agree with the authors that detecting expression differences in lowly expressed genes can be challenging. However, as demonstrated in the reference provided (Lu et al., 2023), a significant reduction in WRKY75 expression is observed in T-DNA insertion mutant alleles of WRKY75. In contrast, Fig. 9B in the current manuscript shows no reduction in WRKY75 expression in the two mutant alleles selected by the authors, which suggests that these alleles cannot be classified as loss-of-function mutants (line 745). Additionally, the authors note that the wrky75 mutant exhibits reduced main root length under salt stress, consistent with the phenotype reported by Lu et al. (2023). However, other phenotypic discrepancies exist between the two studies. For example, 1) Lu et al. (2023) report that w¬rky75 root length is comparable to WT under control conditions, whereas the current manuscript shows that wrky75 root growth is significantly lower than WT; 2) under salt stress, Lu et al. (2023) show that wrky75 accumulates higher levels of Na+, whereas the current study finds Na+ levels in wrky75 indistinguishable from WT. To confirm the loss of WRKY75 function in these T-DNA insertion alleles the authors should provide additional evidence (e.g., Western blot analysis).

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Syngnathid fishes (seahorses, pipefishes, and seadragons) present very particular and elaborated features among teleosts and a major challenge is to understand the cellular and molecular mechanisms that permitted such innovations and adaptations. The study provides a valuable new resource to investigate the morphogenetic basis of four main traits characterizing syngnathids, including the elongated snout, toothlessness, dermal armor and male pregnancy. More particularly, the authors have focused on a late stage of pipefish organogenesis to perform single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) completed by in situ hybridization analyses to identify molecular pathways implicated in the formation of the different specific traits.<br /> The first set of data explores the scRNA-seq atlas composed of 35,785 cells from two samples of gulf pipefish embryos that authors have been able to classify into major cell types characterizing vertebrate organogenesis, including epithelial, connective, neural and muscle progenitors. To affirm identities and discover potential properties of clusters, authors primarily use KEGG analysis that reveals enriched genetic pathways in each cell types. After revisions, the authors have provided extended supplementary files to well interpret the dataset and some statements have been clarified. I thank the authors for the revisions/completions of ISH results compared to initial submission.

To conclude, the scRNA-seq dataset in this unconventional model organism will be useful for the community and will provide clues for future research to understand the extraordinary evolution of the Syngnathidae family.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

This study investigates an intriguing question in cognitive control from a temporal dynamics perspective: why does concurrent verbal working memory load eliminate the color-word Stroop effect? Through a series of thorough data analyses, the authors propose that verbal working memory load occupies the stimulus-response mapping resources represented by theta-band activity, thereby disrupting the mapping process for task-irrelevant distractors. This reduces the response tendency to the distractors, ultimately leading to the elimination of the Stroop effect.

Strengths:

The behavioral and neural evidence presented in the manuscript is solid, and the findings have valuable theoretical implications for research on Stroop conflict processing.

Weaknesses:

There are several areas where the manuscript could be improved.

Major Comments:

(1) In the Results section, the rationale behind selecting the beta band for the central (C3, CP3, Cz, CP4, C4) regions and the theta band for the fronto-central (Fz, FCz, Cz) regions is not clearly explained in the main text. This information is only mentioned in the figure captions. Additionally, why was the beta band chosen for the S-ROI fronto-central region and the theta band for the S-ROI central region? Was this choice influenced by the MVPA results?

(2) In the Data Analysis section, line 424 states: "Only trials that were correct in both the memory task and the Stroop task were included in all subsequent analyses. In addition, trials in which response times (RTs) deviated by more than three standard deviations from the condition mean were excluded from behavioral analyses." The percentage of excluded trials should be reported. Also, for the EEG-related analyses, were the same trials excluded, or were different criteria applied?

(3) In the Methods section, line 493 mentions: "A 400-200 ms pre-stimulus time window was selected as the baseline time window." What is the justification in the literature for choosing the 400-200 ms pre-stimulus window as the baseline? Why was the 200-0 ms pre-stimulus period not considered?

(4) Is the primary innovation of this study limited to the methodology, such as employing MVPA and RSA to establish the relationship between late theta activity and behavior?

(5) On page 14, lines 280-287, the authors discuss a specific pattern observed in the alpha band. However, the manuscript does not provide the corresponding results to substantiate this discussion. It is recommended to include these results as supplementary material.

(6) On page 16, lines 323-328, the authors provide a generalized explanation of the findings. According to load theory, stimuli compete for resources only when represented in the same form. Since the pre-memorized Chinese characters are represented semantically in working memory, this explanation lacks a critical premise: that semantic-response mapping is also represented semantically during processing.

(7) The classic Stroop task includes both a manual and a vocal version. Since stimulus-response mapping in the vocal version is more automatic than in the manual version, it is unclear whether the findings of this study would generalize to the impact of working memory load on the Stroop effect in the vocal version.

(8) While the discussion section provides a comprehensive analysis of the study's results, the authors could further elaborate on the theoretical and practical contributions of this work.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

The revision by Ruan et al clarifies several aspects of the original manuscript that were difficult to understand, and I think it presents some useful and interesting ideas. I understand that the authors are distinguishing their model from the standard Wright-Fisher model in that the population size is not imposed externally, but is instead a consequence of the stochastic reproduction scheme. Here, the authors chose a branching process but in principle any Markov chain can probably be used. Within this framework, the authors are particularly interested in cases where the variance in reproductive success changes through time, as explored by the DDH model, for example. They argue with some experimental results that there is a reason to believe that the variance in reproductive success does change over time.

One of the key aspects of the original manuscript that I want to engage with is the DDH model. As the authors point out, their equations 5 and 6 are assumptions, and not derived from any principles. In essence, the authors are positing that that the variance in reproductive success, given by 6, changes as a function of the current population size. There is nothing "inherent" to a negative binomial branching mechanism that results in this: in fact, the the variance in offspring number could in principle be the same for all time. As relates to models that exist in the literature, I believe that this is the key difference: unlike Cannings models, the authors allow for a changing variance in reproduction through time.

This is, of course, an interesting thing to consider, and I think that the situation the authors point out, in which drift is lower at small population sizes and larger at large population sizes, is not appreciated in the literature. However, I am not so sure that there is anything that needs to be resolved in Paradox 1. A very strong prediction of that model is that Ne and N could be inversely related, as shown by the blue line in Fig 3b. This suggests that you could see something very strange if you, for example, infer a population size history using a Wright-Fisher framework, because you would infer a population *decline* when there is in fact a population *expansion*. However, as far as I know there are very few "surprising population declines" found in empirical data. An obvious case where we know there is very rapid population growth is human populations; I don't think I've ever seen an inference of recent human demographic history from genetic data that suggests anything other than a massive population expansion. While I appreciate the authors empirical data supporting their claim of Paradox 1 (more on the empirical data later), it's not clear to me that there's a "paradox" in the literature that needs explaining so much as this is a "words of caution about interpreting inferred effective population sizes". To be clear, I think those words of caution are important, and I had never considered that you might be so fundamentally misled as to infer decline when there is growth, but calling it a "paradox" seems to suggest that this is an outstanding problem in the literature, when in fact I think the authors are raising a *new* and important problem. Perhaps an interesting thing for the authors to do to raise the salience of this point would be to perform simulations under this model and then infer effective population sizes using e.g. dadi or psmc and show that you could identify a situation in which the true history is one of growth, but the best fit would be one of decline

The authors also highlight that their approach reflects a case where the population size is determined by the population dynamics themselves, as opposed to being imposed externally as is typical in Cannings models. I agree with the authors that this aspect of population regulation is understudied. Nonetheless, several manuscripts have dealt with the case of population genetic dynamics in populations of stochastically fluctuating size. For example, Kaj and Krone (2003) show that under pretty general conditions you get something very much like a standard coalescent; for example, combining their theorem 1 with their arguments on page 36 and 37, they find that exchangeable populations with stochastic population dynamics where the variance does not change with time still converge to exactly the coalescent you would expect from Cannings models. This is strongly suggestive that the authors key result isn't about stochastic population dynamics per se, but instead related to arguing that variance in reproductive success could change through time. In fact, I believe that the result of Kaj and Krone (2003) is substantially more general than the models considered in this manuscript. That being said, I believe that the authors of this manuscript do a much better job of making the implications for evolutionary processes clear than Kaj and Krone, which is important---it's very difficult to understand from Kaj and Krone the conditions under which effective population sizes will be substantially impacted by stochastic population dynamics.

I also find the authors exposition on Paradox 3 to be somewhat strange. First of all, I'm not sure there's a paradox there at all? The authors claim that the lack of dependence of the fixation probability on Ne is a paradox, but this is ultimately not surprising---fixation of a positively selected allele depends mostly on escaping the boundary layer, which doesn't really depend on the population size (see Gillespie's book "The Causes of Molecular Evolution" for great exposition on boundary layer effects). Moreover, the authors *use a Cannings-style argument* to get gain a good approximation of how the fixation probability changes when there is non-Poisson reproduction. So it's not clear that the WFH model is really doing a lot of work here. I suppose they raise the interesting point that the particularly simple form of p(fix) = 2s is due to the assumption that variance in offspring is equal to 1.

In addition, I raised some concerns about the analysis of empirical results on reproductive variance in my original review, and I don't believe that the authors responded to it at all. I'm not super worried about that analysis, but I think that the authors should probably respond to me.

Overall, I feel like I now have a better understanding of this manuscript. However, I think it still presents its results too strongly: Paradox 1 contains important words of caution that reflect what I am confident is an under appreciated possibility, and Paradox 3 is, as far as I'm concerned, not a paradox at all. I have not addressed Paradox 2 very much because I think that another reviewer had solid and interesting comments on that front and I am leaving it to them. That being said, I do think Paradox 2 actually presents a deep problem in the literature and that the authors' argument may actually represent a path toward a solution.

This manuscript can be a useful contribution to the literature, but as it's presented at the moment, I think most of it is worded too strongly and it continues to not engage appropriately with the literature. Theoretical advances are undoubtedly important, and I think the manuscript presents some interesting things to think about but ultimately needs to be better situated and several of the claims strongly toned down.

References:<br /> Kaj, I., & Krone, S. M. (2003). The coalescent process in a population with stochastically varying size. Journal of Applied Probability, 40(1), 33-48.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

Assessment of cardiac LEC transcriptomes post-MI may yield new targets to improve lymphatic function. scRNAseq is a valid approach as cardiac LECs are rare compared to blood vessel endothelial cells.

Strengths:

Extensive bioinformatics approaches employed by the group

Weaknesses:

Too few cells included in scRNAseq data set and the spatial transcriptomics data that was exploited has little relevance, or rather specificity, for cardiac lymphatics. This study seems more a collection of preliminary transcriptomic data than a true scientific report to help advance the field.

Comments on revisions:

Thank you for the revision that helps clarify some outstanding questions.

(1) I still have questions relating to the relevance of the spatial maps generated and shown in fig 3C. They are supposedly generated using a 'molecular finger print' specific to each sub-cluster of LECs. However, given that at early stages postMI most populations are exceedingly rare in your analyses, could you please explain or comment on the relevance of the spatial maps?

(2) Fig 3 s1 would indicate that the population CaII is the majoritarian one in healthy hearts, while quantifications in Fig 3A show that rather the LEC Co subpopulation is majoritarian. Further, in mouse hearts histological analyses have demonstrated that cardiac lymphatics are restricted to the outer layers of the heart. This is not seen in your spatial maps. This seems to be the case only for the LEc Co population in healthy hearts, but not for other subpopulation signatures. Please explain.

(3) Further, the population of CaI, with 1 cell analysed in d3, but appears very prevalent in the spatial maps at d3. Please explain.

(4) In your list of 12 genes used as matrix anchors to identify LEC subpopulations in your screens, it is not apparent how LEC CaI, II and III differ so much as to allow selective detection of subpopulations. This similitude of profiles is supported by Fig 2F, and further explanations are needed to explain how the spatial maps of LEC ca subpopulations appear as distinct as shown in fig 3 S1 and Fig 3C.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

In the work Josse Poppinga and collaborators addressed the synaptic function of Sortin-Nexin 4 (SNX4). Employing a newly-developed in vitro KO model, with live imaging experiments, electrophysiological recordings and ultrastructural analysis, the authors evaluate modifications in synaptic morphology and function upon loss of SNX4. The data demonstrate increased neurotransmitter release and alteration in synapse ultrastructure with higher number of docked vesicles and shorter AZ. The evaluation of presynaptic function of SNX4 is of relevance and tackles an open and yet unresolved question in the field of presynaptic physiology.

Strengths:

The sequential characterization of the cellular model is nicely conducted, and the different techniques employed are appropriate for the morpho-functional analysis of the synaptic phenotype and the derived conclusions on SNX4 function at presynaptic site. The authors succeeded in presenting a novel in vitro model that results in chronic deletion of SNX4 in neurons. A convincing sequence of experimental techniques are applied to the model to unravel the role of SNX4, whose functions in neuronal cells and at synapses are largely unknown. The understanding of the role of endosomal sorting at presynaptic site is relevant and of high interest in the field of synaptic physiology and on the pathophysiology of the many described synaptopathies that broadly result in loss of synaptic fidelity and quality control at release sites.

Weaknesses:

The flow of the data presentation is mostly descriptive with several consistent morphological and functional modifications upon SNX loss. The paper would benefit from a wider characterization that would allow to address the physiological roles of SNX4 at synaptic site and speculate on the underlying molecular mechanisms. The novel experiments on autophagy progression as well as spontaneous neurotransmission are well conducted, although do not assist for the explanation of the molecular mechanism underneath.

Comments on revisions:

Other implementations in the revised version are quite limited and would benefit from a more detailed presentation and description. i.e.: Sholl analysis in the new figure 1h, is presented with no definition of number of cells employed and standard deviations of the replication. The "simil" Sholl analysis performed on VAMP2 is still puzzling and some explanations on the reason for the constant value of VAMP2 fluorescent signal from less than 0 to 160 µm from the cell body is to be added. How is the increased number of active synapses explained? How is this related to shorter AZ and higher number of docked vesicles?

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

Arafi et al. present results of studies designed to better understand the effects of mutations in the presenilin-1 (PSEN1) gene on proteolytic processing of the amyloid precursor protein (APP). This is important because APP processing can result in the production of the amyloid β-protein (Aβ), a key pathologic protein in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Aβ exists in various forms that differ in amino acid sequence and assembly state. The predominant forms of Aβ are Aβ40 and Aβ42, which are 40 and 42 amino acids in length, respectively. Shorter and longer forms derive from processive proteolysis of the Aβ region of APP by the heterotetramer β-secretase, within which presenilin 1 possesses the active site of the enzyme. Each form may become toxic if it assembles into non-natively folded, oligomeric, or fibrillar structures. A deep mechanistic understanding of enzyme-substrate interactions is a first step toward the design and successful use of small-molecule therapeutics for AD.

The key finding of Arafi et al. is that three PSEN mutations display unusual profiles of effects on Aβ production that have novel implications for the stalled E-S complex hypothesis. PSEN1 F386S is unique in that initial ε cleavage is not reduced compared with WT PSEN1; only certain trimming steps are deficient, results consistent with FLIM experiments that reveal stabilized E-S complexes only in Aβ-rich regions in the cell. In contrast, PSEN1 A431E and A434T display very little ε cleavage and therefore very little overall Aβ production, suggesting a limited role of Aβ in the pathogenesis of these two mutants and pointing to stalled E-S complexes as the common factor. For the biochemist, this may not be surprising, but in the context of understanding and treating AD, it is immense because it shifts the paradigm from targeting the results of γ-secretase action, viz., Aβ oligomers and fibrils, to targeting initial Aβ production at the molecular level. It is the equivalent of taking cancer treatment from simple removal of tumorous tissue to prevention of tumor formation and growth. Arafi et al. have provided us with a blueprint for the design of small-molecule inhibitors of γ-secretase. The significance of this achievement cannot be overstated.

Strengths and weaknesses:

The comprehensiveness and rigor of the study are notable. Rarely have I reviewed a manuscript reporting the results of so many orthogonal experiments, all of which support the authors' hypotheses, and of so many excellent controls. In addition, as found in clinical trial reports, the limitations of the study were discussed explicitly. None of these significantly affected the conclusions of the study.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

In this study, Rosenblum et al introduce a novel and automatic way of calculating sleep cycles from human EEG. Previous results have shown that the slope of the non-oscillatory component of the power spectrum (called the aperiodic or fractal component) changes with sleep stage. Building on this, the authors present an algorithm that extracts the continuous-time fluctuations in the fractal slope and propose that peaks in this variable can be used to identify sleep cycle limits. Cycles defined in this way are termed "fractal cycles". The main focus of the article is a comparison of "fractal" and "classical" (ie defined manually based on the hypnogram) sleep cycles in numerous datasets.

The manuscript amply illustrates through examples the strong overlap between fractal and classical cycle identification. Accordingly, a high percentage (81%) can be matched one-to-one between methods and sleep cycle duration is well correlated (around R = 0.5). Moreover, the methods track certain global changes in sleep structure in different populations: shorter cycles in children and longer cycles in patients medicated with REM-suppressing anti-depressants. Finally, a major strength of the results is that they show similar agreement between fractal and classical sleep cycle length in 5 different data sets, showing that it is robust to changes in recording settings and methods.

The match between fractal and classical cycles is not one-to-one. For example, the fractal method identifies a correlation between age and cycle duration in adults that is not apparent with the classical method.<br /> The difference between the fractal and classical methods appear to be linked to the uncertain definition of sleep cycles since they are tied to when exactly the cycle begins/ends and whether or not to count cycles during fractured sleep architecture at sleep onset. Moreover, the discrepancies between the two are on the order of that found between classical cycles defined manually or via an automatic algorithm.

Overall the fractal cycle is an attractive method to study sleep architecture since it dispenses with time-consuming and potentially subjective manual identification of sleep cycles. However, given its difference with the classical method, it is unlikely that fractal scoring will be able to replace classical scoring directly. By providing a complementary quantification, it will likely contribute to refining the definition of sleep cycles that is currently ambiguous in certain cases. Moreover, it has the potential to be applied on animal studies which rarely deal with sleep cycle structure.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

This study investigates an intriguing question in cognitive control from a temporal dynamics perspective: why does concurrent verbal working memory load eliminate the color-word Stroop effect? Through a series of thorough data analyses, the authors propose that verbal working memory load occupies the stimulus-response mapping resources represented by theta-band activity, thereby disrupting the mapping process for task-irrelevant distractors. This reduces the response tendency to the distractors, ultimately leading to the elimination of the Stroop effect.

Strengths:

The behavioral and neural evidence presented in the manuscript is solid, and the findings have valuable theoretical implications for research on Stroop conflict processing.

Comments on revisions:

The authors have addressed all concerns

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

The authors define a new metric for visual displays, derived from psychophysical response times, called visual homogeneity (VH). They attempt to show that VH is explanatory of response times across multiple visual tasks. They use fMRI to find visual cortex regions with VH-correlated activity. On this basis, they declare a new visual region in human brain, area VH, whose purpose is to represent VH for the purpose of visual search and symmetry tasks.

Link to original review: https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/93033v2/reviews#peer-review-0

Comments on latest version:

Authors rebuttal: We agree that visual homogeneity is similar to existing concepts such as target saliency, memorability etc. We have proposed it as a separate concept because visual homogeneity has an independent empirical measure (the reciprocal of target-absent search time in oddball search, or the reciprocal of same response time in a same-different task, etc) that may or may not be the same as other empirical measures such as saliency and memorability. Investigating these possibilities is beyond the scope of our study but would be interesting for future work. We have now clarified this in the revised manuscript (Discussion, p. 42).

Reviewer response to rebuttal: Neither the original ms nor the comments on that ms pretended that "visual homogeneity" was entirely separate from target saliency etc. So this is a response to a criticism that was never made. What the authors do claim, and what the comments question, is that they have successfully subsumed long-recognized psychophysical concepts like target saliency etc. under a new, uber-concept, "visual homogeneity" that explains psychophysical experimental results in a more unified and satisfying way. This subsumption of several well-established psychophysical concepts under a new, unified category is what reviewers objected to.

Authors rebuttal: However, we'd like to emphasize that the question of whether visual homogeneity is novel or related to existing concepts misses entirely the key contribution of our study.

Reviewer response to rebuttal: Sorry, but the claim of a new uber-concept in psychophysics, "visual homogeneity", is a major claim of the paper. The fact that it is not the only claim made does not absolve the authors from having to prove it satisfactorily.

"Authors rebuttal: "In addition, the large regions of VH correlations identified in Experiments 1 and 2 vs. Experiments 3 and 4 are barely overlapping. This undermines the claim that VH is a universal quantity, represented in a newly discovered area of visual cortex, that underlies a wide variety of visual tasks and functions."<br /> • We respectfully disagree with your assertion. First of all, there is partial overlap between the VH regions, for which there are several other obvious explanations that must be considered first before dismissing VH outright as a flawed construct. We acknowledge these alternatives in the Results (p. 27), and the relevant text is reproduced below.

"We note that it is not straightforward to interpret the overlap between the VH regions identified in Experiments 2 & 4. The lack of overlap could be due to stimulus differences (natural images in Experiment 2 vs silhouettes in Experiment 4), visual field differences (items in the periphery in Experiment 2 vs items at the fovea in Experiment 4) and even due to different participants in the two experiments. There is evidence supporting all these possibilities: stimulus differences (Yue et al., 2014), visual field differences (Kravitz et al., 2013) as well as individual differences can all change the locus of neural activations in object-selective cortex (Weiner and Grill-Spector, 2012a; Glezer and Riesenhuber, 2013). We speculate that testing the same participants on search and symmetry tasks using similar stimuli and display properties would reveal even larger overlap in the VH regions that drive behavior."

Reviewer response to rebuttal: The authors are saying that their results merely look unconvincing (weak overlap between VH regions defined in different experiments) because there were confounding differences between their experiments, in subject population, stimuli, etc. That is possible, but in that case it is up to the authors to show that their definition of a new "area VH" is convincing when the confounding differences are resolved, e.g. by using the same stimuli in the different experiments they attempt to agglomerate here. That would require new experiments, and none are offered in this revision.

Authors rebuttal: • Thank you for carefully thinking through our logic. We agree that a distance-to-centre calculation is entirely unnecessary as an explanation for target-present visual search. The similarity between target and distractor, so there is nothing new to explain here. However, this is a narrow and selective interpretation of our findings because you are focusing only on our results on target-present searches, which are only half of all our data. The other half is the target-absent responses which previously have had no clear explanation. You are also missing the fact that we are explaining same-different and symmetry tasks as well using the same visual homogeneity computation. We urge you to think more deeply about the problem of how to decide whether an oddball is present or not in the first place. How do we actually solve this task?

Reviewer response to rebuttal: It is the role of the authors to think deeply about their paper and on that basis present a clear and compelling case that readers can understand quickly and agree with. That is not done here.

Authors rebuttal: There must be some underlying representation and decision process. Our study shows that a distance-to-centre computation can actually serve as a decision variable to solve disparate property-based visual tasks. These tasks pose a major challenge to standard models of decision-making because the underlying representation and decision variable have been unclear. Our study resolves this challenge by proposing a novel computation that can be used by the brain to solve all these disparate tasks, and bring these tasks into the ambit of standard theories of decision-making.

Reviewer response to rebuttal: There is only a "challenge" if you accept the authors' a priori assumption that all of these tasks must have a common explanation and rely on a single neural mechanism. I do not accept that assumption, and I don't think the authors provide evidence to support the assumption. There is nothing "unclear" about how search, oddball, etc. have been thoroughly explained, separately, in the psychophysical literature that spans more than a century.

Authors rebuttal: • You are indeed correct in noting that both Experiment 1 & 2 involve oddball search, and so at the superficial level, it looks circular that the oddball search data of Experiment 1 is being used to explain the oddball search data of Experiment 2.<br /> However a deeper scrutiny reveals more fundamental differences: Experiment 1 consisted of only oddball search with the target appearing on the left or right, whereas Experiment 2 consisted of oddball search with the target either present or completely absent. In fact, we were merely using the search dissimilarities from Experiment 1 to reconstruct the underlying object representation, because it is well-known that neural dissimilarities are predicted well by search dissimilarities (Sripati & Olson, 2009; Zhivago et al, 2014).

Reviewer response to rebuttal: Here again the authors cite differences between their multiple experiments as a virtue that supports their conclusions. Instead, the experiments should have been designed for maximum similarity if the authors intended to explain them with the same theory.

Authors rebuttal: To thoroughly refute any lingering concern about circularity, we reasoned that the model predictions for Experiment 2 could have been obtained by a distance-to-center computation on any brain like object representation. To this end, we used object representations from deep neural networks pretrained on object categorization, whose representations are known to match well with the brain, and asked if a distance-to-centre computation on these representations could predict the search data in Experiment 2. This was indeed the case, and these results are now included an additional section in Supplementary Material (Section S1).

Reviewer response to rebuttal: The authors' claims are about human performance and how it is based on the human brain. Their claims are not well supported by the human experiments that they performed. It serves no purpose to redo the same experiments in silico, which cannot provide stronger evidence that compensates for what was lacking in the human data.

Authors rebuttal: "Confirming the generality of visual homogeneity<br /> We performed several additional analyses to confirm the generality of our results, and to reject alternate explanations.

First, it could be argued that our results are circular because they involve taking oddball search times from Experiment 1 and using them to explain search response times in Experiment 2. This is a superficial concern since we are using the search dissimilarities from Experiment 1 only as a proxy for the underlying neural representation, based on previous reports that neural dissimilarities closely match oddball search dissimilarities (Sripati and Olson, 2010; Zhivago and Arun, 2014). Nonetheless, to thoroughly refute this possibility, we reasoned that we would get similar predictions of the target present/absent responses in Experiment using any other brain-like object representation. To confirm this, we replaced the object representations derived from Experiment 1 with object representations derived from deep neural networks pretrained for object categorization, and asked if distance-to-center computations could predict the target present/absent responses in Experiment 2. This was indeed the case (Section S1).

Second, we wondered whether the nonlinear optimization process of finding the best-fitting center could be yielding disparate optimal centres each time. To investigate this, we repeated the optimization procedure with many randomly initialized starting points, and obtained the same best-fitting center each time (see Methods).

Third, to confirm that the above model fits are not due to overfitting, we performed a leave-one-out cross validation analysis. We left out all target-present and target-absent searches involving a particular image, and then predicted these searches by calculating visual homogeneity estimated from all other images. This too yielded similar positive and negative correlations (r = 0.63, p < 0.0001 for target-present, r = -0.63, p < 0.001 for target-absent).

Fourth, if heterogeneous displays indeed elicit similar neural responses due to mixing, then their average distance to other objects must be related to their visual homogeneity. We confirmed that this was indeed the case, suggesting that the average distance of an object from all other objects in visual search can predict visual homogeneity (Section S1).

Fifth, the above results are based on taking the neural response to oddball arrays to be the average of the target and distractor responses. To confirm that averaging was indeed the optimal choice, we repeated the above analysis by assuming a range of relative weights between the target and distractor. The best correlation was obtained for almost equal weights in the lateral occipital (LO) region, consistent with averaging and its role in the underlying perceptual representation (Section S1).

Finally, we performed several additional experiments on a larger set of natural objects as well as on silhouette shapes. In all cases, present/absent responses were explained using visual homogeneity (Section S2)."

Reviewer response to rebuttal: The authors can experiment on side questions for as long as they please, but none of the results described above answer the concern about how center-fitting undercuts the evidentiary value of their main results.

Authors rebuttal: • While it is true that the optimal center needs to be found by fitting to the data, there no particular mystery to the algorithm: we are simply performing a standard gradient-descent to maximize the fit to the data. We have described the algorithm clearly and are making our codes public. We find the algorithm to yield stable optimal centers despite many randomly initialized starting points. We find the optimal center to be able to predict responses to entirely novel images that were excluded during model training. We are making no assumption about the location of centre with respect to individual points. Therefore, we see no cause for concern regarding the center-finding algorithm.

Reviewer response to rebuttal: The point of the original comment was that center-fitting should not be done in the first place because it introduces unknowable effects.

•Authors rebuttal: Most visual tasks, such as finding an animal, are thought to involve building a decision boundary on some underlying neural representation. Even visual search has been portrayed as a signal-detection problem where a particular target is to be discriminated from a distractor. However none of these formulations work in the case of property-based visual tasks, where there is no unique feature to look for.<br /> We are proposing that, when we view a search array, the neural response to the search array can be deduced from the neural responses to the individual elements using well-known rules, and that decisions about an oddball target being present or absent can be made by computing the distance of this neural response from some canonical mean firing rate of a population of neurons. This distance to center computation is what we denote as visual homogeneity. We have revised our manuscript throughout to make this clearer and we hope that this helps you understand the logic better.<br /> • You are absolutely correct that the stimulus complexity should matter, but there are no good empirically derived measures for stimulus complexity, other than subjective ratings which are complex on their own and could be based on any number of other cognitive and semantic factors. But considering what factors are correlated with target-absent response times is entirely different from asking what decision variable or template is being used by participants to solve the task.

Reviewer response to rebuttal: If stimulus complexity is what matters, as the authors agree here, then it is incumbent on them to measure stimulus complexity. The difficulty of measuring stimulus complexity does not justify avoiding the problem with an analysis that ignores complexity.

Authors rebuttal: • We have provided empirical proof for our claims, by showing that target-present response times in a visual search task are correlated with "different" responses in the same-different task, and that target-absent response times in the visual search task are correlated with "same" responses in the same-different task (Section S4).

Reviewer response to rebuttal: Sorry, but there is still no reason to think that same-different judgments are based on a mythical boundary halfway between the two. If there is a boundary, it will be close to the same end of the continuum, where subjects might conceivably miss some tiny difference between two stimuli. The vast majority of "different" stimuli will be entirely different from the same stimulus, producing no confusability, and certainly not a decision boundary halfway between two extremes.

Authors rebuttal: • Again, the opposite correlations between target present/absent search times with VH are the crucial empirical validation of our claims that a distance-to-center calculation explain how we perform these property-based tasks. The VH predictions do not fully explain the data. We have explicitly acknowledged this shortcoming, so we are hardly dismissing it as a problem.

Reviewer response to rebuttal: The authors' acknowledgement of flaws in the ms does not argue in favor of publication, but rather just the opposite.

Authors rebuttal: • Finding an oddball, deciding if two items are same or different and symmetry tasks are disparate visual tasks that do not fit neatly into standard models of decision-making. The key conceptual advance of our study is that we propose a plausible neural representation and decision variable that allows all three property-based visual tasks to be reconciled with standard models of decision-making.

Reviewer response to rebuttal: The original comment stands as written. Same/different will have a boundary very close to the "same" end of the continuum. The boundary is only halfway between two choices if the stimulus design forces the boundary to be there, as in the motion and cat/dog experiments.

Authors rebuttal: "There is no inherent middle point boundary between target present and target absent. Instead, in both types of trial, maximum information is present when target and distractors are most dissimilar, and minimum information is present when target and distractors are most similar. The point of greatest similarity occurs at then limit of any metric for similarity. Correspondingly, there is no middle point dip in information that would produce greater difficulty and higher response times. Instead, task difficulty and response times increase monotonically with similarity between targets and distractors, for both target present and target absent decisions. Thus, in Figs. 2F and 2G, response times appear to be highest for animals, which share the largest numbers of closely similar distractors."<br /> • Your alternative explanation rests on vague factors like "maximum information" which cannot be quantified. By contrast we are proposing a concrete, falsifiable model for three property-based tasks - same/different, oddball present/absent and object symmetry. Any argument based solely on item similarity to explain visual search or symmetry responses cannot explain systematic variations observed for target-absent arrays and for symmetric objects, for the reasons explained earlier.

Reviewer response to rebuttal: There is nothing vague about this comment. The authors use an analysis that assumes a decision boundary at the centerpoint of their arbitrarily defined stimulus space. This assumption is not supported, and it is unlikely, considering that subjects are likely to notice all but the smallest variations between same and different stimuli, putting the boundary nearly at the same end of the continuum, not the very middle.

Authors rebuttal: "(1) The area VH boundaries from different experiments are nearly completely non-overlapping.

In line with their theory that VH is a single continuum with a decision boundary somewhere in the middle, the authors use fMRI searchlight to find an area whose responses positively correlate with homogeneity, as calculated across all of their target present and target absent arrays. They report VH-correlated activity in regions anterior to LO. However, the VH defined by symmetry Experiments 3 and 4 (VHsymmetry) is substantially anterior to LO, while the VH defined by target detection Experiments 1 and 2 (VHdetection) is almost immediately adjacent to LO. Fig. S13 shows that VHsymmetry and VHdetection are nearly non-overlapping. This is a fundamental problem with the claim of discovering a new area that represents a new quantity that explains response times across multiple visual tasks. In addition, it is hard to understand why VHsymmetry does not show up in a straightforward subtraction between symmetric and asymmetric objects, which should show a clear difference in homogeneity."

• We respectfully disagree. The partial overlap between the VH regions identified in Experiments 1 & 2 can hardly be taken as evidence against the quantity VH itself, because there are several other obvious alternate explanations for this partial overlap, as summarized earlier as well. The VH region does show up in a straightforward subtraction between symmetric and asymmetric objects (Section S7), so we are not sure what the Reviewer is referring to here.

Reviewer response to rebuttal: In disagreeing with the comment quoted above, the authors are maintaining that a new functional area of cerebral cortex can be declared even if that area changes location on the cortical map from one experiment to another. That position is patently absurd.

Authors rebuttal: "(3) Definition of the boundaries and purpose of a new visual area in the brain requires circumspection, abundant and convergent evidence, and careful controls.

Even if the VH metric, as defined and calculated by the authors here, is a meaningful quantity, it is a bold claim that a large cortical area just anterior to LO is devoted to calculating this metric as its major task. Vision involves much more than target detection and symmetry detection. Cortex anterior to LO is bound to perform a much wider range of visual functionalities. If the reported correlations can be clarified and supported, it would be more circumspect to treat them as one byproduct of unknown visual processing in cortex anterior to LO, rather than treating them as the defining purpose for a large area of visual cortex."

• We totally agree with you that reporting a new brain region would require careful interpretation and abundant and converging evidence. However, this requires many studies worth of work, and historically category-selective regions like the FFA have achieved consensus only after they were replicated and confirmed across many studies. We believe our proposal for the computation of a quantity like visual homogeneity is conceptually novel, and our study represents a first step that provides some converging evidence (through replicable results across different experiments) for such a region. We have reworked our manuscript to make this point clearer (Discussion, p 32).

Reviewer response to rebuttal: Indeed, declaring a new brain area depends on much more work than is done here. Thus, the appropriate course here is to wait before claiming to have identified a new cortical area.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

The authors explain that an action potential that reach an axon terminal emits a small electrical field as it "annihilates". This happens even though there is no gap junction, at chemical synapses. The generated electrical field is simulated to show that it can affect a nearby, disconnected target membrane by tens of microvolts for tenths of a microsecond. Longer effects are simulated for target locations a few microns away.

To simulate action potentials (APs), the paper does not use the standard Hodgkin-Huxley formalism because it fails to explain AP collision. Instead it uses the Tasaki and Matsumoto (TM) model which is simplified to only models APs with three parameters and as a membrane transition between two states of resting versus excited. The authors expand the strictly binary, discrete TM method to a Relaxing Tasaki Model (RTM) that models the relaxation of the membrane potential after an AP. They find that the membrane leak can be neglected in determining AP propagation and that the capacitive currents dominate the process.

The strength of the work is that authors identified an important interaction between neurons that is neglected by the standard models. A weakness of the proposed approach is the assumptions that it makes. For instance, the external medium is modeled as a homogeneous conductive medium, which may be further explored to properly account for biological processes. To the authors' credit, the external medium can be largely varying and could be left out from the general model, only to be modeled specific instances.

The authors provide convincing evidence by performing experiments to record action potential propagation and collision properties and then developing a theoretical framework to simulate effect of their annihilation on nearby membranes. They provide both experimental evidence and rigorous mathematical and computer simulation findings to support their claims. The work has a potential of explaining significant electrical interaction between nerve centers that are connected via a large number of parallel fibers.

Comments on revisions:

The authors responded to all of my previous concerns and significantly improved the manuscript.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

This paper contains what could be described as a "classic" approach towards evaluating a novel taste stimuli in an animal model, including standard behavioral tests (some with nerve transections), taste nerve physiology, and immunocytochemistry of the tongue. The stimulus being tested is ornithine, from a class of stimuli called "kokumi", which are stimuli that enhance other canonical tastes, increasing essentially the hedonic attributes of these other stimuli; the mechanism for ornithine detection is thought to be GPRC6A receptors expressed in taste cells. The authors showed evidence for this in an earlier paper with mice; this paper evaluates ornithine taste in a rat model.

Strengths:

The data show the effects of ornithine on taste: in two-bottle and briefer intake tests, adding ornithine results in a higher intake of most, but not all, stimuli tests. Bilateral nerve cuts or the addition of GPRC6A antagonists decrease this effect. Small effects of ornithine are shown in whole-nerve recordings.

Weaknesses:

The conclusion seems to be that the authors have found evidence for ornithine acting as a taste modifier through the GPRC6A receptor expressed on the anterior tongue. It is hard to separate their conclusions from the possibility that any effects are additive rather than modulatory. Animals did prefer ornithine to water when presented by itself. Additionally, the authors refer to evidence that ornithine is activating the T1R1-T1R3 amino acid taste receptor, possibly at higher concentrations than they use for most of the study, although this seems speculative. It is striking that the largest effects on taste are found with the other amino acid (umami) stimuli, leading to the possibility that these are largely synergistic effects taking place at the tas1r receptor heterodimer.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

This work proposes a new approach to analyse cell-count data from multiple brain regions. Collecting such data can be expensive and time-intensive, so, more often than not, the dimensionality of the data is larger than the number of samples. The authors argue that Bayesian methods are much better suited to correctly analyse such data compared to classical (frequentist) statistical methods. They define a hierarchical structure, partial pooling, in which each observation contributes to the population estimate to more accurately explain the variance in the data. They present two case studies in which their method proves more sensitive in identifying regions where there are significant differences between conditions, which otherwise would be hidden.

Strengths:

The model is presented clearly, and the advantages of the hierarchical structure are strongly justified. Two alternative ways are presented to account for the presence of zero counts. The first involves the use of a horseshoe prior, which is the more flexible option, while the second involves a modified Poisson likelihood, which is better suited to datasets with a large number of zero counts, perhaps due to experimental artifacts. The results show a clear advantage of the Bayesian method for both case studies.

The code is freely available, and it does not require a high-performance cluster to execute for smaller datasets. As Bayesian statistical methods become more accessible in various scientific fields, the whole scientific community will benefit from the transition away from p-values. Hierarchical Bayesian models are an especially useful tool that can be applied to many different experimental designs. However, while conceptually intuitive, their implementation can be difficult. The authors provide a good framework with room for improvement.

Weaknesses:

Alternative possibilities are discussed regarding the prior and likelihood of the model. Given that the second case study inspired the introduction of the zero-inflation likelihood, it is not clear how applicable the general methodology is to various datasets. If every unique dataset requires a tailored prior or likelihood to produce the best results, the methodology will not easily replace more traditional statistical analyses that can be applied in a straightforward manner. Furthermore, the differences between the results produced by the two Bayesian models in case study 2 are not discussed. In specific regions, the models provide conflicting results (e.g., regions MH, VPMpc, RCH, SCH, etc.), which are not addressed by the authors. A third case study would have provided further evidence for the generalizability of the methodology.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

Loh and colleagues investigate valence encoding in the mesolimbic dopamine system. Using an elegant approach, they show that sucrose, which normally evokes strong dopamine neuron activity and release in the nucleus accumbens, is made aversive via conditioned taste aversion, the same sucrose stimulus later evokes much less dopamine neuron activity and release. Thus, dopamine activity can dynamically track the changing valence of an unconditioned stimulus. These results are important for helping clarify valence and value related questions that are the matter of ongoing debate regarding dopamine functions in the field.

Strengths:

This is an elegant way to ask this question, the within subject's design and the continuity of the stimulus is a strong way to remove a lot of the common confounds that make it difficult to interpret valence-related questions. I think these are valuable studies that help tie up questions in the field while also setting up a number of interesting future directions. There are number of control experiments and tweaks to the design that help eliminate a number of competing hypotheses regarding the results. The data are clearly presented and contextualized.

Weaknesses for consideration:

The focus on one relatively understudied region of the rat striatum for dopamine recordings could potentially limit generalization of the findings. While this can be determined in future studies, the implications should be further discussed in the current manuscript.

Reviewer #1 (Public review):

Summary:

The authors have used full-length single-cell sequencing on a sorted population of human fetal retina to delineate expression patterns associated with the progression of progenitors to rod and cone photoreceptors. They find that rod and cone precursors contain a mix of rod/cone determinants, with a bias in both amounts and isoform balance likely deciding the ultimate cell fate. Markers of early rod/cone hybrids are clarified, and a gradient of lncRNAs is uncovered in maturing cones. Comparison of early rods and cones exposes an enriched MYCN regulon, as well as expression of SYK, which may contribute to tumor initiation in RB1 deficient cone precursors.

Strengths:

(1) The insight into how cone and rod transcripts are mixed together at first is important and clarifies a long-standing notion in the field.

(2) The discovery of distinct active vs inactive mRNA isoforms for rod and cone determinants is crucial to understanding how cells make the decision to form one or the other cell type. This is only really possible with full-length scRNAseq analysis.

(3) New markers of subpopulations are also uncovered, such as CHRNA1 in rod/cone hybrids that seem to give rise to either rods or cones.

(4) Regulon analyses provide insight into key transcription factor programs linked to rod or cone fates.

(5) The gradient of lncRNAs in maturing cones is novel, and while the functional significance is unclear, it opens up a new line of questioning around photoreceptor maturation.

(6) The finding that SYK mRNA is naturally expressed in cone precursors is novel, as previously it was assumed that SYK expression required epigenetic rewiring in tumors.

Weaknesses:

(1) The writing is very difficult to follow. The nomenclature is confusing and there are contradictory statements that need to be clarified.

(2) The drug data is not enough to conclude that SYK inhibition is sufficient to prevent the division of RB1 null cone precursors. Drugs are never completely specific so validation is critical to make the conclusion drawn in the paper.

for - stats - Perato's law - social transformation - fascism, polarization and climate crisis - climate communication - 80% will change if we listen, 19% will require deeper conversations - 1% will not change - Roger Hallam