Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:

This manuscript reports experiments designed to dissect the function of N-cadherin during mammalian folliculogenesis, using the mouse as a model system. Prior studies have shown that this is the principal cadherin expressed by the follicular granulosa cells. Two main strategies are used - small-molecule inhibitors that target N-cadherin and a conditional knockout where the gene encoding N-cad is deleted in granulosa cells. The authors also take advantage of the ability to reproduce key events of folliculogenesis, such as oocyte meiotic maturation, in vitro. Four main conclusions are drawn from the studies: (i) cadherin-based cell contact is required to maintain cadherin (N-cad in the granulosa cells; E-cad in the oocyte) at the plasma membrane; (ii) N-cad is required for cumulus layer expansion; (iii) N-cad is required for meiotic maturation of the oocyte; (iv) N-cad is required for ovulation.

Strengths:

The experiments are logically conceived, clearly described and presented, and carefully interpreted. A key strength of the paper is that multiple approaches have been used (drugs, knockouts, immunofluorescence, PLA, in vitro and in vivo studies). Taken together, they clearly establish essential roles for N-cadherin during folliculogenesis.

It is intriguing that, when cadherin activity is impaired, the cadherins are lost from the plasma membrane. This suggests that, in a multicellular context, interactions with other cadherins, either in cis within the same cell or in trans with a neighboring cell, are required to maintain cadherins at the membrane. Hence, beyond their significance for understanding female reproductive biology, these experiments have broader implications for cell biology.

Weaknesses:

A few points could be considered or clarified by the authors:

The YAP experiments were confusing to the reviewer. CRS-066 increased YAP activity, as indicated by increased expression of target genes. Since CRS-066 prevents expansion, this result suggests that YAP antagonizes expansion. Therefore, blocking YAP should favor expansion. Yet, the YAP inhibitor impaired expansion. In the reviewer's eyes, these results seem to be contradictory.

It is intriguing that the inhibitors were able to efficiently block oocyte maturation. Oocytes from which the cumulus granulosa cells have been removed (denuded) will mature in vitro in the absence of LH or EGF. Since the effect of the inhibitors is to break the contact between the cumulus cells and oocyte, one might have predicted that this would not impair the ability of the oocytes to mature. Perhaps the authors could comment on this.

Regarding the experiments where the inhibitors were administered intra-peritoneally, the authors might comment on the rationale for choosing the doses that were used. An additional point to consider is that, since N-cadherin is expressed in a variety of tissues, an effect of interfering with N-cadherin at these non-ovarian sites could indirectly influence ovarian function.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Weinberger et al. use different fate-mapping models, the FIRE model and PLX-diet to follow and target different macrophage populations and combine them with single-cell data to understand their contribution to heart regeneration after I/R injury. This question has already been addressed by other groups in the field using different models. However, the major strength of this manuscript is the usage of the FIRE mouse model that, for the first time, allows specific targeting of only fetal-derived macrophages.

The data show that the absence of resident macrophages is not influencing infarct size but instead is altering the immune cell crosstalk in response to injury, which is in line with the current idea in the field that macrophages of different origins have distinct functions in tissues, especially after an injury.

To fully support the claims of the study, specific targeting of monocyte-derived macrophages or the inhibition of their influx at different stages after injury would be of high interest.

In summary, the study is well done and important for the field of cardiac injury. But it also provides a novel model (FIRE mice + RANK-Cre fate-mapping) for other tissues to study the function of fetal-derived macrophages while monocyte-derived macrophages remain intact.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:

In this manuscript by Xiong L et al., the authors have uncovered an important link between innate immune signaling and hair regeneration. The authors provide convincing evidence supporting the critical roles of TLR2 in sensing CEP levels in hair follicles, counteracting the action of BMP signaling, and facilitating the activation of HFSCs during the hair cycle and wound repair. Importantly, the authors also propose that decreased CEP production and TLR2 expression might be factors contributing to the decreased hair regeneration associated with aging.

Strengths:

The experiments in this manuscript are well-designed and presented. The authors provided extensive evidence supporting the roles of TLR2 signaling in regulating hair follicle stem cell functions. Importantly, the findings from this paper could have sustained impacts on our understanding of the roles of innate immunity in regulating tissue regeneration in the absence of inflammation.

Weaknesses:

1. The central conclusion of this study is that the activation of TLR2 can suppress BMP signaling. However, the molecular link between TLR2 and BMP signaling is still missing. Given the importance of this finding, it would be intriguing to further investigate how TLR2 activation suppresses BMP signaling. A better characterization of the molecular-level interaction between TLR2 and BMP signaling can further enhance the impact of this study.

2. The authors imply that the decreased CEP level in aged mice could lead to deficient TLR2 signaling, which could further cause aging-associated hair regeneration defects. But this has not been demonstrated. What are the BMPs and pSmad1/5 levels in aged skin? Another important experiment to confirm the importance of this link during aging would be to inject CEP into the aged skin and examine whether this could restore hair regeneration in aged mice.

3. The impacts of CEP/TLR2 on proliferation of keratinocytes is still weak. How much of this effect is a result of NFkB activation, and how much is simply due to inhibiting BMP signaling?

Updated comments on the revised manuscript:<br /> The authors have addressed my previous questions.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:

In the article titled "Hammerhead-type FXR agonists induce an eRNA FincoR that ameliorates nonalcoholic steatohepatitis in mice," the authors explore the role of the Farnesoid X Receptor (FXR) in treating metabolic disorders like NASH. They identify a new liver-specific long non-coding RNA (lncRNA), FincoR, regulated by FXR, notably induced by agonists such as tropifexor. The study shows that FincoR plays a significant role in enhancing the efficacy of tropifexor in mitigating liver fibrosis and inflammation associated with NASH, suggesting its potential as a novel therapeutic target. The study makes a promising contribution to understanding the role of FincoR in alleviating liver fibrosis in NASH, providing initial insights into the mechanisms involved. While it offers a valuable starting point, there is potential for further exploration into the functional roles of FincoR and their specific actions in human NASH cases. Building upon the current findings to elucidate more detailed mechanistic pathways through which FincoR exerts its therapeutic effects in liver disease would elevate the research's significance and potential impact in the field.

Strengths:

This study stands out for its comprehensive and unbiased approach to investigating the role of FincoR, a liver-specific lncRNA, in the treatment of NASH. Key strengths include: 1) The application of advanced sequencing methods like GRO-seq and RNA-seq offered a comprehensive and unbiased view of the transcriptional changes induced by tropifexor, particularly highlighting the role of FincoR. 2) Utilizing a genetic mouse model of FXR KO and a FincoR liver-specific knockdown (FincoR-LKD) mouse model provided a controlled and relevant environment for studying NASH, allowing for precise assessment of tropifexor's therapeutic effects. 3) The inclusion of tropifexor, an FDA-approved FXR agonist, adds significant clinical relevance to the study. It bridges the gap between experimental research and potential therapeutic application, providing a direct pathway for translating these findings into real-world clinical benefits for NASH patients. 4) The study's rigorous experimental design, incorporating both negative and positive controls, ensured that the results were specifically attributable to the action of FincoR and tropifexor.

Weaknesses:

The study presents several notable weaknesses that could be addressed to strengthen its findings and conclusions: 1) The authors focus on FincoR, but do not extensively test other lncRNAs identified in Figure 1A. A more comprehensive approach, such as rescue experiments with these lncRNAs, would provide a better understanding of whether similar roles are played by other lncRNAs in mitigating NASH. 2) FincoR was chosen for further study primarily because it is the most upregulated lncRNA induced by GW4064. Including another GW4064-induced lncRNA as a control in functional studies would strengthen the argument for FincoR's unique role in NASH. 3) The study does not conclusively demonstrate whether FincoR is specifically expressed in hepatocytes or other liver cell types. Conducting FincoR RNA-FISH with immunofluorescent experiments or RT-PCR, using markers for different liver cell types, would clarify its expression profile. 4) Understanding the absolute copy number of FincoR is crucial. Determining whether there are sufficient copies of FincoR to function as proposed would lend more credibility to its suggested role. 5) The manuscript, although technically proficient, does not thoroughly address the relevance of these findings to human NASH. Questions like the conservation of FincoR in humans and its potential role in human NASH should be discussed.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Glaucoma is the leading cause of irreversible blindness worldwide, affecting more than 80 million people. Primary open angle glaucoma (POAG) is the prevalent form of glaucoma, while prevalence of primary angle closure glaucoma (PACG) is highest in Asia compared to over the world. Early detection of glaucoma and severity prediction is mandatory, and therefore the main aim of this study focused on characterizing the metabolite profile associated with PACG, identify potential blood diagnostic markers, assess their specificity for PACG and verify their applicability to predict progression of visual field loss. To this end, Li et al. implemented a 5-phases multicenter prospective study to identify novel candidate biomarkers of PACG. A total of 616 individuals were recruited, identifying 1464 distinct metabolites in the serum by metabolomics and chemiluminescence immunoassays. By applying different machine learning algorithms the metabolite androstenedione showed good discrimination between PACG and control subjects, both the discovery and validation phases. This metabolite also showed alterations in the aqueous humor and higher levels of androstenedione seemed to be associated with faster loss of visual field. Overall, the authors claimed that serum androstenedione levels may provide a new biomarker for early detection and monitoring/predicting PACG severity/progression.

Strengths:

• Omics research on glaucoma is constrained by inadequate sample sizes, a dearth of validation sets to corroborate findings and absence of specificity analyses. The 5-phases study designed try overcoming these limitations. The proposed study design is very robust, with well described discovery set (1 and 2), validation phase (1 and 2), supplemental phase and cohort phase. Large and well-characterized patients with adequate control subjects contributed to the robustness of the results.<br /> • Combining untargeted and targeted metabolomics using mass spectrometry instruments (high resolution and low resolution) with an additional chemiluminiscence immunoassay determining androstenedione levels<br /> • Androstenedione achieved better diagnostic accuracy across the discovery and validation sets, with AUC varying between 0.85 and 1.0. Interestingly, baseline androstenedione levels can predict glaucoma progression via visual field loss results.<br /> • Positive correlation was observed between levels of androstenedione in serum and aqueous humor of PACG patients.<br /> • A level higher of 1.66 ng/mL of the metabolite androstenedione seems to imply high risk of visual field loss. Androstenedione may serve as predictor of glaucomatous visual field progression.

Weaknesses:

• A single biomarker seems very unlikely to be of much help in the detection of glaucoma due to the etiological heterogeneity of the disease, the existence of different subtypes, and the genetic variability among patients. Rather, a panel of biomarkers may provide more useful information for clinical prediction, including better sensitivity and specificity. The inclusion of additional metabolites already identifying in the study, in combination, may provide more reliable and correct assignment results.<br /> • The number of samples in the supplementary phase is low, larger samples sizes are mandatory to confirm the diagnostic accuracy.<br /> • Cohorts from different populations are needed to verify the applicability of this candidate biomarker.<br /> • Sex hormones seem to be associated also with other types of glaucoma, such as primary open-angle glaucoma (POAG), although the molecular mechanisms are unclear (see doi:10.1167/iovs.17-22708). The inclusion of patients diagnosed with other subtypes of glaucoma, like POAG, may contribute to determine the sensitivity and specificity of the proposed biomarker. Androstenedione levels should be determined in POAG, NTG or PEXG patients.<br /> • In addition, the levels of androstenedione were found significantly altered during other diseases as described by the authors or by conditions like polycystic ovary syndrome, limiting the utility of the proposed biomarker.<br /> • Uncertainty of the androstenedione levels compromises its usefulness in clinical practice.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

The authors of the manuscript "High-resolution kinetics of herbivore-induced plant volatile transfer reveal tightly clocked responses in neighboring plants" assessed the effects of herbivory induced maize volatiles on receiver plants over a period of time in order to assess the dynamics of the responses of receiver plants. Different volatile compound classes were measured over a period of time using PTR-ToF-MS and GC-MS, under both natural light:dark conditions, and continuous light. They also measured gene expression of related genes as well as defense related phytohormones. The effects of a secondary exposure to GLVs on primed receiver plants was also measured.

The paper addresses some interesting points, however some questions arise regarding some of the methods employed. Firstly, I am wondering why VOCs (as measured by GC-MS) were not quantified. While I understand that quantification is time consuming and requires more work, it allows for comparisons to be made between lines of the same species, as well as across other literature on the subject. Simply relying on the area under the curve and presenting results using arbitrary units is not enough for analyses like these. AU values do not allow for conclusions regarding total quantities, and while I understand that this is not the main focus of this paper, it raises a lot of uncertainty for readers (for example, the references cited show that TMTT has been found to accumulate at similar levels of caryophyllene, however the AU values reported are an order of magnitude higher for TMTT. Again, without actual quantification this is meaningless, but for readers it is confusing).

With regards to the correlation analyses shown in figure 6, the results presented in many of the correlation plots are not actually informative. While there is a trend, I do not think that this is an appropriate way to show the data, as there are clearly other relationships at play. The comparison between plants under continuous light and normal light:dark conditions is interesting.

This paper addresses a very interesting idea and I look forward to seeing further work that builds on these ideas.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> Overall, this study provides a meticulous comparison of developmental transcriptomes between two sub-species of the annelid Streblospio benedicti. Different lineages of S. benedicti maintain one of two genetically programmed alternative life histories, the ancestral planktotrophic or derived lecithotrophic forms of development. This contrast is also seen at the inter-species level in many marine invertebrate taxa, such as echinoderms and molluscs. The authors report relatively (surprisingly?) modest differences in transcriptomes overall but also find some genes whose expression is essentially morph-specific (which they term "exclusive").

Strengths:<br /> The study is based on a dense and appropriately replicated sampling of early development. The tight clustering of each stage/morph combination in PCA space suggests the specimens were accurately categorized. The similar overall trajectories of the two morphs were surprising to me for two stages: 1) the earliest stage (16-cell), at which we might expect maternal differences due to the several-fold difference in zygote size, and 2) the latest stage (1-week), where there appears to be the most obvious morphological difference. This is why we need to do experiments!

The examination of F1 hybrids was another major strength of the study. It also produced one of the most surprising results: though intermediate in phenotype, F1 embryos have the most distinct transcriptomes, and reveal a range of fixed, compensatory differences in the parental lines.

Weaknesses:<br /> Overall I really enjoyed this paper, but I see a few places where it can be tightened and made more insightful. These relate to better defining the basis for "exclusive" expression (regulation or gene presence/absence?), providing more examples of how specific genes related to trophic mode behave, and placing the study in the context of similar work in other phyla.

Reviewer #2 (Public Review):

The authors investigate the transcriptional regulation of cysteine dioxygenase (CDO-1) in C. elegans and its role in maintaining cysteine homeostasis. They show that high cysteine levels activate cdo-1 transcription through the hypoxia-inducible transcription factor HIF-1. Using transcriptional and translational reporters for CDO-1, the authors propose that a negative feedback pathway involving RHY-1, CYSL-1, EGL-9 and HIF-1 in regulating cysteine homeostasis.

Genetics is a notable strength of this study. The forward genetic screen, gene interaction and epistasis analyses are beautifully designed and rigorously conducted, yielding solid and unambiguous conclusions on the genetic pathway regulating CDO-1. The writing is clear and accessible, contributing to the overall high quality of the manuscript.<br /> Addressing the specifics of cysteine supplementation and interpretation regarding the cysteine homeostasis pathway would further clarify the paper and strengthen the study's conclusions.

First, the authors show that the supplementation of exogenous cysteine activates cdo-1p::GFP. Rather than showing data for one dose, the author may consider presenting dose-dependency results and whether cysteine activation of cdo-1 also requires HIF-1 or CYSL-1, which would be important data given the focus and major novelty of the paper in cysteine homeostasis, not the cdo-1 regulatory gene pathway. While the genetic manipulation of cdo-1 regulators yields much more striking results, the effect size of exogenous cysteine is rather small. Does this reflect a lack of extensive condition optimization or robust buffering of exogenous/dietary cysteine? Would genetic manipulation to alter intracellular cysteine or its precursors yield similar or stronger effect sizes?

Second, there remain several major questions regarding the interpretation of the cysteine homeostasis pathway. How much specificity is involved for the RHY-1/CYSL-1/EGL-9/HIF-1 pathway to control cysteine homeostasis? Is the pathway able to sense cysteine directly or indirectly through its metabolites or redox status in general? Given the very low and high physiological concentrations of intracellular cysteine and glutathione (GSH, a major reserve for cysteine), respectively, there is a surprising lack of mention and testing of GSH metabolism. In addition, what are the major similarities and differences of cysteine homeostasis pathways between C. elegans and other systems (HIF dependency, transcription vs post-transcriptional control)? These questions could be better discussed and noted with novel findings of the current study that are likely C. elegans specific or broadly conserved.

All of my comments and questions above have been satisfactorily addressed in the revised manuscript.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> This study reports that IT neurons have biased representations toward low spatial frequency (SF) and faster decoding of low SFs than high SFs. High SF-preferred neurons, and low SF-preferred neurons to a lesser degree, perform better category decoding than neurons with other profiles (U and inverted U shaped). SF coding also shows more sparseness than category coding in the earlier phase of the response and less sparseness in the later phase. The results are also contrasted with predictions of various DNN models.

Strengths:<br /> The study addressed an important issue on the representations of SF information in a high-level visual area. Data are analyzed with LDA which can effectively reduce the dimensionality of neuronal responses and retain category information.

Weaknesses:<br /> The results are likely compromised by improper stimulus timing and unmatched spatial frequency spectrums of stimuli in different categories.

The authors used a very brief stimulus duration (35ms), which would degrade the visual system's contrast sensitivity to medium and high SF information disproportionately (see Nachmias, JOSAA, 1967). Therefore, IT neurons in the study could have received more degraded medium and high SF inputs compared to low SF inputs, which may be at least partially responsible for higher firing rates to low Sf R1 stimuli (Figure 1c) and poorer recall performance with median and high SF R3-R5 stimuli in LDA decoding. The issue may also to some degree explain the delayed onset of recall to higher SF stimuli (Figure 2a), preferred low SF with an earlier T1 onset (Figure 2b), lower firing rate to high SF during T1 (Figure 2c), somewhat increased firing rate to high SF during T2 (because weaker high SF inputs would lead to later onset, Figure 2d).

Figure 3b shows greater face coding than object coding by high SF and to a lesser degree by low SF neurons. Only the inverted-U-shaped neurons displayed slightly better object coding than face coding. Overall the results give an impression that IT neurons are significantly more capable of coding faces than coding objects, which is inconsistent with the general understanding of the functions of IT neurons. The problem may lie with the selection of stimulus images (Figure 1b). To study SF-related category coding, the images in two categories need to have similar SF spectrums in the Fourier domain. Such efforts are not mentioned in the manuscript, and a look at the images in Figure 1b suggests that such efforts are likely not properly made. The ResNet18 decoding results in Figure 6C, in that IT neurons of different profiles show similar face and object coding, might be closer to reality.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> This manuscript dissects the contribution of the CaBP 1 and 2 on the calcium current in the cochlear inner hair cells. The authors measured the calcium current inactivation from the double knock-out CaBP1 and 2 and showed that both proteins contribute to voltage-dependent and calcium-dependent inactivation. Synaptic release was reduced in the double KO. As a consequence, the authors observed a depressed activity within the auditory nerve. Taken together, this study identifies a new player that regulates the stimulation-secretion coupling in the auditory sensory cells.

Strengths:<br /> In this study, the authors bring compelling evidence that CaBP 1 and 2 are both involved in the inactivation of the calcium current, from cellular up to system level, and by taking care to probe different experimental conditions such as different holding potentials and by rescuing the phenotype with the re-expression of CaBP2. Indeed, while changing the holding potential worsens the secretion, it completely changes the kinetics of the inactivation recovery. It alerts the reader that probing different experimental conditions that may be closer to physiology is better suited to uncovering any deleterious phenotype. This gave pretty solid results.

Weaknesses:<br /> Although this study clearly points out that CaBP1 is involved in the calcium current inactivation, it is not clear how CaBP1 and CaBP2 act together (but this is probably beyond the scope of the study). Another point is that the authors re-express CaBP2 to largely rescue the phenotype in the double KO but no data are available to know whether the re-expression of both CaBP1 and CaBP2 would achieve a full recovery and what would be the effect of the sole re-expression of CaBP1 in the double KO.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> The authors introduced their previous paper with the concise statement that "the relationships between lineage-specific attributes and genotypic differences of tumors are not understood" (Chen et al., JEM 2019, PMID: 30737256). For example, it is not clear why combined loss of RB1 and TP53 is required for tumorigenesis in SCLC or other aggressive neuroendocrine (NE) cancers, or why the oncogenic mutations in KRAS or EGFR that drive NSCLC tumorigenesis are found so infrequently in SCLC. This is the main question addressed by the previous and current papers.

One approach to this question is to identify a discrete set of genetic/biochemical manipulations that are sufficient to transform non-malignant human cells into SCLC-like tumors. One group reported the transformation of primary human bronchial epithelial cells into NE tumors through a complex lentiviral cocktail involving the inactivation of pRB and p53 and activation of AKT, cMYC, and BCL2 (PARCB) (Park et al., Science 2018, PMID: 30287662). The cocktail previously reported by Chen and colleagues to transform human pluripotent stem-cell (hPSC)-derived lung progenitors (LPs) into NE xenografts was more concise: DAPT to inactivate NOTCH signaling combined with shRNAs against RB1 and TP53. However, the resulting RP xenografts lacked important characteristics of SCLC. Unlike SCLC, these tumors proliferated slowly and did not metastasize, and although small subpopulations expressed MYC or MYCL, none expressed NEUROD1.

MYC is frequently amplified or expressed at high levels in SCLC, and here, the authors have tested whether inducible expression of MYC could increase the resemblance of their hPSC-derived NE tumors to SCLC. These RPM cells (or RPM T58A with stabilized cMYC) engrafted more consistently and grew more rapidly than RP cells, and unlike RP cells, formed liver metastases when injected into the renal capsule. Gene expression analyses revealed that RPM tumor subpopulations expressed NEUROD1, ASCL1, and/or YAP1.

The hPSC-derived RPM model is a major advance over the previous RP model. This may become a powerful tool for understanding SCLC tumorigenesis and progression and for discovering gene dependencies and molecular targets for novel therapies. However, the specific role of cMYC in this model needs to be clarified.

cMYC can drive proliferation, tumorigenesis, or apoptosis in a variety of lineages depending on concurrent mutations. For example, in the Park et al., study, normal human prostate cells could be reprogrammed to form adenocarcinoma-like tumors by activation of cMYC and AKT alone, without manipulation of TP53 or RB1. In their previous manuscript, the authors carefully showed the role of each molecular manipulation in NE tumorigenesis. DAPT was required for NE differentiation of LPs to PNECs, shRB1 was required for expansion of the PNECs, and shTP53 was required for xenograft formation. cMYC expression could influence each of these steps, and importantly, could render some steps dispensable. For example, shRB1 was previously necessary to expand the DAPT-induced PNECs, as neither shTP53 nor activation of KRAS or EGFR had no effect on this population, but perhaps cMYC overexpression could expand PNECs even in the presence of pRB, or even induce LPs to become PNECs without DAPT. Similarly, both shRB1 and shTP53 were necessary for xenograft formation, but maybe not if cMYC is overexpressed. If a molecular hallmark of SCLC, such as loss of RB1 or TP53, has become dispensable with the addition of cMYC, this information is critically important in interpreting this as a model of SCLC tumorigenesis.

To interpret the role of cMYC expression in hPSC-derived RPM tumors, we need to know what this manipulation does without manipulation of pRB, p53, or NOTCH, alone or in combination. Seven relevant combinations should be presented in this manuscript: (1) cMYC alone in LPs, (2) cMYC + DAPT, (3) cMYC + shRB1, (4) cMYC + DAPT + shRB1, (5) cMYC + shTP53, (6) cMYC + DAPT + shTP53, and (7) cMYC + shRB1 + shTP53. Wild-type cMYC is sufficient; further exploration with the T58A mutant would not be necessary.

This reviewer considers that there should be a presentation of the effects of these combinations on LP differentiation to PNECs, expansion of PNECs as well as other lung cells, xenograft formation and histology, and xenograft growth rate and capacity for metastasis. If this could be clarified experimentally, and the results discussed in the context of other similar approaches such as the Park et al., paper, this study would be a major addition to the field.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> The authors were trying to achieve that Tgif1 expression is regulated by EAK1/2 and PTH in a time-dependent manner, and its roles in suppressing Pak3 for facilitating osteoblast adhesion. The authors further tried to show that the Tgif1-Pak3 signaling plays a significant role in osteoblast migration to the site of bone repair and bone remodeling.

Strengths:<br /> - In a previous study, it was demonstrated that Tgif1 is a target gene of PTH, and the absence of Tgif1 failed to increase bone mass by PTH treatment (Saito et al., Nat Commun., 2019). In this study, the authors found that Tgif1-Pak3 signaling prompts osteoblast migration through osteoblast adhesion to prompt bone regeneration. This novel finding provides a better understanding of how Tgif1 expression in osteoblasts regulates adherence, spreading, and migration during bone healing and bone remodeling.

- The authors demonstrated that ERK1/2 and PTH regulate Tgif1 expression in a time-dependent manner and its role in suppressing Pak3 through various experimental approaches such as luciferase assay, ChIP assay, and gene silencing. These results contribute to the overall strength of the article.

Weaknesses:<br /> -The authors need to further justify why they focused on Pak3 in the introduction by mentioning its known function for cell adhesion.

-Some results indicated statistically significant but small changes. The authors need to explain in the discussion part why they believe this is the major mechanism or why there may be some other possible mechanisms.

-The study does not include enough in vivo data to claim that this mechanism is crucial for bone healing and bone remodeling in vivo.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> In this manuscript entitled "Association with TFIIIC limits MYCN accumulation in hubs of active promoters and chromatin accumulation of non-phosphorylated RNA polymerase II" the authors examine how the cohesin complex component (and RNA pol III associated factor) TFIIIC interacts with MYCN and controls transcription. They confirm that TFIIIC co-purifies with MYCN, dependent on its amino terminus, as shown in previous work. The authors also find that TFIIIC and MYCN are both found in promoter hubs and suggest that TFIIIC inhibits MYCN's association with these hubs. Finally, the authors indicate that TFIIIC/MYCN alters exosome function, and BRCA1-dependent effects, at MYCN-regulated loci.

Strengths:<br /> The authors utilize multiple experimental approaches to investigate the potential biological and genomic impacts of MYCN association with TFIIIC - the findings are interesting in suggesting that this interaction may limit or otherwise regulate MYC activity.

Weaknesses:<br /> (1) In Figure 1, the authors show that TF3C binds to the amino terminus of MYCN (Myc box I region), as shown previously. The data in Figure 1 B-D support, but do not rigorously confirm a 'direct' interaction because it has not been ruled out that accessory proteins mediating the association may be present in the mixture.

(2) The authors indicate in Figure 2 that TF3C has essentially no effect on MYCN-dependent gene expression and/or transcription elongation. Yet a previous study (PMID: 29262328) associated with several of the same authors concluded that TF3C positively affects transcription elongation. The authors make no attempt to reconcile these disparate results and need to clarify this point.

(3) Figures 2B and C show that unphosphorylated pol2 is TSS-centered, and Ser2-P pol2 occupation is centered beyond the TES. From this data, however, the reader can't tell how much of the phospho-Ser2- pol2 is centered on the TSS. The authors should include overall plots over TSS and TES, and also perhaps the gene-body to allow a better comparison for TSS and TES plotted for both antibodies over the collected gene sets.

(4) The authors see more TF3C at promoters in cells with MYCN (Figure 2F). What are the levels of TF3C in the absence and presence of MYCN?

(5) The finding that TF3C is increased at TSS (Figure 2F) doesn't necessarily indicate that 1) MYCN is recruiting TF3C there, and 2) that this is due to the phosphorylation status of pol2. It could mean many other things. The logic of conflating these 3 points based on the data shown is questionable.

(6) Figure 3A doesn't add much to the paper, as it is overplotted and no relationship is clear, except that Pol2 and MYCN occupy many of the same sites. Perhaps a less complex or different type of plot would allow the interactions to be better visible.

(7) That depletion of TF3C leads to increased promoter hubs may or may not have anything to do with its association with MYCN (Figure 4E). This could be a direct consequence of its known structural function in cohesin complexes, and the MYCN changes as a secondary consequence of this (also see point 4, above).

(8) Depletion of TF3C5 results in a loss of EXOSC5 (exosome) at TSS in the presence and absence of MYCN (Figure 5B). As TF3C5 is a cohesin, could this simply be a consequence of genomic structure changes?

(9) The authors suggest that RNA dynamics are affected by changes in exosome function (RNA degradation, etc). What effect, if any does TF3C depletion have on the overall gene expression profile?

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Interactions known to be important for melanosome transport include exon F and the globular tail domain (GTD) of MyoVa with Mlph. Motivated by a discrepancy between in vitro and cell culture results regarding necessary interactions for MyoVa to be recruited to the melanosome, the authors used a series of pull-down and pelleting assays experiments to identify an additional interaction that occurs between exon G of MyoVa and Mlph. This interaction is independent of and synergistic with the interaction of Mlph with exon F. However, the interaction of the actin-binding domain of Mlph can occur either with exon G or with the actin filament, but not both simultaneously. These data lead to a modified recruitment model where both exon F and exon G enhance the binding of Mlph to auto-inhibited MyoVa, and then via an unidentified switch (PKA?) the actin-binding domain of Mlph dissociates from MyoVa and interacts with the actin filament to enhance MyoVa processivity.

The only weakness noted is that the authors could have had a more complete story if they pursued whether PKA phosphorylation/dephosphorylation of Mlph is indeed the switch for the actin-binding domain of Mlph to interact with exon G versus the actin filament.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> The authors establish a recombinant insect cell expression and purification scheme for the antiviral Dicer complex of C. elegans. In addition to Dicer-1, the complex harbors two additional proteins, the RIG-I-like helicase DRH-1, and the dsRNA-binding protein RDE-4. The authors show that the complex prefers blunt-end dsRNA over dsRNAs that contain overhangs. Furthermore, whereas ATP-dependent dsRNA cleavage only exacerbates regular dsRNA cleavage activity, the presence of RDE-4 is essential to ATP-dependent and ATP-independent dsRNA cleavage. Single-particle cryo-EM studies of the ternary C. elegans Dicer complex reveal that the N-terminal domain of DRH-1 interacts with the helicase domain of DCR-1, thereby relieving its autoinhibitory state. Lastly, the authors show that the ternary complex is able to processively cleave long dsRNA, an activity primarily relying on the helicase activity of DRH-1.

Strengths:<br /> • First thorough biochemical characterization of the antiviral activity of C. elegans Dicer in complex with the RIG-I-like helicase DRH-1 and the dsRNA-binding protein RDE-4.<br /> • Discovery that RDE-4 is essential to dsRNA processing, whereas ATP hydrolysis is not.<br /> • Discovery of an autoinhibitory role of DRH-1's N-terminal domain (in analogy to the CARD domains of RIG-I).<br /> • First structural insights into the ternary complex DCR-1:DRH-1:RDE-4 by cryo-EM to medium resolution.<br /> • Trap experiments reveal that the ternary DCR-1 complex cleaves blunt-ended dsRNA processively. Likely, the helicase domain of DRH-1 is responsible for this processive cleavage.

Weaknesses:<br /> • Cryo-EM Structure of the ternary Dicer-1:DRH-1:RED-4 complex to only medium resolution.<br /> • High-resolution structure of the C-terminal domain of DRH-1 bound to dsRNA does not reveal the mechanism of how blunt-end dsRNA and overhang-containing one are being discriminated.<br /> • The cryo-EM structure of DCR1:DRH-1:RDE-4 in the presence of ATP only reveals the helicase and CTD domains of DRH-1 bound to dsRNA. No information on dsRNA termini recognition is presented. The paragraph seems detached from the general flow of the manuscript.<br /> • The antiviral DCR-1:DRH-1:RDE-4 complex shows largely homologous activities and regulation than Drosophila Dicer-2.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:

The authors have developed and optimized a footprinting assay to monitor the recruitment of mRNAs to a reconstituted translation initiation system. This assay is named Recruitment-Sequencing (Rec-Seq) and enables the analysis of many purified mRNAs in the reconstituted system.

This system possesses the ability to determine how competition occurs between mRNAs for the initiation machinery. This is the first approach using a reconstituted system that enables this important feature, and this is an important advance for the field.

Strengths:

Using purified mRNAs in a fully reconstituted system and being able to monitor start site selection is an important advance. The method enables one to observe changes in mRNA recruitment and start site selection in response to the absence or presence of different initiation components or accessory proteins.

Weaknesses:

Start site fidelity in purified reconstituted systems can be dramatically altered in different buffer conditions. Interpretation of the observed changes to start site selection in mRNAs in the absence or presence of Ded1 using only the one buffer condition used is therefore limited.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> In their manuscript, Kong Fang et al describe a robust pipeline for the isolation of small extracellular vesicles through a combination of size exclusion chromatography and miniaturized density gradient separation. Subsequently, they prove that the method is reproducible and suitable for small-volume operations while at the same time not compromising the quality of vesicles.

Strengths:<br /> The paper narrates a robust method for purifying high-quality sEVs from small amounts of blood plasma. They also demonstrate that through this approach, they can derive sEVs without compromising the protein composition, integrity of the vesicles, or contamination with other proteins or lipids.

Weaknesses:<br /> The paper is a nice summary of how to enrich sEVs from blood samples. Although well performed and substantiated with data, the paper primarily deals with method development and optimisation.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

In recent years, these investigators have been engaged in a debate regarding the classification of the sacral parasympathetic system as "sympathetic" rather than "parasympathetic," based on shared developmental ontogeny of spinal preganglionic neurons. In this current study, these investigators conducted single-cell RNAseq analyses of four groups of autonomic neurons: paravertebral sympathetic neurons (stellate and lumbar train ganglia), prevertebral sympathetic neurons (coeliac-mesenteric ganglia), rostral parasympathetic ganglia (sphenopalatine ganglia), and the caudal pelvic ganglia (containing traditionally recognized sacral "parasympathetic cholinergic neurons," which the investigators sought to challenge in terms of nomenclature). The authors argued that the pelvic ganglionic neurons shared the expression of more genes with sympathetic ganglia, as opposed to parasympathetic ganglia. Additionally, the pelvic neurons did not express a set of genes observed in the rostral parasympathetic sphenopalatine ganglia. Based on these findings, they claimed that the sacral autonomic system should be considered sympathetic rather than parasympathetic.

However, noradrenergic sympathetic neurons and cholinergic neurons, by the virtue of expressing different neurotransmitters, could have distinct roles. It is true that some cholinergic neurons reside in the sympathetic train ganglia as well, such as those innervating the sweat gland and some vascular systems; in this sense, the pelvic ganglia share some features with sympathetic ganglia, except that the pelvic ganglia contain a much higher percentage of cholinergic neurons compared with sympathetic ganglia. It is much simpler and easier to divide the autonomic nervous system into sympathetic neurons that relieve noradrenaline versus parasympathetic neurons that relieve acetylcholine, and these two systems often act in antagonistic manners, even though in some cases, these two systems can work synergistically. As such, it is not justified to claim that "pelvic organs receive no parasympathetic innervation".

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

This paper aims to address the establishment and maintenance of neural circuitry in the case of a massive loss of neurons. The authors used genetic manipulations to ablate the principal projection neurons, the mitral/tufted cells, in the mouse olfactory bulb. Using diphtheria toxin (Tbx21-Cre:: loxP-DTA line) the authors ablated progressively large numbers of M/T cells postnatally. By injecting diphtheria toxin (DT) into the Tbx21-Cre:: loxP-iDTR line, the authors were able to control the timing of the ablation in the adult stage. Both methods led to the successful elimination of a majority of M/TCs by 4 months of age. The authors made a few interesting observations. First, they found that the initial pruning of the remaining M/T cell primary dendrite was unaffected. However, in adulthood, a significant portion of these cells extended primary dendrites to innervate multiple glomeruli. Moreover, the incoming olfactory sensory neuron (OSN) axons, as examined for those expressing the M72 receptor, showed a divergent innervation pattern as well. The authors conclude that M/T cell density is required to maintain the dendritic structures and the olfactory map. To address the functional consequences of eliminating a large portion of principal neurons, the authors conducted a series of behavioral assays. They found that learned odor discrimination was largely intact. On the other hand, mating and aggression were reduced. The authors concluded that learned behaviors are more resilient than innate ones.

The study is technically sound, and the results are clear-cut. The most striking result is the contrast between the normal dendritic pruning during early development and the expanded dendritic innervation in adulthood. It is a novel discovery that can lead to further investigation of how the single-glomerulus dendritic innervation is maintained. The authors conducted a few experiments to address potential mechanisms, but it is inconclusive, as detailed below. It is also interesting to see that the massive neuronal loss did not severely impact learned odor discrimination. This result, together with previous studies showing nearly normal odor discrimination in the absence of large portions of the olfactory bulb or scrambled innervation patterns, attests to the redundancy and robustness of the sensory system. The discussion should take into account these other studies in a historical context.

Main comments:

1. In previous studies, it has been concluded that dendritic pruning unfolds independently, regardless of the innervation pattern or activity of the OSNs. The new observation bolsters this conclusion by showing that a loss of neighboring M/T cells does not affect the developmental process. A more nuanced discussion comparing the results of these studies would strengthen the paper.

2. The authors propose that a certain density of M/T is required to prevent the divergent innervation of primary dendrites, but the evidence is not sufficient to support this proposal. The experiment with low-dose DT injection to ablate a smaller portion of M/T cells did not change the percentage of cells innervating two or more glomeruli. The authors suggest that a threshold must be met, but this threshold is not determined. It would be possible to adjust the DT injection dose to find this threshold.

3. The authors suggest that neural activity is not required for this plasticity. The evidence was derived primarily from naris occlusion and neuronal silencing using Kir2.1. While the results are consistent with the notion, it is a rather narrow interpretation of how neural activity affects circuit configuration. Perturbation of neural activity also entails an increase in firing. Inducing the activity of the neurons may alter this plasticity. Silencing per se may induce a homeostatic response that expands the neurite innervation pattern to increase synaptic input to compensate for the loss of activity. Thus, further silencing the cells may not reduce multi-glomerular innervation, but an increased activity may.

4. There is a discrepancy between this study and the one by Fujimoto et al. (Developmental Cell; 2023), which shows that not only glutamatergic inputs to the primary dendrite can facilitate pruning of remaining dendrites but also Kir2.1 overexpression can significantly perturb dendritic pruning. This discrepancy is not discussed by the authors.

5. An alternative interpretation of the discrepancy between the apparent normal pruning by p10 and expanded dendritic innervation in adulthood is that there are more cells before P10, when ~25% of M/T cells are present, but at a later date only 1-3% are present. The relationship between the number of M/T cells and single glomerulus innervation has not been explored during postnatal development. It would be important to test this hypothesis.

6. The authors attribute the change in the olfactory map to the loss of M/T cells. Another obvious possibility is that the diffused projection is a response to the change in the olfactory bulb size. With less space to occupy, the axons may be forced to innervate neighboring glomeruli. It is not known how the total number of glomeruli is affected. This question could be addressed by tracking developmental changes in bulb volume and glomerular numbers.

7. The retained ability to discriminate odors upon reinforced training is not surprising in light of a number of earlier studies. For example, Slotnick and colleagues have shown that rats losing ~90% of the OB can retain odor discrimination. Weiss et al have shown that humans without an olfactory bulb can perform normal olfactory tasks. Gronowitz et al have used theoretical prediction and experimental results to demonstrate that perturbing the olfactory map does not have a major impact on olfactory discrimination.<br /> Fleischmann et al have shown that mice with a monoclonal nose can discriminate odors. The authors should discuss their results in these contexts.

8. It should be noted that odor discrimination resulting from reinforcement training does not mean normal olfactory function. It is a highly artificial situation as the animals are overtrained. It should not be used as a measure of the robustness of the olfactory sense. Natural odor discrimination (without training), detection threshold, and innate appetitive/aversive response to certain odors may be affected. These experiments were not conducted.

9. The social behaviors were conducted using relatively coarse measures (vaginal plug and display of aggression). Moreover, these behaviors are most likely affected by the disruption of the AOB mitral cells and have little to do with the dendritic pruning process described in the paper. It is misleading to lump social behaviors with innate responses to odors.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

The authors use a combination of crop modeling and field experiments to argue that drought during seedling establishment likely severely impacts the yield of pearl millet, an important but understudied cereal crop and that rapid seedling root elongation could play a major role in mitigating this. They further argue that this trait has a strong genetic basis and that major polymorphisms in candidate genes can be identified using standard methods from modern genetics and genomics. Finally, they use homology with the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana to argue that the function of one putatively causal gene is to regulate root cell elongation.

The major strength of this paper is that it convincingly demonstrates how modern methods from plant breeding and model organisms can be combined to address questions of great practical importance in important but poorly understood crops. The notion that it is possible to connect single-locus polymorphism and cellular biology to drought tolerance and crop yield in pearl millet is not a trivial one.

The weakness is obvious: while the argument made is convincing, it must be recognized that the strength of the evidence is by no means of the level expected in a model organism. Conclusions could easily be wrong, and there is no direct evidence that regulatory variation in PgGRXC9 leads to higher crop yield via cell elongation and seedling drought tolerance. However, generating such evidence in a poorly studied crop would be a monumental undertaking, and should probably not be the priority of people working on pearl millet!

The utility of this work is that it suggests that it is practicable to gain valuable insight into crop adaptation by clever use of modern methods from a variety of sources.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Trenker et al. report cryo-EM structures of HER4/HER2 heterodimers and HER4 homodimers bound to Neuregulin-1β (Nrg1β) and Betacellulin (BTC). As observed for prior cryo-EM structures of full-length or near full-length HER-family receptors only the extracellular regions are visualized, presumably owing to flexibility in the relative orientation of extra- and intra-cellular regions. The authors observe no appreciable differences between Nrg1β and BTC bound heterodimers, both ligands, in this case being high-affinity ligands, and modest "scissor-like" differences in the subunit relationships in HER4 homodimers with Nrg1β and BTC bound.

The authors also show that, as they showed for HER3, the HER4 dimerization arm is not indispensable for forming heterodimers with HER2 despite the HER4 dimerization arm forming a more canonical interaction with HER2. Perhaps most interestingly, the authors observe glycan interactions that appear to stabilize intra- and inter-subunit interactions in HER4 homodimers but that inter-subunit glycans are not present in HER2/HER4 heterodimers. The authors speculate that these glycan interactions may contribute to the apparent propensity of HER4 to homodimerize vs. heterodimerize with HER2.

I realize that an important role of reviewers is to provide authors with informed and critical comments, but I found this manuscript a well-written, thoughtful, and important contribution. My only note is that I am not an electron microscopist so have assumed the microscopy has been carried out expertly and rely on other reviewers to vet structure determinations.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> The paper is an attempt to explain a geographic paradox between infection prevalence and antimalarial resistance emergence. The authors developed a compartmental model that importantly contains antigenic strain diversity and in turn antigen-specific immunity. They find a negative correlation between parasite prevalence and the frequency of resistance emergence and validate this result using empirical data of chloroquine-resistance. Overall, the authors conclude that strain diversity is a key player in explaining observed patterns of resistance evolution across different geographic regions.

The authors pose and address the following specific questions:<br /> 1. Does strain diversity modulate the equilibrium resistance frequency given different transmission intensities?<br /> 2. Does strain diversity modulate the equilibrium resistance frequency and its changes following drug withdrawal?<br /> 3. Does the model explain biogeographic patterns of drug resistance evolution?

Strengths:<br /> The model built by the authors is novel. As emphasized in the manuscript, many factors (e.g., drug usage, vectorial capacity, population immunity) have been explored in models attempting to explain resistance emergence, but strain diversity (and strain specific immunity) has not been explicitly included and thus explored. This is an interesting oversight in previous models, given the vast antigenic diversity of Plasmodium falciparum (the most common human malaria parasite) and its potential to "drive key differences in epidemiological features".

The model also accounts for multiple infections, which is a key feature of malarial infections, with individuals often infected with either multiple Plasmodium species or multiple strains of the same species. Accounting for multiple infections is critical when considering resistance emergence, as with multiple infections there is within-host competition which will mediate the fitness of resistant genotypes. Overall, the model is an interesting combination of a classic epidemiological model (e.g., SIR) and a population genetics model.

In terms of major model innovations, the model also directly links selection pressure via drug administration with local transmission dynamics. This is accomplished by the interaction between strain-specific immunity, generalized immunity and host immune response.

Weaknesses:<br /> The authors emphasize several model limitations, including the specification of resistance by a single locus (thus not addressing the importance of recombination should resistance be specified by more than one locus); the assumption that parasites are independently and randomly distributed among hosts (contrary to empirical evidence); and the assumption of a random association between the resistant genotype and antigenic diversity. However, each of these limitations are addressed in the discussion.

Did the authors achieve their goals? Did the results support their conclusion?<br /> Returning to the questions posed by the authors:<br /> 1. Does strain diversity modulate the equilibrium resistance frequency given different transmission intensities? Yes. The authors demonstrate a negative relationship between prevalence/strain diversity and resistance frequency (Figure 2).

2. Does strain diversity modulate the equilibrium resistance frequency and its changes following drug withdrawal? Yes. The authors find that, under resistance invasion and some level of drug treatment, resistance frequency decreased with the number of strains (Figure 4). The authors also find that lower strain diversity results in a slower decline in resistant genotypes after drug withdrawal and higher equilibrium resistance frequency (Figure 6).

3. Does the model explain biogeographic patterns of drug resistance evolution? Yes. The authors find that their full model (which includes strain-specific immunity) produces the empirically observed negative relationship between resistance and prevalence/strain diversity, while a model only incorporating generalised immunity does not (Figure 8).

Utility of work to others and relevance within and beyond the field?<br /> This work is important because antimalarial drug resistance has been an ongoing issue of concern for much of the 20th century and now 21st century. Further, this resistance emergence is not equitably distributed across biogeographic regions, with South America and Southeast Asia experiencing much of the burden of this resistance emergence. Not only can widespread resistant strains be traced back to these two relatively low-transmission regions, but these strains remain at high frequency even after drug treatment ceases.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> In this manuscript, Janssens et al. addressed the challenge of mapping the location of transcriptionally unique cell types identified by single nuclei sequencing (snRNA-seq) data available through the Fly Cell Atlas. They identified 100 transcripts for head samples and 50 transcripts for fly body samples allowing the identification of every unique cell type discovered through the Fly Cell Atlas. To map all of these cell types, the authors divided the fly body into head and body samples and used the Molecular Cartography (Resolve Biosciences) method to visualize these transcripts. This approach allowed them to build spatial tissue atlases of the fly head and body, to identify the location of previously unknown cell types and the subcellular localization of different transcripts. By combining snRNA-seq data from the Fly Cell Atlas with their spatially resolved transcriptomics (SRT) data, they demonstrated an automated cell type annotation strategy to identify unknown clusters and infer their location in the fly body. This manuscript constitutes a proof-of-principle study to map the location of the cells identified by ever-growing single-cell transcriptomic datasets generated by others.

Strengths:<br /> The authors used the Molecular Cartography (Resolve Biosciences) method to visualize 100 transcripts for head samples and 50 transcripts for fly body samples in high resolution. This method achieves high resolution by multiplexing a large number of transcript visualization steps and allows the authors to map the location of unique cell types identified by the Fly Cell Atlas.

Weaknesses:<br /> Combining single-nuclei sequencing (snRNA-seq) data with spatially resolved transcriptomics (SRT) data is challenging, and the methods used by the authors in this study cannot reliably distinguish between cells, especially in brain regions where the processes of different neurons are clustered, such as in neuropils. This means that a grid that the authors mark as a unique cell may actually be composed of processes from multiple cells.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:

In this study, Jeong and Choi examine neural correlates of behavior during a naturalistic foraging task in which rats must dynamically balance resource acquisition with the risk of threat. Rats first learn to forage for sucrose reward from a spout, and when a threat is introduced (an attack-like movement from a "LobsterBot"), they adjust their behavior to continue foraging while balancing exposure to the threat, adopting anticipatory withdrawal behaviors to avoid encounter with the LobsterBot. Using electrode recordings targeting the medial prefrontal cortex (PFC), they identify heterogenous encoding of task variables across prelimbic and infralimbic cortex neurons, including correlates of distance to the reward/threat zone, and correlates of avoidance behavior. Based on analysis of population responses, they suggest that the prefrontal cortex switches between coding schemes to process spatial information or behavioral responses in a context-dependent manner. Characterization of the heterogenous coding scheme by which the frontal cortex represents information in different goal states is an important contribution to our understanding of brain mechanisms underlying flexible behavior in ecological settings.

Strengths:

As many behavioral neuroscience studies employ highly controlled task designs, relatively less is known about how the brain organizes navigation and behavioral selection in naturalistic settings, where environment states and goals are more fluid. Here, the authors take advantage of a natural challenge faced by many animals - how to forage for resources in an unpredictable environment - to investigate neural correlates of behavior when goal states are dynamic. Related to this, they also investigate how prefrontal cortex (PFC) activity can reorganize to support different functional "modes" (here, between a navigational mode and an action-selection mode) for flexible behavior. Overall, an important strength and real value of this study is the design of the behavioral experiment, which is trial-structured, permitting the use of standard methods to analyze neural data, yet rich enough to encourage and permit more natural behavior. The experiment is also phased to measure behavioral changes as animals first encounter a threat, and then learn to adapt their foraging strategy to its presence. Characterization of this adaptation process is itself quite interesting and sets a foundation for further study of threat learning and risk management in the foraging context. Finally, the characterization of single-neuron activity from the prefrontal cortex in this naturalistic setting is an important contribution to the field - previous studies have identified the neural correlates of spatial and behavioral variables in the frontal cortex, but the nature of how these representations co-exist or are dynamically adjusted when animals shift their goals is less clear.

Weaknesses:

While the task design in this study is intentionally stimulus-rich and places a minimal constraint on the animal to preserve naturalistic behavior, this is, unfortunately, a double-edged sword, as it also introduces additional variables that confound some of the neural analysis. Because of this, a general weakness of the study is a lack of clear interpretability of the task variable neural correlates. This is a limitation of the task, which includes many naturally correlated variables - however, I think with some additional analyses, the authors could strengthen some of their core arguments and significantly improve clarity.

For example, the authors argue, based on an ANN decoding analysis (Figure 2b), that PFC neurons encode spatial information - but the spatial coordinate that they decode (the distance to the active foraging zone) is itself confounded by the fact that animals exhibit different behavior in different sections of the arena. From the way the data are presented, it is difficult to tell whether the decoder performance reflects a true neural correlate of distance, or whether it is driven by behavior-associated activity that is evoked by different behaviors in different parts of the arena. The author's claim that PFC neurons encode spatial information could be substantiated with a more careful analysis of single-neuron responses to supplement the decoder analysis. For example, 1) They could show examples of single neurons that are active at some constant distance away from the foraging site, regardless of animal behavior, and 2) They could quantify how many neurons are significantly spatially modulated, controlling for correlates of behavior events. One possible approach to disambiguate this confound could be to use regression-based models of neuron spiking to quantify variance in neuron activity that is explained by spatial features, behavioral features, or both.

The authors also claim that the heterogenous encoding of spatial and behavioral variables in PFC neurons is structured in a particular way that depends on the animal's goal state and/or context (a navigational mode and an action-selection mode). The main evidence supporting this interpretation is a population vector analysis based on principal component projections of neural data (Figure 4), which shows that the population response is different, on average, in the encounter zone compared to the foraging and nesting zones. But again, the different "zones" are obligately correlated with different types of behavior/stimuli. Since some neurons are modulated by events unique to the encounter zone (e.g., licking sucrose water, withdrawing from the LobsterBot, etc.), differences in population activity patterns may simply reflect this behavior/event coding. To substantiate the claim that PFC neurons really switch between different coding "modes," the authors could include a version of this analysis where they have regressed out, or otherwise controlled for, these confounds. Otherwise, the claim that the authors have identified "distinctively different states of ensemble activity," as opposed to simple coding of salient task features, seems premature.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> The authors aimed to infer the trajectories of long range and local neuronal synchrony across the Alzheimer's disease continuum, relative to neurodegeneration and cognitive decline. The trajectories are inferred using event-based models, which infer a set of data-driven disease stages from a given dataset. The authors develop an adapted event-based modelling approach, in which they characterise each stage as a particular biomarker increasing by a particular z-score deviation from controls. Fitting infers the optimal set of z-scores to use for each biomarker and the order in which each biomarker reaches each z-score. The authors apply this approach to data from 148 individuals (70 cognitively unimpaired older adults and 78 individual with mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer's disease), identifying trajectories in which long-range (amplitude-envolope correlation) and local (regional spectral power) neuronal synchrony in the alpha and beta bands becomes abnormal prior to neurodegeneration (measured as the volume of the parahippocampal gyrus) and cognitive decline (measured using the mini-mental state examination).

Strengths:<br /> - The main strength is that the authors assess two models. In the first they derive a staging system based only on the volume of the parahippocampal gyrus and mini-mental state examination score. They then investigate how neuronal synchrony metrics change compared to this staging system. In the second they derive a staging system that also includes an average (combined long-range and local) neuronal synchrony metric and investigate how long-range and local synchrony metrics change relative to this staging system. This is a strength as the first model provides confidence that there is not overfitting to the neuronal synchrony data, and the second provides more detailed insights into the dynamics of the early neuronal synchrony changes.<br /> - Another strength is that the authors automatically infer the optimal z-scores to choose, rather than having to pre-select them manually, as in previous approaches.

Weaknesses:<br /> - The authors do not have a dataset for external validation.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

In this study, Lin et al developed a protocol termed MOCAT, to perform tissue clearing and labelling on large-scale FFPE mouse brain specimens. They have optimised protocols for dewaxing and adequate delipidation of FFPE tissues to enable deep immunolabelling, even for whole mouse brains. This was useful for the study of disease models such as in an astrocytoma model to evaluate spatial architecture of the tumour and its surrounding microenvironment. It was also used in a traumatic brain injury model to quantify changes in vasculature density and differences in monoaminergic innervation. They have also demonstrated the potential of multi-round immunolabelling using photobleaching, as well as expansion microscopy with FFPE samples using MOCAT.

Strengths:<br /> This paper has demonstrated, with some good imaging examples, that it is possible to perform deep immunostaining with detailed analysis on FFPE samples using MOCAT. The figures provided appeared to be largely convincing with good amount of details.

They have showcased different ways to perform analysis on cleared tissue. For example, the use of lectin-labelled blood vessels as a structural reference for multi-round immunolabelling was very useful. They have also demonstrated how to generate comparable quantitative data on various mouse disease models which will be important for future tissue-clearing studies.

Weaknesses:<br /> Although the authors have proven the feasibility of their techniques on FFPE samples, it is questionable whether this will translate well for human brain tissues. The vast majority of the study data was generated using rodent brain tissues and it appears the technique was only performed on human FFPE tissues no larger than 1 mm in thickness. The PFA/formalin fixation time for the tissue was also limited to 24 hours in this study. Whilst this may be true for most surgical specimens, whole brain specimens in brain banks will often have formalin fixation time exceeding 3 weeks. The issue of prolonged formalin fixation prior to embedding in paraffin wax was not addressed in this study.

Inherent differences in human and rodent brain tissues may affect the effectiveness of immunostaining. In this study, results on human brain specimens appeared to show a reduction in clarity and staining quality at greater imaging depth at 900 µm, particularly for MAP2 and GFAP (Figure 5).

In addition, there are inadequate details in the materials and methods section which may limit the readers' ability to successfully replicate the study or proposed method for tissue clearing. Further details on the optimisation of this protocol and brief details from previously published protocols were not described in the methods section.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> In this manuscript, the authors set out to develop genetic tools that can specifically and comprehensively label Axo-Axonic Cells (AACs), also known as Chandelier cells. These AACs possess unique morphological and connectivity features, making them an ideal subject for studying various aspects of cell types across different experimental methods. To achieve both specificity and comprehensiveness in AAC labeling, the authors employ an intersectional strategy that combines lineage origin and molecular markers. This approach successfully targets AACs across the mouse brain and reveals their widespread distribution in various brain structures beyond the previously known regions. Additionally, the authors utilize rabies transneuronal labeling to provide a comprehensive overview of AACs, their variations, and input sources throughout the brain. This experimental approach offers a powerful model system for investigating the role of AACs in circuit development and function across diverse brain regions.

Strengths:<br /> Genetic Tools and Specificity: The authors' genetic tools show qualitative evidence of specificity for AACs, opening new avenues for targeted research on these cells. The use of intersectional strategies enhances the precision of AAC labeling.

Widespread Distribution: The study significantly broadens our understanding of AAC distribution, revealing their presence in brain regions beyond what was previously documented. This expanded knowledge is a valuable contribution to the field.

Transneuronal Labeling: The inclusion of rabies transneuronal labeling provides a comprehensive view of AACs, their variations, and input sources, allowing for a more holistic understanding of their role in neural circuits.

Weaknesses:<br /> Quantitative Analysis: While the claim of specificity appears qualitatively convincing, the manuscript could be improved with more quantitative analysis.

Comprehensiveness Claim: The assertion of comprehensiveness, implying labeling "almost all" AACs in all brain regions, is challenging to substantiate conclusively. Acknowledging the limitations of proving complete comprehensiveness and discussing them in the discussion section would be more appropriate than asserting it in the results section.

Local Inputs: While the manuscript focuses on inter-areal inputs to AACs, it would benefit from exploring local inputs as well. Identifying the local neurons that target AACs and analyzing their patterns could provide valuable insights into AAC function within specific brain regions.

Discussion Focus: The discussion section should delve deeper into the biological implications of the findings, moving beyond technical significance. Exploring similarities and differences in input patterns between AACs and other cell types, and linking them to the locations of starter cells or specific connectivity patterns in the brain, would enrich the discussion. For instance, investigating whether input patterns can be predicted based on the locations of starter cells or connectivity specificity could provide valuable insights.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> This describes the molecular identity of the intermediate status of cranial neural crest cells (NCCs) during the initial delamination process. Taking advantage of single-cell RNA seq, the authors identify new populations of cells during EMT characterized by a specific set of gene expressions, including Dlc1. Promigratory cranial NCCs differentiate through different trajectories depending on their cell cycle phases but converge into a common progenitor, then differentiate into mesenchymal cells expressing region-specific genes.

Strengths:<br /> Single-cell RNA seq data convincingly support what the authors claim. This is the first time to identify intermediate states between premigratory and migratory cranial NCCs. Silencing one of the marker genes, Dlc1, reduces the migratory activity of cranial NCCs. These findings deepen our understanding of the mechanism of EMT in general.

Weaknesses:<br /> Common and specific features between cranial and trunk NCCs could be described/discussed in-depth. Phenotypic relations between the reduction of delamination and defects found in Dlc1 mutant mice can be discussed.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

In this manuscript, Seba et al., investigate the mechanism of chromosome organization by the MukBEF complex in E. coli. They use a combination of Hi-C and ChIP analysis to understand the steps of MukBEF regulation: its unloading from DNA (how MukBEF activity is prevented in the terminus regions of the chromosome by MatP), and its loading onto DNA (how DNA replication influences MukBEF association with the chromosome). Seba et al., induce chromosomal rearrangements to flip the sections of the ter region, thus perturbing matS site numbers and position. They find that MukBEF activity is prevented around matS sites and that higher matS density has greater effect on MukBEF. Separately, using replication mutants and inducible MukBEF expression, they find that MukBEF can associate with the chromosome even in the absence of replication (as seen by the emergence of long-range contacts). However, ChIP data suggests that MukBEF binding to DNA is enriched on newly replicated DNA.

Altogether, this work provides a valuable and comprehensive view of MukBEF-mediated chromosome organization, with insights on the mechanism of the exclusion of MukBEF from the terminus region of the chromosome. The use of the programmed genetic rearrangements is powerful and allows the authors to provide clear and convincing evidence for MukBEF exclusion from ter by matS sites. It is particularly striking to see that MukBEF can promote long-range contacts even in chromosomal regions between two matS, but the complex is excluded from the matS 'zones'. Experiments using cells blocked for replication show that MukBEF can influence chromosome organization in the absence of replication as well. While previous studies have reported some evidences in support of both of the above conclusions, the experiments described here offer a clear and direct demonstration of the same.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

In this study, the authors seek to characterize the role of splicing factor SRSF1 during spermatogenesis using Vasa-Cre;Srsf1Fl/del mice model. The authors first revealed that spermatogonia-related genes (e.g., Plzf, Id4, Setdb1, Stra8, Tial1/Tiar, Bcas2, Ddx5, Srsf10, Uhrf1, and Bud31) were bound by SRSF1 in the mouse testes by CLIP-seq. The authors convincingly demonstrated that specific deletion of SRSF1 in mouse gem cells with vasa-cre lead to NOA by impairing homing and failure survival of spermatogonia. To investigate the molecular mechanisms of SRSF1 in spermatogonia, further multiomics analysis including CLIP-seq, IP-MS, and RNA-seq were conducted. The results showed that SRSF1 coordinated with other RNA splicing-related proteins to directly bind and regulate the expression of nine spermatogonia-related genes especially Tial1/Tiar via alternative splicing. The authors revealed the critical role of SRSF1-mediated AS in precursor SSCs homing and survival, which may provide a framework to elucidate the molecular mechanisms of the posttranscriptional network underlying the formation of SSC pools and the establishment of niches. This work will be of interest to stem cell and reproductive biologists. The experiments are well-designed and conducted, and the overall methods and results are convincing except for the claim that altered splicing of the Tial1 transcript mediates the effect of SRSF1 loss.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

The manuscript aims to provide mechanistic insight into the activation of PI3Kbeta by its known regulators tyrosine phosphorylated peptides, GTP-loaded Rac1 and G-protein beta-gamma subunits. To achieve this the authors have used supported lipid bilayers, engineered recombinant peptides and proteins (often tagged with fluorophores) and TIRF microscopy to enable bulk (averages of many molecules) and single molecule quantitation. The great strength of this approach is the precision and clarity of mechanistic insight. Although the study does not use "in transfecto" or in vivo models the experiments are performed using "physiologically-based" conditions and provide a powerful insight into core regulatory principles that will be relevant in vivo.<br /> The results are beautiful, high quality, well controlled and internally consistent (and with other published work that overlaps on some points) and as a result are compelling. The primary conclusion is that the primary regulator of PI3Kbeta are tyrosine phosphorylated peptides (and by inference tyrosine phsophorylated receptors/adaptors) and that the other activators can synergise with that input but have relatively weak impacts on their own.

Although the methodology is not easily imported, for reasons of both cost and the experience needed to execute them well, the results have broad importance for the field and reverse an impression that had built in large parts of the broader signalling and PI3K communities that all of the inputs to PI3Kbeta were relatively equivalent, however, these conclusions were based on "in cell" or in vivo studies that were very difficult to interpret clearly.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

In this revised preprint the authors investigate whether a presumably allosteric P2RX7 activating compound that they previously discovered reduces fibrosis in a bleomycin mouse model. They chose this particular model as publicly available mRNA data indicate that the P2RX7 pathway is downregulated in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis patients compared to control individuals. In their revised manuscript, the authors use three proxies of lung damage, Ashcroft score, collagen fibers, and CD140a+ cells, to assess lung damage following the administration of bleomycin. These metrics are significantly reduced on HEI3090 treatment. Additional data implicate specific immune cell infiltrates and cytokines, namely inflammatory macrophages and damped release of IL-17A, as potential mechanistic links between their compound and reduced fibrosis. Finally, the researchers transplant splenocytes from WT, NLRP3-KO, and IL-18-KO mice into animals lacking the P2RX7 receptor to specifically ascertain how the transplanted splenocytes, which are WT for P2RX7 receptor, respond to HEI3090 (a P2RX7 agonist). Based on these results, the authors conclude that HEI3090 enhanced IL-18 production through the P2RX7-NLRP3 inflammasome axis to dampen fibrosis.

These findings could be interesting to the field, as there are conflicting results as to whether NLRP3 activation contributes to fibrosis and if so, at what stage(s) (e.g., acute damage phase versus progression). The revised manuscript is more convincing in that three orthogonal metrics for lung damage were quantified.

However, deletion of the P2RX7 receptor itself reduces the extent of fibrosis, suggesting that P2RX7 signaling can be pro-fibrotic. In the absence of P2RX7, the effects of HEI3900 are also abolished, suggesting that HEI3900 acts in part via P2RX7 signaling. This suggests a paradox that P2RX7 signaling can be both detrimental and beneficial in fibrosis and there is need for a better understanding of when P2RX7 signaling is beneficial and when it is detrimental in lung fibrosis. HEI3900-induced activation of P2RX7 seems to be beneficial but this primarily is shown for when fibrosis is already established. As the P2RX7 genetic deletion mouse model has less fibrosis, P2RX7 signaling and inflammasome activation may be deleterious during the formation of disease but it is also possible that HEI3900 has other beneficial effects that are not directly related to P2RX7.

Molecularly, additional evidence on specificity, such as thermal proteome profiling and direct biophysical binding experiments, would also enhance the authors' argument that the compound indeed binds P2RX7 directly and specifically. Since all small molecules have some degree of promiscuity, the absence of an additional P2RX7 modulator, or direct recombinant IL-18 administration, is needed to orthogonally validate the functional importance of this pathway. Another way the authors could probe pathway specificity would involve co-administering α-IL-18 with HEI3090 in several key experiments (similar to Figure 4L).

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> The study follows the role of yeast eIF2A protein as potential translation initiation factor engaged in the non-canonical translation initiation under stress conditions and as a substitute for eIF2. Using ribosome profiling, RNA-Seq and reporter based assays authors evaluated the role of eIF2A protein under regular or stress conditions (cells starved for branched amino acids). Authors found that yeast cells depleted of eIF2A protein do not change significantly their translation initiation, or translation in general. In the contrast to previously reported data for human homolog yeast eIF2A does not significantly contribute to regulation of the uORFs, regardless if they start with canonical AUG or near cognate start codons. eIF2A is not involved in the repression of IRES element in URE2 gene or has a role in purine biosynthesis. It appears that in yeast eIF2A contributes to regulation of very limited number of mRNAs (32 with significant changes in translation efficiency), where only 17 of such messages indeed are consistent with eIF2A deletion and single mRNA (HKR1) could be validated in reporter assay.

Strengths:<br /> The strength of the manuscript is complete analysis and unbiased approach using genomic analysis methods (ribosome profiling and RNA-seq) as well as reporter validation studies. Additional strength of the manuscript is scientific rigor and statistics associated with data analyses, clear data presentation and discussion of the results in the context of the previous studies and results.

Weaknesses:<br /> none noted

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

In their study, Osorio-Valeriano and colleagues seek to understand how bacterial-specific polymerizing proteins called bactofilins contribute to morphogenesis. They do this primarily in the stalked budding bacterium Hyphomonas neptunium, with supporting work in a spiral-shaped bacterium, Rhodospirillum rubrum. Overall the study incorporates bacterial genetics and physiology, imaging, and biochemistry to explore the function of bactofilins and cell wall hydrolases that are frequently encoded together within an operon. They demonstrate an important, but not essential, function for BacA in morphogenesis of H. neptunium. Using biochemistry and imaging, they show that BacA can polymerize and that its localization in cells is dynamic and cell-cycle regulated. They further demonstrate that BacA likely limits movement of the elongasome into the stalk, spatially confining its activity. The authors then focus on lmdC, which encodes a putative M23 endopeptidase upstream of bacA in H. neptunium, and find that is essential for viability. The purified LmdC C-terminal domain could cleave E. coli peptidoglycan in vitro suggesting that it is a DD-endopeptidase. LmdC interacts directly with BacA in vitro and co-localizes with BacA in cells. To expand their observations, the authors then explore a related endopeptidase/bactofilin pair in R. rubrum; those observations support a function for LmdC and BacA in R. rubrum morphogenesis as well.

An overall strength of this study is the breadth and completeness of approaches used to assess bactofilin and endopeptidase function in cells and in vitro. The authors establish a clear function for BacA in morphogenesis in two bacterial systems, and demonstrate a physical relationship between BacA and the cell wall hydrolase LmdC that may be broadly conserved. The eventual model the authors favor for BacA regulation of morphogenesis in H. neptunium is that it serves as a diffusion barrier and limits movement of morphogenetic machinery like the elongasome into the elongating stalk and/or bud.

The data presented illuminate aspects of bacterial morphogenesis and the physical and functional relationship between polymerizing proteins and cell wall enzymes in bacteria, a recurring theme in bacterial cell biology with a variety of underlying mechanisms. Bactofilins in particular are relatively recently discovered and any new insights into their functions and mechanisms of action are valuable. The findings presented here are likely to interest those studying bacterial morphogenesis, peptidoglycan, and cytoskeletal function.

Joint Public Review:

Summary:

This paper reports how mycobacterial cAMP level is increased under stressful conditions and that the increase is important in the survival of the bacterium in animal hosts.

Strengths:

The authors show that under different stresses the response regulator PhoP represses a phosphodiesterase (PDE) that degrades cAMP specifically. Identification of a PDE specific to cAMP is significant progress in understanding Mtb pathogenesis. An increase in cAMP apparently increases bacterial survival upon infection. On the practical side, the reduction of cAMP by increasing PDE can be a means to attenuate the growth of the bacilli. The results have wider implications since PhoP is implicated in controlling diverse mycobacterial stress responses and many bacterial pathogens modulate host cell cAMP level. The results here are straightforward, internally consistent, and of both theoretical and applied interests.

Weaknesses:

Repression of PDE promoter by binding of phosphorylated PhoP could have been shown at higher precision. The binding is now somewhere along a roughly 500 bp region. Although the regulation of PDE is shown to be by transcriptional repression only, it has been described as a homeostatic mechanism. The latter would have required a demonstration of both repression and activation by negative feedback.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

The paper aims to determine the impact of forest cover and fragmentation on the prevalence of malaria in non-human primates. The paper uses existing spatial datasets, as well as data obtained through published studies on zoonotic malaria. The findings of this study are important, as forest loss is still occurring in the tropics which will impact human infections of zoonotic malaria.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

The authors succeeded in establishing experimental and mathematical models for the formation of new blood vessels. The experimental model relies on temporal imaging of multilcellular projections and lumen formation from a single blood vessel embedded in an engineered extracellular matrix. The mathematical model combines both discrete and continuum elements. It would be helpful to understand how the authors came up with phenotypic classes for analyzing their live imaging data. On the modeling side, it would be useful to see whether the claims about Turing patterns could be supported by either a mean-field model or a more thorough parametric analysis of the discreet continuum model. The authors did a good job in comparing their VEGF/Notch mechanism to the EGF/Notch vulval patterning mechanism in C. elegans. The authors might want to look into the literature from studies of the tracheal patterning system in Drosophila when the combined actions of the FGF and Notch signaling specify tip and stalk cells. The similarities are quite striking and are worth noting.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary

This article by Zhai et al, investigates sterol transport in bacteria. Synthesis of sterols is rare in bacteria but occurs in some, such as, M capsulatus where the sterols are found primarily in the outer membrane. In a previous paper the authors discovered an operon consisting of five genes, with two of these genes encoding demethylases involved in sterol demethylation. In this manuscript the authors set out to investigate the functions of the other three genes in the operon. Interestingly, through a bioinformatic analysis they show that they are an inner membrane transporter of the RND family, a periplasmic binding protein and an outer membrane associated protein, all potentially involved with lipid transport, so providing a means of transporting the lipids to the outer membrane. These proteins are then extensively investigated through lipid pulldowns, binding analysis on all three, and X-ray crystallography and docking of the latter two.

Strengths<br /> The lipid pulldowns and associated MST binding analysis are convincing, clearly showing that sterols are able to bind to these proteins. The structures of BstB and BstC are high resolution with excellent maps that allow docking studies to be carried out. These structures are distinct from sterol binding proteins in eukaryotes.

Weaknesses<br /> While the docking and molecular dynamics studies are consistent with the binding of sterols to BstB and BstC, this is not backed up particularly well. Their discussion, however, is measured and clearly provides a strong case for further investigation.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:

This paper makes important contributions to the structural analysis of the DNA replication-linked nucleosome assembly machine termed Chromatin Assembly Factor-1 (CAF-1). The authors focus on the interplay of domains that bind DNA, histones and replication clamp protein PCNA.

Strengths:<br /> The authors analyze soluble complexes containing full-length versions of all three fission yeast CAF-1 subunits, an important accomplishment given that many previous structural and biophysical studies have focused on truncated complexes. New data here supports previous experiments indicating that the KER domain is a long alpha helix that binds DNA. Via NMR, the authors discover structural changes at the histone binding site, defined here with high resolution. Most strikingly, the experiments here show that for the S. pombe CAF-1 complex, that the WHD domain at the C-terminus of the large subunit lacks DNA binding activity observed in the human and budding yeast homologs, indicating a surprising divergence in the evolution of this complex. Together, these are important contributions to the understanding of how the CAF-1 complex works.

Weaknesses:<br /> 1. Given the strong structural predication about the roles of residues L359 and F380 (Fig. 2f), mutation of these residues would be the definitive test of their contribution to histone binding.

2. Could it be that the apparent lack of histone deposition by the delta-WHD mutant complex occurs because this mutant complex is unstable when added to the Xenopus extract?

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

The study investigates the role of PARP-1 in transcriptional regulation. Biochemical and ChIP-seq analyses demonstrate specific binding of PARP-1 to active histone marks, particularly H4K20me, in polytene chromosomes of Drosophila third instar larvae. Under heat stress conditions, PARP-1's dynamic repositioning from the Hsp70 promoter to its gene body is observed, facilitating gene activation. PARP-1, in conjunction with PR-Set7, plays a crucial role in the activation of Hsp70 and a subset of heat shock genes, coinciding with an increase in H4K20me1 levels at these gene loci. This study proposes that H4K20me1 is a key facilitator of PARP-1 binding and gene regulation. However, there are several critical concerns that are yet to be addressed. The experimental validation and demonstration of results in the main manuscript are scant. Recent developments in the area are omitted, as an important publication hasn't been discussed anywhere in the work (PMID: 36434141). The proposed mechanism operates quite selectively, and any extrapolations require intensive scientific evidence.

Major Comments:

1. PARP1 hypomorphic mutant validation data must be provided at RNA levels as the authors have mentioned about its global reduction in RNA levels.

2. The authors should provide immunoblot data for global Poly (ADP) ribosylation levels in PARP1 hypomorphic mutant condition as compared to the control. They must also provide the complete details of the mouse anti-pADPr antibody used in their immunoblot in Figure 5B.

3. PR-Set7 mutant validation results should be provided in the main manuscript, as done by the authors using qRT-PCR. Also, immunoblot data for the PR-set7 null condition should be supplemented in the main manuscript as the authors have already mentioned their anti-PR-Set7 (Rabbit, 1:1000, Novus Biologicals, 44710002) antibody in the materials and methods section.

4. The authors have probably missed out on a very important recent report (PMID: 36434141), suggesting the antagonistic nature of the PARP1 and PR-SET7 association. In light of these important observations, the authors must check for the levels of PR-Set7 in PARP1 hypomorphic conditions.

5. Also, the results of the aforementioned study should be adequately discussed in the present study along with its implications in the same.

6. Gene transcriptional activation requires open chromatin and RNA polymerase II binding to the promoter. Since, differentially expressed genes in both PR-Set7 null and PARP1 hypomorph mutants, co-enriched with PARP-1 and H4K20me1 were mainly upregulated, the authors should provide RNA polymerase II occupancy data of these genes via RNA-Pol II ChIP-seq to further attest their claims.

7. As discussed in Figure 4, the authors found transcriptional activation of group B genes even after a significant reduction of H3K20me1 in their gene body after heat shock. Given the dynamic equilibrium shift in epigenetic marks that regulate gene expression and their locus-specific transcriptional regulation, the authors should further look for the enrichment of other epigenetic marks and even H4K20me1 specific demethylases such as PHF8 (PMID: 20622854), and their cross-talk with PARP1 to further bridge the missing links of this tale. This will add more depth to this work.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> Ngoune et al. present compelling evidence that Slender cells are challenged to infect tsetse flies. They explore the experimental context of a recent important paper in the field, Schuster et al., that presents evidence suggesting the proliferative Slender bloodstream T.brucei can infect juvenile tsetse flies. Schuster et al. was disruptive to the widely accepted paradigm that the Stumpy bloodstream form is solely responsible for tsetse infection and T.brucei transmission potential.

Evidence presented here shows that in all cases, Stumpy form parasites are exponentially more capable of infecting tsetse flies. They further show that Slender cells do not infect mature flies.

However, they raise questions of immature tsetse immunological potential and field transmission potential that their experiments do not address. Specifically, they do not show that teneral tsetse flies are immunocompromised, that tsetse flies must be immunocompromised for Slender infection nor that younger teneral tsetse infection is not pertinent to field transmission.

Strengths:<br /> Experimental Design is precise and elegant, outcomes are convincing. Discussion is compelling and important to the field. This is a timely piece that adds important data to a critical discussion of host:parasite interactions, of relevance to all parasite transmission.

Weaknesses:<br /> As above, the authors dispute the biological relevance of teneral tsetse infection in the wild, without offering evidence to the contrary. Statements need to be softened for claims regarding immunological competence or relevance to field transmission.

Joint Public Review:

The authors develop reporter constructs in E. coli that are repressed by the mammalian Musashi-1 (MSI-1) RNA-binding protein. Using a set of rigorously controlled experiments, the authors convincingly show that MSI-1 can be directed to control translation, and that translational control by MSI-1 can be modulated allosterically by oleic acid. This is a potentially useful tool for synthetic biologists, with the advantage over transcriptional regulation that one gene in an operon could be targeted. The authors' MSI-1-regulated reporter constructs could also be useful for mechanistic studies of MSI-1.

The authors initial construct design led to only weak regulation by MSI-1, presumably because the MSI-1 binding sites were not suitably positioned to repress translation initiation. A more rationally designed construct led to considerably greater repression. A minor weakness of the paper is that the authors used their initial, weakly regulated construct to assess the effect of MSI-1 binding site mutations and for their mathematical modeling; these experiments would be better suited to the more strongly regulated construct.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> The authors aim to address a critical challenge in the field of bioinformatics: the accurate and efficient identification of protein binding sites from sequences. Their work seeks to overcome the limitations of current methods, which largely depend on multiple sequence alignments or experimental protein structures, by introducing GPSite, a multi-task network designed to predict binding residues of various molecules on proteins using ESMFold.

Strengths:<br /> 1. Benchmarking. The authors provide a comprehensive benchmark against multiple methods, showcasing the performances of a large number of methods in various scenarios.

2. Accessibility and Ease of Use. GPSite is highlighted as a freely accessible tool with user-friendly features on its website, enhancing its potential for widespread adoption in the research community.

Weaknesses:<br /> 1. Lack of Novelty. The method primarily combines existing approaches and lacks significant technical innovation. This raises concerns about the original contribution of the work in terms of methodological development. Moreover, the paper reproduces results and analyses already presented in previous literature, without providing novel analysis or interpretation. This further diminishes the contribution of this paper to advancing knowledge in the field.

2. Benchmark Discrepancies. The variation in benchmark results, especially between initial comparisons and those with PeSTo. GPSite achieves a PR AUC of 0.484 on the global benchmark but a PR AUC of 0.61 on the benchmark against PeSTo. For consistency, PeSTo should be included in the benchmark against all other methods. It suggests potential issues with the benchmark set or the stability of the method. This inconsistency needs to be addressed to validate the reliability of the results.

3. Interface Definition Ambiguity. There is a lack of clarity in defining the interface for the binding site predictions. Different methods are trained using varying criteria (surfaces in MaSIF-site, distance thresholds in ScanNet). The authors do not adequately address how GPSite's definition aligns with or differs from these standards and how this issue was addressed. It could indicate that the comparison of those methods is unreliable and unfair.

While GPSite demonstrates the potential to surpass state-of-the-art methods in protein binding site prediction, the evidence supporting these claims seems incomplete. The lack of methodological novelty and the unresolved questions in benchmark consistency and interface definition somewhat undermine the confidence in the results. Therefore, it's not entirely clear if the authors have fully achieved their aims as outlined.

The work is useful for the field, especially in disease mechanism elucidation and novel drug design. The availability of genome-scale binding residue annotations GPSite offers is a significant advancement. However, the utility of this tool could be hampered by the aforementioned weaknesses unless they are adequately addressed.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> The authors have developed a zebrafish model of glioblastoma and characterized this, with a particular focus on the role of recruited myeloid cells in the tumours. Microglia/macrophages in the tumours are proposed to have an inflammatory phenotype and are engaged in phagocytosis. Knockout of Irf7 and Irf8 genes enhanced tumour initiation. Depleting mature myeloid cell types with chlodronate also enhanced tumour intitiation. It is proposed that in early-stage tumours, microglia/macrophages have tumour suppressive activity.

Strengths:<br /> The authors have generated a novel glioblastoma model in zebrafish. Two key strengths of the zebrafish model are that early-stage tumours can be studied and in vivo visualization can be readily performed. The authors show a video of microglia/macrophages adopting the ameboid phenotype in tumours (as is observed in human tumours) and engaging in phagocytosis. Video 1 was very impressive in my opinion and shows the model is a very useful tool to study microglia/macrophage:glioblastoma cell interactions. The irf7/irf8 knockdown and the chlodronate experiments are consistent with a role for mature myeloid cells in suppressing tumour initiation, suggesting that the model may also be very valuable in understanding immune surveillance in glioblastoma initiation.

Weaknesses:<br /> EGFRvIII is mainly associated with the classical subtype, so the mesenchymal subtype might be unexpected here. This could be commented on. Some more histologic characterization of the tumours would be helpful. Are they invasive, do larger tumours show necrosis and microvascular proliferation? This would help with understanding the full potential of the new model. Current thinking in established human glioblastoma is that the M1/M2 designations for macrophages are not relevant, with microglia macrophage populations showing a mixture of pre- and anti-inflammatory features. Ideally, there would be a much more detailed characterization of the intratumoral microglia/macrophage population here, as single markers can't be relied upon. Phagocytosis could have antitumour effects through the removal of live cancer cells, or could be cancer-promoting if apoptotic cancer cells are being rapidly cleared with concomitant activation of an immunosuppressive phenotype in the phagocytes (i.e. efferocytosis). It may be possible to distinguish between these two types of phagocytosis experimentally. Do the irf7/8 and chlodronate experiments distinguish between effects on microglia/macrophages and dendritic cells?

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> In this study, the authors investigate a very interesting but often overlooked aspect of abstract vs. concrete processing in language. Specifically, they study if the differences in processing of abstract vs. concrete concepts in the brain are static or dependent on the (visual) context in which the words occur. This study takes a two-step approach to investigate how context might affect the perception of concepts. First, the authors analyze if concrete concepts, expectedly, activate more sensory systems while abstract concepts activate higher-order processing regions. Second, they measure the contextual situatedness vs. displacement of each word with respect to the visual scenes it is spoken in and then evaluate if this contextual measure correlates with more activation in the sensory vs. higher-order regions respectively.

Strengths:<br /> This study raises a pertinent and understudied question in language neuroscience. It also combines both computational and meta-analytic approaches.

Weaknesses:<br /> Overall, the study had many intermediary steps that required manual subsection / random sampling and variable choices (like the time lag of analysis) with almost no visualization and interpretation of how these choices affect the observed results. The approach was also roundabout.

Peaks and Valleys Analysis:<br /> 1. Doesn't this method assume that the features used to describe each word, like valence or arousal, will be linearly different for the peaks and valleys? What about non-linear interactions between the features and how they might modulate the response?<br /> 2. Doesn't it also assume that the response to a word is infinitesimal and not spread across time? How does the chosen time window of analysis interact with the HRF? From the main figures and Figures S2-S3 there seem to be differences based on the timelag.<br /> 3. Were the group-averaged responses used for this analysis?<br /> 4. Why don't the other terms identified in Figure 5 show any correspondence to the expected categories? What does this mean? Can the authors also situate their results with respect to prior findings as well as visualize how stable these results are at the individual voxel or participant level? It would also be useful to visualize example time courses that demonstrate the peaks and valleys.

Estimating contextual situatedness:<br /> 1. Doesn't this limit the analyses to "visual" contexts only? And more so, frequently recognized visual objects?<br /> 2. The measure of situatedness is the cosine similarity of GloVE vectors that depend on word co-occurrence while the vectors themselves represent objects isolated by the visual recognition models. Expectedly, "science" and the label "book" or "animal" and the label "dog" will be close. But can the authors provide examples of context displacement? I wonder if this just picks up on instances where the identified object in the scene is unrelated to the word. How do the authors ensure that it is a displacement of context as opposed to the two words just being unrelated? This also has a consequence on deciding the temporal cutoff for consideration (2 seconds).<br /> 3. While the introduction motivated the problem of context situatedness purely linguistically, the actual methods look at the relationship between recognized objects in the visual scene and the words. Can word surprisal or another language-based metric be used in place of the visual labeling? Also, it is not clear how the process identified in (2) above would come up with a high situatedness score for abstract concepts like "truth".<br /> 4. It is a bit hard to see the overlapping regions in Figures 6A-C. Would it be possible to show pairs instead of triples? Like "abstract across context" vs. "abstract displaced"? Without that, and given (2) above, the results are not yet clear. Moreover, what happens in the "overlapping" regions of Figure 3?

Miscellaneous comments:<br /> 1. In Figure 3, it is surprising that the "concrete-only" regions dominate the angular gyrus and we see an overrepresentation of this category over "abstract-only". Can the authors place their findings in the context of other studies?<br /> 2. The following line (Pg 21) regarding the necessary differences in time for the two categories was not clear. How does this fall out from the analysis method?<br /> 3. Both categories overlap **(though necessarily at different time points)** in regions typically associated with word processing.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

The manuscript by Wagstyl et al. describes an extensive analysis of gene expression in the human cerebral cortex and the association with a large variety of maps capturing many of its microscopic and macroscopic properties. The core methodological contribution is the computation of continuous maps of gene expression for >20k genes, which are being shared with the community. The manuscript is a demonstration of several ways in which these maps can be used to relate gene expression with histological features of the human cortex, cytoarchitecture, folding, function, development and disease risk. The main scientific contribution is to provide data and tools to help substantiate the idea of the genetic regulation of multi-scale aspects of the organisation of the human brain. The manuscript is dense, but clearly written and beautifully illustrated.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Despite numerous studies on quinidine therapies for epilepsies associated with GOF mutant variants of Slack, there is no consensus on its utility due to contradictory results. In this study Yuan et al. investigated the role of different sodium selective ion channels on the sensitization of Slack to quinidine block. The study employed electrophysiological approaches, FRET studies, genetically modified proteins and biochemistry to demonstrate that Nav1.6 N- and C-tail interacts with Slack's C-terminus and significantly increases Slack sensitivity to quinidine blockade in vitro and in vivo. This finding inspired the authors to investigate whether they could rescue Slack GOF mutant variants by simply disrupting the interaction between Slack and Nav1.6. They find that the isolated C-terminus of Slack can reduce the current amplitude of Slack GOF mutant variants co-expressed with Nav1.6 in HEK cells and prevent Slack induced seizures in mouse models of epilepsy. This study adds to the growing list of channels that are modulated by protein-protein interactions, and is of great value for future therapeutic strategies.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

In this preprint, Zhang et al. describe a new tool for mapping the connectivity of mouse neurons. Essentially, the tool leverages the known peculiar infection capabilities of Rabies virus: once injected into a specific site in the brain, this virus has the capability to "walk upstream" the neural circuits, both within cells and across cells: on one hand, the virus can enter from a nerve terminal and infect retrogradely the cell body of the same cell (retrograde transport). On the other hand, the virus can also sometimes spread to the presynaptic partners of the initial target cells, via retrograde viral transmission.

Similarly to previously published approaches with other viruses, the authors engineer a complex library of viral variants, each carrying a unique sequence ('barcode'), so they can uniquely label and distinguish independent infection events and their specific presynaptic connections, and show that it is possible to read these barcodes in-situ, producing spatial connectivity maps. They also show that it is possible to read these barcodes together with endogenous mRNAs, and that this allows spatial mapping of cell types together with anatomical connectivity.

The main novelty of this work lies in the combined use of rabies virus for retrograde labeling together with barcoding and in-situ readout. Previous studies had used rabies virus for retrograde labeling, albeit with low multiplexing capabilities, so only a handful of circuits could be traced at the same time. Other studies had instead used barcoded viral libraries for connectivity mapping, but mostly focused on the use of different viruses for labeling individual projections (anterograde tracing) and never used a retrograde-infective virus.

The authors creatively merge these two bits of technology into a powerful genetic tool, and extensively and convincingly validate its performance against known anatomical knowledge. The authors also do a very good job at highlighting and discussing potential points of failure in the methods.

Unresolved questions, which more broadly affect also other viral-labeling methods, are for example how to deal with uneven tropism (ie. if the virus is unable or inefficient in infecting some specific parts of the brain), or how to prevent the cytotoxicity induced by the high levels of viral replication and expression, which will tend to produce "no source networks", neural circuits whose initial cell can't be identified because it's dead. This last point is particularly relevant for in-situ based approaches: while high expression levels are desirable for the particular barcode detection chemistry the authors chose to use (gap-filling), they are also potentially detrimental for cell survival, and risk producing extensive cell death (which indeed the authors single out as a detectable pitfall in their analysis). This is likely to be one the major optimisation space for future implementations of this barcoding approach.

Overall the paper is well balanced, the data are well presented and the conclusions are strongly supported by the data. Impact-wise, the method is definitely going to be very useful for the neurobiology community.

Reviewer #2 (Public Review):

Summary: In the revised manuscript, the authors aim to investigate brain-wide activation patterns following administration of the anesthetics ketamine and isoflurane, and conduct comparative analysis of these patterns to understand shared and distinct mechanisms of these two anesthetics. To this end, they perform Fos immunohistochemistry in perfused brain sections to label active nuclei, use a custom pipeline to register images to the ABA framework and quantify Fos+ nuclei, and perform multiple complementary analyses to compare activation patterns across groups.

In the latest revision, the authors have made some changes in response to our previous comments on how to fix the analyses. However, the revised analyses were not changed correctly and remain flawed in several fundamental ways.

Critical problems:

(1) Before one can perform higher level analyses such as hiearchal cluster or network hub (or PC) analysis, it is fundamental to validate that you have significant differences of the raw Fos expression values in the first place. First of all, this means showing figures with the raw data (Fos expression levels) in some form in Figures 2 and 3 before showing the higher level analyses in Figures 4 and 5; this is currently switched around. Second and most importantly, when you have a large number of brain areas with large differences in mean values and variance, you need to account for this in a meaningful way. Changing to log values is a step in the right direction for mean values but does not account well for differences in variance. Indeed, considering the large variances in brain areas with high mean values and variance, it is a little difficult to believe that all brain regions, especially brain areas with low mean values, passed corrections for multiple comparisons test. We suggested Z-scores relative to control values for each brain region; this would have accounted for wide differences in mean values and variance, but this was not done. Overall, validation of anesthesia-induced differences in Fos expression levels is not yet shown.

(2) Let's assume for a moment that the raw Fos expression analyses indicate significant differences. They used hierarchal cluster analyses as a rationale for examining 53 brain areas in all subsequent analyses of Fos expression following isoflurane versus home cage or ketamine versus saline. Instead, the authors changed to 201 brain areas with no validated rationale other than effectively saying 'we wanted to look at more brain areas'. And then later, when they examined raw Fos expression values in Figures 4 and 5, they assess 43 brain areas for ketamine and 20 brain areas for isoflurane, without any rationale for why choosing these numbers of brain areas. This is a particularly big problem when they are trying to compare effects of isoflurane versus ketamine on Fos expression in these brain areas - they did not compare the same brain areas.

Less critical comments:

(3) The explanation of hierarchical level's in lines 90-95 did not make sense.

(4) I am still perplexed by why the authors consider the prelimbic and infralimbic cortex 'neuroendocrine' brain areas in the abstract. In contrast, the prelimbic and infralimbic were described better in the introduction as "associated information processing" areas.

5- It looks like overall Fos levels in the control group Home (ISO) are a magnitude (~10-fold) lower than those in the control group Saline (KET) across all regions shown. This large difference seems unlikely to be due to a biologically driven effect and seems more likely to be due to a technical issue, such as differences in staining or imaging between experiments. The authors discuss this issue but did not answer whether the Homecage-ISO experiment or at least the Fos labeling and imaging performed at the same time as for the Saline-Ketamine experiment?

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> The authors ran a series of experiments with separate subject populations, different stimuli, and on two different MRI scanners (one 3T, one 7T) to establish a scenes-selective region on the intraparietal gyrus that they decided to name PIGS. I think that IPA (intraparietal place area) would also have been a good choice with an allusion to a beverage rather than a domestic animal. The authors show that PIGS can be detected robustly through a series of experiments. They anatomically and functionally separate PIGS from nearby V6, which encodes optic flow. The authors determined that PIGS encodes ego-motion.

Strengths:<br /> The robust detection of PIGS in several experiments with different sets of participants and on different scanners makes these results convincing. The functional differentiation is well executed.

Weaknesses:<br /> The distinction of PIGS from nearby OPA, which has also been implied in navigation and ego-motion, is not as clear as it could be.

Impact:<br /> Overall, this is a valuable contribution to the cognitive neuroscience of the visual system. It shows that there is still room for discovering details of visual processing, given recent advances in scanning technology, statistical methods, and larger sample sizes.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> The present study evaluates the role of visual experience in shaping functional correlations between extrastriate visual cortex and frontal regions. The authors used fMRI to assess "resting-state" temporal correlations in three groups: sighted adults, congenitally blind adults, and neonates. Previous research has already demonstrated differences in functional correlations between visual and frontal regions in sighted compared to early blind individuals. The novel contribution of the current study lies in the inclusion of an infant dataset, which allows for an assessment of the developmental origins of these differences.

The main results of the study reveal that correlations between prefrontal and visual regions are more prominent in the blind and infant groups, with the blind group exhibiting greater lateralization. Conversely, correlations between visual and somato-motor cortices are more prominent in sighted adults. Based on these data, the authors conclude that visual experience plays an instructive role in shaping these cortical networks. This study provides valuable insights into the impact of visual experience on the development of functional connectivity in the brain.

Strengths:<br /> The dissociations in functional correlations observed among the sighted adult, congenitally blind, and neonate groups provide strong support for the study's main conclusion regarding experience-driven changes in functional connectivity profiles between visual and frontal regions.

In general, the findings in sighted adult and congenitally blind groups replicate previous studies and enhance the confidence in the reliability and robustness of the current results.

Split-half analysis provides a good measure of robustness in the infant data.

Weaknesses:<br /> There is some ambiguity in determining which aspects of these networks are shaped by experience.

This uncertainty is compounded by notable differences in data acquisition and preprocessing methods, which could result in varying signal quality across groups. Variations in signal quality may, in turn, have an impact on the observed correlation patterns.

The study's findings could benefit from being situated within a broader debate surrounding the instructive versus permissive roles of experience in the development of visual circuits.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:

Songbirds provide a tractable system to examine neural mechanisms of sequence generation and variability. In past work, the projection from LMAN to RA (output of the anterior forebrain pathway) was shown to be critical for driving vocal variability during babbling, learning, and adulthood. LMAN is immediately adjacent to MMAN, which projects to HVC. MMAN is less well understood but, anatomically, appears to resemble LMAN in that it is the cortical output of a BG-thalamocortical loop. Because it projects to HVC, a major sequence generator for both syllable phonology and sequence, a strong prediction would be that MMAN drives sequence variability in the same way that LMAN drives phonological variability. This hypothesis predicts that MMAN lesions in a Bengalese finch would reduce sequence variability. Here, the authors test this hypothesis. They provide a surprising and important result that is well motivated and well analyzed: MMAN lesions increase sequence variability - this is exactly the opposite result from what would be predicted based on the functions of LMAN.

Strengths:

1. A very important and surprising result shows that lesions of a frontal projection from MMAN to HVC, a sequence generator for birdsong, increase syntactical variability.

2. The choice of Bengalese finches, which have complex transition structures, to examine the mechanisms of sequence generation, enabled this important discovery.

3. The idea that frontal outputs of BG-cortical loops can generate vocal variability comes from lesions/inactivations of a parallel pathway from LMAN to RA. The difference between MMAN and LMAN functions is striking and important.

Weaknesses:

1. If more attention was paid to how syllable phonology was (or was not) affected by MMAN lesions then the claims could be stronger around the specific effects on sequence.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> The authors investigated causal inference in the visual domain through a set of carefully designed experiments, and sound statistical analysis. They suggest the early visual system has a crucial contribution to computations supporting causal inference.

Strengths:<br /> I believe the authors target an important problem (causal inference) with carefully chosen tools and methods. Their analysis rightly implies the specialization of visual routines for causal inference and the crucial contribution of early visual systems to perform this computation. I believe this is a novel contribution and their data and analysis are in the right direction.

Weaknesses:<br /> In my humble opinion, a few aspects deserve more attention:

1. Causal inference (or causal detection) in the brain should be quite fundamental and quite important for human cognition/perception. Thus, the underlying computation and neural substrate might not be limited to the visual system (I don't mean the authors did claim that). In fact, to the best of my knowledge, multisensory integration is one of the best-studied perceptual phenomena that has been conceptualized as a causal inference problem. Assuming the causal inference in those studies (Shams 2012; Shams and Beierholm 2022; Kording et al. 2007; Aller and Noppeney 2018; Cao et al. 2019) (and many more e.g., by Shams and colleagues), and the current study might share some attributes, one expects some findings in those domains are transferable (at least to some degree) here as well. Most importantly, underlying neural correlates that have been suggested based on animal studies and invasive recording that has been already studied, might be relevant here as well. Perhaps the most relevant one is the recent work from the Harris group on mice (Coen et al. 2021). I should emphasize, that I don't claim they are necessarily relevant, but they can be relevant given their common roots in the problem of causal inference in the brain. This is a critical topic that the authors may want to discuss in their manuscript.

2. If I understood correctly, the authors are arguing pro a mere bottom-up contribution of early sensory areas for causal inference (for instance, when they wrote "the specialization of visual routines<br /> for the perception of causality at the level of individual motion directions raises the possibility that this function is located surprisingly early in the visual system *as opposed to a higher-level visual computation*."). Certainly, as the authors suggested, early sensory areas have a crucial contribution, however, it may not be limited to that. Recent studies progressively suggest perception as an active process that also weighs in strongly, the top-down cognitive contributions. For instance, the most simple cases of perception have been conceptualized along this line (Martin, Solms, and Sterzer 2021)<br /> and even some visual illusion (Safavi and Dayan 2022), and other extensions (Kay et al. 2023). Thus, I believe it would be helpful to extend the discussion on the top-down and cognitive contributions of causal inference (of course that can also be hinted at, based on recent developments). Even adaptation, which is central in this study can be influenced by top-down factors (Keller et al. 2017). I believe, based on other work of Rolfs and colleagues, this is also aligned with their overall perspective on vision.

3. The authors rightly implicate the neural substrate of causal inference in the early sensory system. Given their study is pure psychophysics, a more elaborate discussion based on other studies that used brain measurements is needed (in my opinion) to put into perspective this conclusion. In particular, as I mentioned in the first point, the authors mainly discuss the potential neural substrate of early vision, however much has been done about the role of higher-tier cortical areas in causal inference e.g., see (Cao et al. 2019; Coen et al. 2021).

There were many areas in this manuscript that I liked: clever questions, experimental design, and statistical analysis.

Bibliography<br /> \============

Aller, Mate, and Uta Noppeney. 2018. "To Integrate or Not to Integrate: Temporal Dynamics of Bayesian Causal Inference." Biorxiv, December, 504118. .

Cao, Yinan, Christopher Summerfield, Hame Park, Bruno Lucio Giordano, and Christoph Kayser. 2019. "Causal Inference in the Multisensory Brain." Neuron 102 (5): 1076-87.e8. .

Coen, Philip, Timothy P. H. Sit, Miles J. Wells, Matteo Carandini, and Kenneth D. Harris. 2021. "The Role of Frontal Cortex in Multisensory Decisions." Biorxiv, April. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 2021.04.26.441250. .

Kay, Kendrick, Kathryn Bonnen, Rachel N. Denison, Mike J. Arcaro, and David L. Barack. 2023. "Tasks and Their Role in Visual Neuroscience." Neuron 111 (11). Elsevier: 1697-1713. .

Keller, Andreas J, Rachael Houlton, Björn M Kampa, Nicholas A Lesica, Thomas D Mrsic-Flogel, Georg B Keller, and Fritjof Helmchen. 2017. "Stimulus Relevance Modulates Contrast Adaptation in Visual Cortex." Elife 6. eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd: e21589.

Kording, K. P., U. Beierholm, W. J. Ma, S. Quartz, J. B. Tenenbaum, and L. Shams. 2007. "Causal Inference in Multisensory Perception." PloS One 2: e943. .

Martin, Joshua M., Mark Solms, and Philipp Sterzer. 2021. "Useful Misrepresentation: Perception as Embodied Proactive Inference." Trends Neurosci. 44 (8): 619-28. .

Safavi, Shervin, and Peter Dayan. 2022. "Multistability, Perceptual Value, and Internal Foraging." Neuron, August. .

Shams, L. 2012. "Early Integration and Bayesian Causal Inference in Multisensory Perception." In The Neural Bases of Multisensory Processes, edited by M. M. Murray and M. T. Wallace. Frontiers in<br /> Neuroscience. Boca Raton (FL).

Shams, Ladan, and Ulrik Beierholm. 2022. "Bayesian Causal Inference: A Unifying Neuroscience Theory." Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 137 (June): 104619. .

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary and strengths. This paper starts with an exceptionally fair and balanced introduction to a topic, the mirror neuron literature, which is often debated and prone to controversies even in the choice of the terminology. In my opinion, the authors made an excellent job in this regard, and I really appreciated it. Then, they propose a novel method to look at population dynamics to compare neural selectivity and alignment between execution and observation of actions performed with different types of grip.

Weakness. Unfortunately, the goal and findings within this well-described framework are less clear to me. The authors aimed to investigate, using a novel analytic approach, whether and to what extent a match exists between population codes and neural dynamics when a monkey performs an action or observes it performed by an experimenter. This motivation stems from the fact that the general evidence in the literature is that the match between visual and motor selectivity of mirror neuron responses is essentially at a chance level. While the approach devised by the author is generally well-described and understandable, the main result obtained confirms this general finding of a lack of matching between the two contexts in 2 out of the three monkeys. Nevertheless, the authors claim that the patterns associated with execution and observation can be re-aligned with canonical correlation, indicating that these distinct neural representations show dynamical similarity that may enable the nervous system to recognize particular actions. This final conclusion is hardly acceptable to me, and constitutes my major concern, at least without a more explicit explanation: how do we know that this additional operation can be performed by the brain? Is this a computational trick to artificially align something that is naturally non-aligned, or can it capture something real and useful?<br /> Based on the accumulated evidence on space-constrained coding of others' actions by mirror neurons (e.g., Caggiano et al. 2009; Maranesi et al. 2017), recent evidence also cited by the authors (Pomper et al. 2023), and the most recent views supported even by the first author of the original discovery (i.e., Vittorio Gallese, see Bonini et al. 2022 on TICS), it seems that one of the main functions of these cells, especially in monkeys, might be to prepare actions and motor responses during social interaction rather than recognizing the actions of others - something that visual brain areas could easily do better than motor ones in most situations. In this perspective, and given the absence of causal evidence so far, the lack of visuo-motor congruence is a potentially relevant feature of the mechanism rather than something to be computationally cracked at all costs.

Specific comments on Results/Methods:<br /> I can understand, based on the authors' hypothesis, that they employed an ANOVA to preliminarily test whether and which of the recorded neurons fit their definition of "mirror neurons". However, given the emphasis on the population level, and the consolidated finding of highly different execution and observation responses, I think it could be interesting to apply the same analysis on (at least also) the whole recorded neuronal population, without any preselection-based on a single neuron statistic. Such preselection of mirror neurons could influence the results of EXE-OBS comparisons since all the neurons activated only during EXE or OBS are excluded. Related to this point, the authors could report the total number of recorded neurons per monkey/session, so that also the fraction of neurons fitting their definition of mirror neuron is explicit.<br /> Furthermore, the comparison of the dynamics of the classification accuracy in figures 4 and 5, and therefore the underlying assumption of subspaces shift in execution and observation, respectively, reveal substantial similarities between monkeys despite the different contexts, which are clearly greater than the similarities among neural subspaces shifts across task epochs: to me, this suggests that the main result is driven by the selected neural populations in different monkeys/implants rather than by an essential property of the neuronal dynamics valid across animals. Could the author comment on this issue? This could easily explain the "strange" result reported in figure 6 for monkey T.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

The manuscript by Hariani et al. presents experiments designed to improve our understanding of the connectivity and computational role of Unipolar Brush Cells (UBCs) within the cerebellar cortex, primarily lobes IX and X. The authors develop and cross several genetic lines of mice that express distinct fluorophores in subsets of UBCs, combined with immunocytochemistry that also distinguishes subtypes of UBCs, and they use confocal microscopy and electrophysiology to characterize the electrical and synaptic properties of subsets of so-labelled cells, and their synaptic connectivity within the cerebellar cortex. The authors then generate a computer model to test possible computational functions of such interconnected UBCs.

Using these approaches, the authors report that:<br /> 1) GRP-driven TDtomato is expressed exclusively in a subset (20%) of ON-UBCs, defined electrophysiologically (excited by mossy fiber afferent stimulation via activation of UBC AMPA and mGluR1 receptors) and immunocytochemically by their expression of mGluR1.

2) UBCs ID'd/tagged by mCitrine expression in Brainbow mouse line P079 is expressed in a similar minority subset of OFF-UBCs defined electrophysiologically (inhibited by mossy fiber afferent stimulation via activation of UBC mGluR2 receptors) and immunocytochemically by their expression of Calretinin. However, such mCitrine expression was also detected in some mGluR1 positive UBCs, which may not have shown up electrophysiologically because of the weaker fluorophore expression without antibody amplification.

3) Confocal analysis of crossed lines of mice (GRP X P079) stained with antibodies to mGluR1 and calretinin documented the existence of all possible permutations of interconnectivity between cells (ON-ON, ON-OFF, OFF-OFF, OFF-ON), but their overall abundance was low, and neither their absolute or relative abundance was quantified.

4) A computational model (NEURON ) indicated that the presence of an intermediary UBC (in a polysynaptic circuit from MF to UBC to UBC) could prolong bursts (MF-ON-ON), prolong pauses (MF-ON-OFF), cause a delayed burst (MF-OFF-OFF), cause a delayed pause (MF-OFF-ON) relative to solely MF to UBC synapses which would simply exhibit long bursts (MF-ON) or long pauses (MF-OFF).

The authors thus conclude that the pattern of interconnected UBCs provides an extended and more nuanced pattern of firing within the cerebellar cortex that could mediate longer lasting sensorimotor responses.

The cerebellum's long known role in motor skills and reflexes, and associated disorders, combined with our nascent understanding of its role in cognitive, emotional, and appetitive processing, makes understanding its circuitry and processing functions of broad interest to the neuroscience and biomedical community. The focus on UBCs, which are largely restricted to vestibular lobes of the cerebellum reduces the breadth of likely interest somewhat. The overall design of specific experiments is rigorous and the use of fluorophore expressing mouse lines is creative. The data that is presented and the writing are clear.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> In this paper, the authors provide a thorough demonstration of the role that one particular type of voltage-gated potassium channel, Kv1.8, plays in a low voltage-activated conductance found in type I vestibular hair cells. Along the way, they find that this same channel protein appears to function in type II vestibular hair cells as well, contributing to other macroscopic conductances. Overall, Kv1.8 may provide especially low input resistance and short time constants to facilitate encoding of more rapid head movements in animals that have necks. Combination with other channel proteins, in different ratios, may contribute to the diversified excitability of vestibular hair cells.

Strengths:<br /> The experiments are comprehensive and clearly described, both in the text and in the figures. Statistical analyses are provided throughout.

Weaknesses:<br /> None.

Joint Public Review:

Zhang et. al. presents compelling results that support the identification of epigenetically mediated control for the recognition of dihydropyrimidine dehydrogenase (DPYD) gene expression that is linked with cancer treatment resistance 5-fluorouracil. The experimental approach was developed and pursued with in vitro and in vivo strategies. Combining molecular, cellular, and biochemical approaches, the authors identify a germline variant with compromised enhancer control. Several lines of evidence were presented that are consistent with increased CEBP recruitment to the DPYD regulatory domain with consequential modifications in promoter-enhancer interactions that are associated with compromised 5-fluorouracil resistance. Functional identification of promoter and enhancer elements was validated by CRISPRi and CRISPRa assays. ChIP and qPCR documented histone marks that can account for the control of DPYD gene expression were established. Consistency with data from patient-derived specimens and direct assessment of 5-fluorouracil sensitivity provides confidence in the proposed mechanisms. The model is additionally supported by genome data from a population with high "compromised allele frequency". It can be informative to directly demonstrate DPYD promoter-enhancer interactions. However, the genetic variants support the integration of regulatory activities.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> The authors originally investigated the function of p53 isoforms with an alternative C-terminus encoded by the Alternatively Spliced (AS) exon in place of exon 11 encoding the canonical "α" C-terminal domain. For this purpose, the authors create a mouse model with a specific deletion of the AS exon.

Strengths:<br /> Interestingly, wt or p53ΔAS/ΔAS mouse embryonic fibroblasts did not differ in cell cycle control, expression of well-known p53 target genes, proliferation under hyperoxic conditions, or the growth of tumor xenografts. However, p53-AS isoforms were shown to confer male-specific protection against lymphomagenesis in Eμ-Myc transgenic mice, prone to highly penetrant B-cell lymphomas. In fact, p53ΔAS/ΔAS Eμ-Myc mice were less protected from developing B-cell lymphomas compared to WT counterparts. The important difference that the authors find between WT and p53ΔAS/ΔAS Eμ-Myc males is a higher number of immature B cells in p53ΔAS/ΔAS vs WT mice. Higher expression of Ackr4 and lower expression of Mt2 was found in p53+/+ Eμ-Myc males compared to p53ΔAS/ΔAS counterparts, suggesting that these two transcripts are in part regulators of B-cell lymphomagenesis and enrichment for immature B cells.

Weaknesses:<br /> The manuscript is interesting but the data are not so striking and are very correlative. The authors should add functional experiments to reinforce their hypotheses and to provide, beyond potential prognostic factors, any potential mechanism at the basis of the different rates of B-cell lymphomagenesis in males vs females individuals and in WT vs p53ΔAS/ΔAS Eμ-Myc males.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> The manuscript "comparative transcriptomics reveal a novel tardigrade specific DNA binding protein induced in response to ionizing radiation" aims to provide insights into the mediators and mechanisms underlying tardigrade radiation tolerance. The authors start by assessing the effect of ionizing radiation (IR) on the tardigrade lab species, H. exemplaris, as well as the ability of this organism to recover from this stress - specifically, they look at DNA double and single-strand breaks. They go on to characterize the response of H. exemplaris and two other tardigrade species to IR at the transcriptomic level. Excitingly, the authors identify a novel gene/protein called TDR1 (tardigrade DNA damage response protein 1). They carefully assess the induction of expression/enrichment of this gene/protein using a combination of transcriptomics and biochemistry - even going so far as to use a translational inhibitor to confirm the de novo production of this protein. TDR1 binds DNA in vitro and co-localizes with DNA in tardigrades.

Reverse genetics in tardigrades is difficult, thus the authors use a heterologous system (human cells) to express TDR1 in. They find that when transiently expressed TDR1 helps improve human cell resistance to IR.

This work is a masterclass in integrative biology incorporating a holistic set of approaches spanning next-gen sequencing, organismal biology, biochemistry, and cell biology. I find very little to critique in their experimental approaches.

Strengths:<br /> 1. Use of trans/interdisciplinary approaches ('omics, molecular biology, biochemistry, organismal biology)<br /> 2. Careful probing of TDR1 expression/enrichment<br /> 3. Identification of a completely novel protein seemingly involved in tardigrade radio-tolerance.<br /> 4. Use of multiple, diverse, tardigrade species of 'omics comparison.

Weaknesses:<br /> 1. No reverse genetics in tardigrades - all insights into TDR1 function from heterologous cell culture system.<br /> 2. Weak discussion of Dsup's role in preventing DNA damage in light of DNA damage levels measured in this manuscript.<br /> 3. Missing sequence data which is essential for making a complete review of the work.

Overall, I find this to be one of the more compelling papers on tardigrade stress-tolerance I have read. I believe there are points still that the authors should address, but I think the editor would do well to give the authors a chance to address these points as I find this manuscript highly insightful and novel.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary: Szathmary and colleagues explore the parabolic growth regime of replicator evolution. Parabolic growth occurs when nucleic acid strain separation is the rate-limiting step of the replication process which would have been the case for non-enzymatic replication of short oligonucleotide that could precede the emergence of ribozyme polymerases and helicases. The key result is that parabolic replication is conducive to the maintenance of genetic diversity, that is, the coexistence of numerous master sequences (the Gause principle does not apply). Another important finding is that there is no error threshold for parabolic replication except for the extreme case of zero fidelity.

Strengths:<br /> I find both the analytic and the numerical results to be quite convincing and well-described. The results of this work are potentially important because they reveal aspects of a realistic evolutionary scenario for the origin of replicators.

Weaknesses:<br /> There are no obvious technical weaknesses. It can be argued that the results represent an incremental advance because many aspects of parabolic replication have been explored previously (the relevant publications are properly cited). Obviously, the work is purely theoretical, experimental study of parabolic replication is due. In the opinion of this reviewer, though, these are understandable limitations that do not actually detract from the value of this work.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

In their manuscript, Arjun et al. investigate the role of the histone acetyltransferase Gcn5 in the control of drosophila blood cell homeostasis in the larval lymph gland. They use gcn5 zygotic mutants as well as targeted knock-down and over-expression of Gcn5 in various lymph gland populations to show that these modulations impact (in a rather haphazard manner) niche cell number, blood cell progenitor maintenance, plasmatocyte differentiation, crystal cell differentiation or DNA damage accumulation. Their results suggest that Gcn5 controls autophagy and they show that decreasing the expression of the autophagy machinery increases blood cell differentiation. Using drugs to modulate the mTOR pathway, they conclude that Gcn5 levels are regulated by mTOR but that the impact of this pathway on blood cell homeostasis can override Gcn5 function.

While the authors did a lot of experiments and good quantifications of the blood cell phenotypes, many results do not make much sense or do not bring valuable information about Gcn5 mode of action. Several conclusions of the manuscripts are not backed by solid data (e.g. that Gcn5 action is mediated by TFEB and the autophagy machinery) and different aspects of the literature are not well taken into consideration. Some results (such as the validation of the knockdown and overexpression of Gcn5) seem flawed. There are some concerns about the results obtained with gcn5 zygotic mutants and an interpretation of the phenotypes observed upon manipulation of Gcn5 expression in different cell types is missing.

Important revisions are needed to improve the quality of the manuscript and confirm the authors' findings.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:

This study describes all tangential neurons of the lobula plate (LOPs) of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Importantly, this is done in a complete manner, for the first time in any species. This means that for the first time, all neurons involved in transmitting wide-field optic flow information to the central brain are known. Exploiting known structure-function relations in these neurons (which are based on solid physiological data in different species of flies), the authors provide estimates of the physiological properties of all described neurons. Combined with transmitter predictions of these cells, this yields a full account of what information about wide-field motion is available to the central fly brain in order to derive behavioral commands from. The study goes one step further and includes anatomical descriptions and physiological property predictions for all major downstream target cells of LOPs.

Main strengths:

The paper is exceptional in three ways. First, it is the first comprehensive account of all tangential neurons of the lobula plate of an insect. This now provides the ground truth for similar studies in other insects. In particular, these results will allow neurons emerging in other species to be confidently described as novel/different from Drosophila, if they were not found in the current study. This is a major change from previously, when confidence in the non-existence of neuronal cell types in this system was impossible, as that system was not fully described.

Second, the rigorous prediction of physiological characteristics (flow-field encoding) in all anatomically described neurons provides a solid basis for system-wide modeling of optic flow encoding in Drosophila. Importantly, the presented physiological predictions include the downstream partner cells of the LOPs in the central brain, neurons for which only very few physiological descriptions exist, but which are essential for transforming optic flow input into behavioral outputs. This paper therefore opens a path towards closing the gap between sensory processing and behavior not only for a few identified and well-studied pathways, but for all wide-field motion processing that exists in a species.

Third, the connectomics work is not only based on one individual sample, but incorporates two EM volumes, analyzed with two different methods (manual tracing and auto segmentation/proofreading), using interhemispheric correspondence and inter-individual correspondence to validate the obtained neuron catalogue. Additionally, light microscopical data was used to validate the EM data. All of this provides exceptional levels of confidence in the presented results.

Main weaknesses:

While the authors compare their results with data from both larger flies and other work in Drosophila, a recent paper (Henning et al 2022) that presented novel data on the distribution of preferred motion directions in the fly lobula plate is not mentioned. This is unfortunate, as the claim of that paper is that the lobula plate contains six instead of four main tuning directions, both at the level of LOPs and T4/T5 input cells - a claim that could likely be directly confirmed or dismissed, or at least incorporated in the data presented in the current study. How would the flow-field predictions change if the data from Henning et al on T4 neurons was used as an input for the modeling rather than the classic four tuning directions?

While the authors nicely perform comparison to other fly species, a more general discussion of how the found cells relate to other insects, e.g. cells known from bees (e.g. Honkanen et al., 2023) or older work from locusts, could give the data more general relevance. While the comparison can likely not be done on a cell type level, given that the structure of the lobula complex is very different between those insects, the types of projections found and their physiologies, i.e. the overall patterns of how wide field motion is sent to the central brain, might be comparable and informative for highlighting general principles of motion processing.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

This study examined whether mitochondrial acyl-CoA thioesterase-2 (ACOT2) regulates mitochondrial matrix acyl-CoA levels. Acot2 deletion in murine skeletal muscle (SM) resulted in acyl-CoA build-up. When energy demand and pyruvate availability were elevated, a lack of ACOT2 activity promoted glucose oxidation. This preference for glucose over fatty acid oxidation was recapitulated in C2C12 myotubes with acute depletion of Acot2. In mice fed a high-fat diet, ACOT2 enabled the accretion of acyl-CoAs and ceramide derivatives in glycolytic SM, and this was associated with worse glucose homeostasis compared to when ACOT2 was absent. The authors suggest that ACOT2 supports CoASH availability to facilitate β-oxidation in glycolytic SM when lipid supply is modest. However, when lipid supply is high, ACOT2 enables acyl-CoA and lipid accumulation, CoASH sequestration, and poor glucose homeostasis. Thus, ACOT2 regulates matrix acyl-CoA concentration in glycolytic muscle, and its impact depends on lipid supply.

Based on the data provided in this study, the authors propose that ACOT2 regulates mitochondrial matrix acyl-CoA levels in white skeletal muscle to facilitate fatty acid oxidation β-oxidation. However, I do not believe the data supports this concept, since ACOT2 deletion actually increased fatty acid oxidation in the mitochondrial JO2 studies. In addition, there are some problems with the experimental data that the authors need to address. This includes the experimental conditions used to assess JO2 in the mitochondria, and not using Cre control mice.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

The authors focused on genetic variability in relation to insulin resistance. The used genetically different lines of mice and exposed them to the same diet. They found that genetic predisposition impacts the overall outcome of metabolic disturbances.

Reviewer #2 (Public Review):

The authors use a high-throughput sequencing-based enrichment assay to measure how individual amino acids substitutions in the Rep proteins of AAV change the production of AAV. The key experiment involved the creation of all possible single codon mutations of the AAV2 rep gene in a barcoded format, transfection of the library into HEK293T cells for production of AAV, and sequencing to see which rep variants were enriched in the viral particles produced from the library. As the library rep variants were flanked by inverted terminal repeats for packaging into viral particles, the authors could use high-throughput sequencing of the barcodes to determine how much each rep variant supported the production of AAV. The rep gene libraries were cleverly made through a cloning process that ensured each mutant was attached to an exactly known 20nt barcode included in each mutagenic oligo (and subsequently moved to the end of the library genes by another cloning step). This allowed the authors to confidently observe nearly all rep variants in their experiments, resulting in a comprehensive map between Rep protein variants and AAV production. The overall map should act as a useful guide for AAV engineering. Not only did certain variants improve AAV production by ~2-fold and show generality across AAV capsid serotypes, the map might be used to predict greater effects through combinations of mutations, especially if augmented by natural evolutionary datasets and statistical learning.

In interpreting the results of this study, the reader should bear in mind that what has been measured and validated in high throughput is the production of intact genome-containing AAVs. The authors also successfully show transduction for selected high production variants. This is important as the efficiency by which an AAV preparations transduce cells is most relevant property for gene therapy.

Overall, this is a well-executed and well-analyzed study. The results support the conclusions and claims of the work. I see this work as a useful resource for engineering recombinant AAVs to increase their production, which should have broad impact as the use of AAVs in gene therapy grows.

Reviewer #2 (Public Review):

Summary:

In this manuscript Nie et al investigate the effect of PARG KO and PARG inhibition (PARGi) on pADPR, DNA damage, cell viability and synthetic lethal interactions in HEK293A and Hela cells. Surprisingly, the authors report that PARG KO cells are sensitive to PARGi and show higher pADPR levels than PARG KO cells, which is abrogated upon deletion or inhibition of PARP1/PARP2. The authors explain the sensitivity of PARG KO to PARGi through incomplete PARG depletion and demonstrate complete loss of PARG activity when incomplete PARG KO cells are transfected with additional gRNAs in the presence of PARPi. Furthermore, the authors show that the sensitivity of PARG KO cells to PARGi is not caused by NAD depletion but by S-phase accumulation of pADPR on chromatin coming from unligated Okazaki fragments, which are recognized and bound by PARP1. Consistently, PARG KO or PARG inhibition show synthetic lethality with Pol beta, which is required for Okazaki fragment maturation. PARG expression levels in ovarian cancer cell lines correlate negatively with their sensitivity to PARGi.

Strengths:

The authors show that PARG is essential for removing ADP-ribosylation in S-phase.

Weaknesses:

1) This begs the question as to the relevant substrates of PARG in S-phase, which could be addressed, for example, by analysing PARylated proteins associated with replication forks in PARG-depleted cells (EdU pulldown and Af1521 enrichment followed by mass spectrometry).<br /> 2) The results showing the generation of a full PARG KO should be moved to the beginning of the Results section, right after the first Results chapter (PARG depletion leads to drastic sensitivity to PARGi), otherwise the reader is left to wonder how PARG KO cells can be sensitive to PARGi when there should be presumably no PARG present.<br /> 3) Please indicate in the first figure which isoforms were targeted with gRNAs, given that there are 5 PARG isoforms. You should also highlight that the PARG antibody only recognizes the largest isoform, which is clearly absent in your PARG KO, but other isoforms may still be produced, depending on where the cleavage sites were located.<br /> 4) FACS data need to be quantified. Scatter plots can be moved to Supplementary while quantification histograms with statistical analysis should be placed in the main figures.<br /> 5) All colony formation assays should be quantified and sensitivity plots should be shown next to example plates.<br /> 6) Please indicate how many times each experiment was performed independently and include statistical analysis.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Hu et al. performed sc-RNA-seq analyses of kidney cells with or without virus infection, vaccines, and vaccines+virus infections from pooled adult zebrafish. They compared within these experimental groups as well as kidney vs spleen. Their analyses identified expected populations but also revealed new hematopoietic stem/progenitor cell (HSPC), even in the spleen. Their analyses show that HSPCs in the kidney can respond to virus infection differentially and can be trained to recognize the same infection and argue that zebrafish kidney can serve as a secondary immune organ. The findings are important and interesting. The manuscript is well written and a pleasure to read. However, there are several issues with their figure presentation and figure qualities, as well as the lack of clarity in some of figure legends. Some of the data presentation can be improved for better clarity. It is also important to outline what is conserved and what is unique for fish.

Major concerns:

1. The visualization for several figure panels is very poor. Please provide high resolution images and larger font sizes for gene list or Y and X axis labels. This includes Figure 1B, Figure 1-figure supplement 2, Figure 2B-2C, 3A-3D, 4F, 5B, 6G, Figure 6-figure supplement 1B, Figure 6-figure supplement 2. Figure 7B, 8C-8E, Figure 8-figure supplement 1., 10F, 10G-10J, Figure 10-figure supplement 1.<br /> 2. What are the figures at the end of the manuscript without any figure legends?<br /> 3. It would be better to use a Table to organize the gene signatures that define each unique population of immune cells such as T, B, NK, etc.<br /> 4. What are the similarities for HSPC and immune cell populations between fish and man based on this research? It is better to form a table to compare and discuss.<br /> 5. It is highly likely that sex and age could be the biological variation for how HSPC responds to virus infections and vaccination. The author should clearly state the fish sex and age from their samples and discuss their results taking into consideration of these variations.<br /> 6. The authors claim that the spleen and kidney share HSPCs. However, their data did not demonstrate this result clearly in Figure 4A. Perhaps they should use different color to make the overlay becoming more obvious? Or include a table to show which HSPCs are shared between the kidney and spleen? Are they sure if these are just HSPCs seeding the spleen to differentiate into B cells or other immune cells?

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> This useful work provides insight into agonist binding to muscle nicotinic receptors. The authors want to understand the fundamental steps in ligand binding to muscle nicotinic receptors using computational methods. The study builds on a large basis of empirical studies of the various states involved in receptor activation. However, the evidence supporting the conclusions is incomplete, because little support is available for the starting structures that are derived from ligand docking. This work is a useful starting point for more detailed work on ligand binding to this important class of receptors.

Strengths:<br /> The strengths include the number of ligands tried, and the relation to the mature analysis of the receptor function.

Weaknesses:<br /> The weaknesses are the brevity of the simulations, the concomitant lack of scope of the simulations, the lack of depth in the analysis, and the incomplete relation to other relevant work.

Reviewer #3 (Public Review):

Summary:

In the manuscript "Ebola Virus Sequesters IRF3 in Viral Inclusion bodies to Evade Host Antiviral Immunity " by Lin Zhu et al, the authors elucidated an evasion mechanism by which EBOV evades host innate immunity.

Strengths:

Using data from immunofluorescence analysis, TEM and Western Blot, the authors conclude that Ebola virus VP35 protein evades host antiviral immunity by interacting with STING to sequester IRF3 into IBs and inhibit type-I interferon production.

Weaknesses:

Similar mechanisms have already been found in other viruses, such as SFTSV, RSV and so on. In addition, the presented results are also relatively rough, and the mechanism explained is not deep enough, so this story is not innovative

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Bian et al showed that biomarker-informed PhenoAgeAccel was consistently related to an increased risk of site-specific cancer and overall cancer within and across genetic risk groups. The results showed that PhenoAgeAccel and genetic liability of a bunch of cancers serve as productive tools to facilitate the identification of cancer-susceptible individuals under an additive model. People with a high genetic risk for cancer may benefit from PhenoAgeAccel-informed interventions.

As the authors pointed out, the large sample size, the prospective design UK Biobank study, and the effective application of PhenoAgeAccel in predicting the risk of overall cancer are the major strengths of the study. Meanwhile, the CPRS seems to be a solid and comprehensive score based on incidence-weighted site-specific polygenic risk scores across 20 well-powered GWAS for cancers.

It wouldn't be very surprising to identify the association between PhenoAgeAccel and cancer risk, since the PhenoAgeAccel was constructed as a predictor for mortality which attributed a lot to cancer. Although cancer is an essential mediator for the association, sensitivity analyses using cancer-free mortality may provide an additional angle. It would be interesting to see, to what extent, PhenoAgeAccel could be reversed by environmental or lifestyle factors. G by E for PhenoAgeAccel might be worth a try.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

The objective of this study was to investigate the influence of the C. trachomatis effector Cdu1 on the ubiquitination of proteins in infected host cells and its correlation with the previously identified role of Cdu1 in facilitating Golgi distribution around the Chlamydia inclusion.

To achieve this, the authors created a cdu1-null mutant in C. trachomatis and employed proteomics to analyze ubiquitinated proteins in cells infected with Cdu1-producing and Cdu1-deficient chlamydiae, comparing them to mock-infected cells. The results revealed that, among the proteins specifically ubiquitinated after infection with Cdu1-deficient chlamydiae, three were other C. trachomatis effectors (InaC, IpaM, and CTL0480), members of a large family of Chlamydia effectors (Incs) that insert in the inclusion membrane.

Subsequently, the authors focused on understanding how Cdu1 shields InaC, IpaM, and CTL0480 from ubiquitination and the implications of this protection for the protein levels and functions of these Incs during infection. Data is presented showing that Cdu1 can bind to InaC, IpaM, and CTL0480, and protects these Incs and itself from ubiquitination and proteasomal degradation. This protective role of Cdu1 is dependent on its acetylation, but not on its deubiquitinating activity. Host cells infected by the cdu1 null mutant displayed defects resembling those observed in cells infected by inaC, ipaM, or ctl0480 null mutants.

Additionally, it was previously established that CTL0480 inhibits a chlamydial egress pathway involving the extrusion of the inclusion. This study now revealed that InaC and IpaM also play a role in promoting the extrusion of C. trachomatis inclusion, and the cdu1 null mutant exhibited a defect in this process. This leads to the title's conclusion that Cdu1 regulates chlamydial exit from host cells by safeguarding specific C. trachomatis effectors from degradation.

In summary, this work is excellent and impressive, both technically and conceptually, providing mechanistic insights into the action of Cdu1. The data provides convincing support for the proposed model, illustrating how the acetylation activity of Cdu1 protects itself and three Incs (InaC, IpaM, and CTL0480) from degradation. While the study indicates that the observed phenotypes in cells infected by the cdu1 null mutant are linked to reduced levels of InaC, IpaM, and CTL0480, these Incs are still detectable in cells infected by the cdu1 null mutant. Even if very unlikely, this leaves room for the possibility that Cdu1 directly promotes assembly of F-actin and Golgi repositioning around the inclusion, MYPT1 recruitment to the inclusion, and extrusion of the inclusion. Nevertheless, the major significance of this work lies in the integration of proteomics and chlamydial genetics to unveil a unique mechanism in which one effector controls the levels of other effectors, emphasizing the intricate relationships among bacterial effectors injected into host cells.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

This article by Navratna et al. reports the first structure of human HGSNAT in an acetyl-CoA-bound state. Through careful structural analysis, the authors propose potential reasons why certain human mutations lead to lysosomal storage disorders and outline a catalytic mechanism. The structural data are of good quality, and the manuscript is clearly written. This study represents an important step toward understanding the mechanism of HGSNAT and is valuable to the field. I have the following suggestions:

1. The authors should characterize whether the purified protein is active. Otherwise, how does one know if the detergent used maintains the protein in a biologically relevant state? The authors should at least attempt to do so. If these prove to be challenging, at the very least, the authors should try a cell-based assay to demonstrate that the GFP tag does not interfere with the function.

2. In Figure 5, the authors present a detailed schematic of the catalytic cycle, which I find to be too speculative. There is no evidence to suggest that this enzyme undergoes isomerization, similar to a transporter, between open-to-lumen and open-to-cytosol states. Could it not simply involve some movements of side chains to complete the acetyl transfer?

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

In this paper, the authors developed an image analysis pipeline to automatically identify individual ‎‎neurons within a population of fluorescently tagged neurons. This application is optimized to deal with ‎‎multi-cell analysis and builds on a previous software version, developed by the same team, to resolve ‎‎individual neurons from whole-brain imaging stacks. Using advanced statistical approaches and ‎‎several heuristics tailored for C. elegans anatomy, the method successfully identifies individual ‎‎neurons with a fairly high accuracy. Thus, while specific to C. elegans, this method can ‎become ‎instrumental for a variety of research directions such as in-vivo single-cell gene expression ‎analysis ‎and calcium-based neural activity studies.‎

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

In this study, the authors examined the putative functions of hypothalamic groups identifiable through Foxb1 expression, namely the parvofox Foxb1 of the LHA and the PMd Foxb1, emphasizing innate defensive responses. First, they reported that chemogenetic activation of Foxb1hypothalamic cell groups led to tachypnea. The authors tend to attribute this effect to the activation of hM3Dq expressed in the parvofox Foxb1 but did not rule out the participation of the PMd Foxb1 cell group, which may as well have expressed hM3Dq, particularly considering the large volume (200 nl) of the viral construct injected. Notably, the activation of the Foxb1hypothalamic cell groups in this experiment did not alter the gross locomotor activity, such as time spent immobile state. Thus, this contrasts with the authors' finding on the optogenetic activation of the Foxb1hypothalamic fibers projecting to the dorsolateral PAG. In the second experiment, the authors applied optogenetic ChR2-mediated excitation of the Foxb1+ cell bodies' axonal endings in the dlPAG, leading to freezing and, in a few cases, bradycardia. The effective site to evoke freezing was the rostral PAGdl, and fibers positioned either ventral or caudal to this target had no response. Considering the pattern of Foxb1hypothalamic cell groups projection to the PAG, the fibers projecting to the rostral PAGdl are likely to arise from the PMd Foxb1 cell group and not from the parvofox Foxb1 of the LHA. Here, it is important to consider that activation of PMd CCK cell group, which consists of around 90% of the PMd cells, evokes escape, not freezing. According to the present findings, a specific population of PMd Foxb1 cells may be involved in producing freezing. In addition, only a few of the animals with correct fiber placement presented sudden onset of bradycardia in response to the photostimulation. Considering the authors' findings, the Foxb1+ hypothalamic groups are likely to mediate behavioral responses related to innate defensive responses, where the parvofox Foxb1 of the LHA would be involved in promoting tachypnea and the PMd Foxb1group in mediating freezing and bradycardia. These findings are exciting, and, at this point, they need to be tested in a scenario of actual exposure to a natural predator.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

This study investigates the underlying mechanisms of information-seeking in infancy. Eight-month-old Dutch infants were tested in a screen-based eye-tracking task in which one of two geometrical shape cues (differing in their shape and motion) either announced the location of an upcoming reward cartoon (informative) or not (non-informative). The authors measured the infants' pupil size before the cartoon appeared. Infants showed smaller pupil sizes when presented with the informative cue as compared to the noninformative cue. The decrease in pupil size in the informative condition emerged over the course of trials whereas infants' pupil size remained unchanged in the noninformative condition. The authors interpret their findings as supportive evidence of statistical learning and generalization processes organizing infants' information-seeking.

It was a pleasure to read the paper and I think the study makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of information-seeking in infancy. The manuscript is very well written and the study is cleverly designed. My following comments are based on my reading of the manuscript and the supplemental materials. It should be noted that evaluating the details of the statistical procedure the authors used lies outside my expertise. The same applies to some decisions of the authors related to pre-processing and filtering the pupil data. I very much appreciate that the authors shared all their raw data and analysis scripts openly accessible on the Open Science Framework. The study was unfortunately not preregistered, making it difficult to trace when in the study process certain decisions or assumptions were made.

My two main concerns relate to the conceptualization and definition of information-seeking and the proposed speed of the mechanisms explaining infants' behavior. I outline my general comments below before listing some more concrete issues.

1) While reading the manuscript, I was sometimes confused about what the authors refer to when talking about information-seeking - both in terms of the broader conceptualization of the phenomenon as well as when referring to their own study. What information are infants seeking? The informative value of the cue shape in terms of their motion (because it carries information about the location of a rewarding animation)? Or is the target (the rewarding video) the information being sought? From how the study is set up, I assume the authors refer mainly to the first aspect, but I think the manuscript would benefit from some clearer distinctions and definitions of terms.

More specifically, I think it could help if the authors would specify the different aspects involved in information-seeking in the introduction (e.g., seeking information "directly", seeking cues guiding them towards information, etc.). Secondly, it would help if they would sharpen their (already in some parts existing) definitions for their study and then keep consistent with their definitions throughout the methods, results, and discussion. Is the cue the information being sought or the "behavior" (motion) of the cue? Or is the target animation the information being sought and guided via the cueing?

2) Speed of the generalization process:<br /> From my understanding of the study design, the shape of the geometrical shape gains informative value over time (serving as an informative cue) and the *motion* of the shape is the actual informative or non-informative visual cue in that it either reliably highlights the actual target region (or all regions). In the generalization trials, only the shape was manipulated while the motion aspect remained consistent with the previous trials. Based on infants' behavior across learning and generalization trials, the authors make an argument about two distinct processes taking place: a slower allowing to learn where to find info and a faster generalization process. Apologies if I missed something, but given that the motion remains consistent, it's maybe not surprising that the generalization trials are "faster"? Maybe the generalization process would have been slower if not only the shape had changed but if also a novel informative motion had been introduced. Also, it would be helpful if the authors could clarify what they mean by the statistical learning process being more "data-hungry" (line 274).

3) I would find it very helpful if the authors would discuss statistical learning and information-seeking processes from other possible mechanisms such as reward learning mechanisms. For example, the authors use a "rewarding" (not informative) stimulus as the target-wouldn't it be possible that the results can be also explained by reinforcement learning processes? Relatedly, in line 396 they write that they used TD learning to predict whether "information will be delivered" and contrast this with the approach being used to predict whether a reward will be delivered. But in their study reward was being delivered, too (in the form of the target), in addition to the informative motion of the cue.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> This manuscript uses optical coherence tomography (OCT) to visualize tissue microstructures about 1-2 mm under the finger pad skin surface. Their geometric features are tracked and used to generate tissue strains upon skin surface indentation by a series of transparent stimuli both normal and tangential to the surface. Then movements of the stratum corneum and the upper portion of the viable epidermis are evaluated. Based upon this data, across a number of participants and ridges, around 300 in total, the findings report upon particular movements of these tissue microstructures in various loading states. A better understanding of the mechanics of the skin microstructures is important to understand how surface forces propagate toward the locations of mechanoreceptive end organs, which lie near the edge of the epidermis and dermis, from which tactile responses of at least two peripheral afferents originate. Indeed, the microstructures of the skin are likely to be important in shaping how neural afferents respond and enhance their sensitivity, receptive field characteristics, etc.

Strengths:<br /> The use of OCT in the context of analyzing the movements of skin microstructures is novel. Also novel and powerful is the use of distinct loading cases, e.g., normal, tangential, and stimulus features, e.g., edges, and curves. I am unaware of other empirical visualization studies of this sort. They are state-of-the-art in this field. Moreover, in addition to the empirical imaging observations, strain vectors in the tissues are calculated over time.

Weaknesses:<br /> The interpretation of the results and their framing relative to the overall hypotheses/questions and prior works could be articulated more clearly. In particular, the major findings of the manuscript are in newly describing a central concept regarding "ridge flanks," but such structures are neither anatomically nor mechanistically defined in a clear fashion. For example, "... it appears that the primary components of ridge deformation and, potentially, neural responses are deformations of the ridge flanks and their relative movement, rather than overall bending of the ridges themselves." From an anatomical perspective, I think what the authors mean by "ridge flanks" is a differential in strain from one lateral side of a papillary ridge to the other. But is it unclear what about the continuous layers of tissue would cause such behaviors. Perhaps a sweat duct or some other structure (not visible to OCT) would subdivide the "flanks" of a papillary ridge somehow? If not due to particular anatomy, then is the importance of the "ridge flank" due to a mechanistic phenomenon of some sort? Given that the findings of the manuscript center upon the introduction of this new concept, I think a greater effort should be made to define what exactly are the "ridge flanks." It is clear from the results, especially the sliding case, that there is something important that the manuscript is getting at with this concept.

The OCT used herein cannot visualize deep and fully into what the manuscript refers to as a "ridge" (note others have previously broken apart this concept apart into "papillary", "intermediate" and "limiting" ridges) near locations of the mechanoreceptive end organs lie at the epidermal-dermal border. Therefore, the OCT must make inferences about the movements of these deeper tissues, but cannot see them directly, and it is the movements of these deeper tissues that are likely driving the intricacies of neural firing. Note the word "ridge" is used often in the manuscript's abstract, introduction, and discussion but the definition in Fig. 1 and elsewhere differs in important ways from prior works of Cauna (expert in anatomy). Therefore, the manuscript should clarify if "ridge" refers to the papillary ridge (visible at the exterior of the skin), intermediate ridge (defined by Cauna as what the authors refer to as the primary ridge), and limiting ridge (defined by Cauna as what the authors refer to as the secondary ridge). What the authors really mean (I think) is some combination of the papillary and intermediate ridge structures, but not the full intermediate ridge. The manuscript acknowledges this in the "Limitations and future work" section, stating that these ridges cannot be resolved. This is important because the manuscript is oriented toward tracking this structure. It sets up the narrative and hypotheses to evaluate the prior works of Cauna, Gerling, Swensson, and others who all directly addressed the movement of this anatomical feature which is key to understanding ultimately how stresses at these locations might move the peripheral end organs (i.e., Merkel cells, Meissner corpuscles).

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

This study aims to identify gene expression differences exclusively caused by cis-regulatory genetic changes by utilizing hybrid cell lines derived from human and chimpanzee. While previous attempts have focused on specific tissues, this study expands the comparison to six different tissues to investigate tissue specificity and derive insights into the evolution of gene expression.

One notable strength of this work lies in the use of composite cell lines, enabling a comparison of gene expression between human and chimpanzee within the same nucleus and shared trans factors environment. However, a potential weakness of the methodology is the use of bulk RNA-seq in diverse tissues, which limits the ability to determine cell-type-specific gene expression and chromatin accessibility regions. Their approach, using hybrid lines, naturally accounts for cell type heterogeneity avoiding the risk of false positives introduced by the otherwise confounding differences in cell type abundances between species, albeit the challenge of false negatives remains an issue. The authors now dully acknowledge this limitation in the manuscript.

Another concern is the use of two replicates derived from the same pair of individuals. While the authors produced cell lines from two pairs of individuals in a previous study (Agloglia et al., 2021). The reason for this experimental design is cost limitations. The authors now acknowledge that the use of replicates could enhance the ability to detect "more" species-specific changes in expression and chromatin accessibility. I would emphasize that replicates would increase robustness to the present findings, given that they are derived from a single pair of individuals.

Furthermore, the study offers the opportunity to relate inter-species differences to trends in molecular evolution. The authors discovered that expression variance and haploinsufficiency score do not fully account for the enrichment of divergence in cell-type-specific genes. The reviewer suggested exploring this further by incorporating external datasets that bin genes based on interindividual transcriptomics variation as a measure of extant transcriptomics constraint (e.g., GTEx reanalysis by Garcia-Perez et al., 2023 - PMID: 36777183). The authors considered this question to be out of the scope of the paper, yet in my opinion this would enhance one of the main findings of this study.

Additionally, stratifying sequence conservation on ASCA regions, which exhibit similar enrichment of cell-type-specific features, using the Zoonomia data mentioned also in the text (Andrews et al., 2023 -- PMID: 37104580) could provide valuable insights. While the author did not find Zoonomia Phastcons values available, they used PhastCons derived from a 470-way alignment of mammals. I commend the authors for their diligent efforts, which undoubtedly bolster their findings that an enrichment in ASCA is evident across all levels of sequence conservation. However, this recent analysis indicates the presence of a potential relationship between sequence conservation and ASCA. It may be advantageous to consider evaluating more quantile subdivisions of maxZ values and pPhastCons values, with the inclusion of these results in the supplementary materials. This approach would be preferable, even if the precise reasons behind the observed discrepancy are not fully elucidated.

Another potential strength of this study is the identification of specific cases of paired allele-specific expression (ASE) and allele-specific chromatin accessibility (ASCA) with biological significance. Prioritizing specific variants remains a challenge, and the authors apply a machine learning approach to identify potential causative variants that disrupt binding sites in two examples (FABP7 and GAD1 in motor neurons). However, additional work is needed to convincingly demonstrate the functionality of these selected variants. Strengthening this section with additional validation of ASE, ASCA, and the specific putative causal variants identified would enhance the overall robustness of the paper. The authors have opted to defer these validations to future studies.

Additionally, the authors support the selected ASE-ASCA pairs by examining external datasets of adult brain comparative genomics (Ma et al., 2022) and organoids (Kanton et al., 2019). While these resources are valuable for comparing observed species biases, the analysis is not systematic, even for the two selected genes. For example, it would be beneficial to investigate if FABP7 exhibits species bias in any cell type in Kanton et al.'s organoids or if GAD1 is species-biased in adult primate brains from Ma et al. Comparing these datasets with the present study, along with the Agoglia et al. reference, would provide a more comprehensive perspective. In the revised version of the manuscript the authors have evaluated the expression of GAD1 in Ma et al, and FABP7 in Sousa et al 2017. For instance, GAD1 show cell type specific species biases in the later. The authors opted for not showing this in the manuscript, However, it remains unclear why certain datasets were favored over others, or why FABP7 should not be evaluated in Kanton et al.

The use of the term "human-derived" in ASE and ASCA has now been avoided.

Finally, throughout the paper, the authors refer to "hybrid cell lines." It has been suggested to use the term "composite cell lines" instead to address potential societal concerns associated with the term "hybrid," which some may associate with reproductive relationships (Pavlovic et al., 2022 -- PMID: 35082442). The authors have presented an eloquent and persuasive explanation that I found to be highly informative.

Joint Public Review:

In this manuscript, the authors introduced an explicit ion model using the coarse-grained modelling approach to model the interactions between nucleosomes and evaluate their effects on chromatin organization. The strength of this method lies in the explicit representation of counterions, especially divalent ions, which are notoriously difficult to model. To achieve their aims and validate the accuracy of the model, the authors conducted coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations and compared predicted values to the experimental values of the binding energies of protein-DNA complexes and the free energy profile of nucleosomal DNA unwinding and inter-nucleosome binding. Additionally, the authors employed umbrella sampling simulations to further validate their model, reproducing experimentally measured sedimentation coefficients of chromatin under varying salt concentrations of monovalent and divalent ions.

The significance of this study lies in the authors' coarse-grained model which can efficiently capture the conformational sampling of molecules while maintaining a low computational cost. The model reproduces the scale and, in some cases, the shape of the experimental free energy profile for specific molecule interactions, particularly inter-nucleosome interactions. Additionally, the authors' method resolves certain experimental discrepancies related to determining the strength of inter-nucleosomal interactions. Furthermore, the results from this study support the crucial role of intrinsic physicochemical interactions in governing chromatin organization within the nucleus.

The authors have successfully addressed the majority of my key concerns. I appreciate the clarification regarding the parameterization from Pablo's lab and the addition of comparisons of energy profiles as a function of inter-nucleosome distances.

However, the statement "The agreement is evident" may not sufficiently capture the essence of Figure S4, as there is a shortage of substantial agreement. The authors rightly acknowledge it but should delineate the nature of the observed discrepancies.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Continuous attractor networks endowed with some sort of adaptation in the dynamics, whether that be through synaptic depression or firing rate adaptation, are fast becoming the leading candidate models to explain many aspects of hippocampal place cell dynamics, from hippocampal replay during immobility to theta sequences during run. Here, the authors show that a continuous attractor network endowed with spike frequency adaptation and subject to feedforward external inputs is able to account for several previously unaccounted aspects of theta sequences, including (1) sequences that move both forwards and backwards, (2) sequences that alternate between two arms of a T-maze, (3) speed modulation of place cell firing frequency, and (4) the persistence of phase information across hippocampal inactivations.

I think the main result of the paper (findings (1) and (2)) are likely to be of interest to the hippocampal community, as well as to the wider community interested in mechanisms of neural sequences. In addition, the manuscript is generally well written and the analytics are impressive. However, several issues should be addressed, which I outline below.

Major comments:

In real data, population firing rate is strongly modulated by theta (i.e., cells collectively prefer a certain phase of theta - see review paper Buzsaki, 2002) and largely oscillates at theta frequency during run. With respect to this cyclical firing rate, theta sweeps resemble "Nike" check marks, with the sweep backwards preceding the sweep forwards within each cycle before the activity is quenched at the end of the cycle. I am concerned that (1) the summed population firing rate of the model does not oscillate at theta frequency, and (2) as the authors state, the oscillatory tracking state must begin with a forward sweep. With regards to (1), can the authors show theta phase spike preference plots for the population to see if they match data? With regards to (2), can the authors show what happens if the bump is made to sweep backwards first, as it appears to do within each cycle?

I could not find the width of the external input mentioned anywhere in the text or in the table of parameters. The implication is that it is unclear to me whether, during the oscillatory tracking state, the external input is large compared to the size of the bump, so that the bump lives within a window circumscribed by the external input and so bounces off the interior walls of the input during the oscillatory tracking phase, or whether the bump is continuously pulled back and forth by the external input, in which case it could be comparable to the size of the bump. My guess based on Fig 2c is that it is the latter. Please clarify and comment.

I would argue that the "constant cycling" of theta sweeps down the arms of a T-maze was roughly predicted by Romani & Tsodyks, 2015, Figure 7. While their cycling spans several theta cycles, it nonetheless alternates by a similar mechanism, in that adaptation (in this case synaptic depression) prevents the subsequent sweep of activity from taking the same arm as the previous sweep. I believe the authors should cite this model in this context and consider the fact that both synaptic depression and spike frequency adaptation are both possible mechanisms for this phenomenon. But I certainly give the authors credit for showing how this constant cycling can occur across individual theta cycles.

The authors make an unsubstantiated claim in the paragraph beginning with line 413 that the Tsodyks and Romani (2015) model could not account for forwards and backwards sweeps. Both the firing rate adaptation and synaptic depression are symmetry breaking models that should in theory be able to push sweeps of activity in both directions, so it is far from obvious to me that both forward and backward sweeps are not possible in the Tsodyks and Romani model. The authors should either prove that this is the case (with theory or simulation) or excise this statement from the manuscript.

The section on the speed dependence of theta (starting with line 327) was very hard to understand. Can the authors show a more graphical explanation of the phenomenon? Perhaps a version of Fig 2f for slow and fast speeds, and point out that cells in the latter case fire with higher frequency than in the former?

I had a hard time understanding how the Zugaro et al., (2005) hippocampal inactivation experiment was accounted for by the model. My intuition is that while the bump position is determined partially by the location of the external input, it is also determined by the immediate history of the bump dynamics as computed via the local dynamics within the hippocampus (recurrent dynamics and spike rate adaptation). So that if the hippocampus is inactivated for an arbitrary length of time, there is nothing to keep track of where the bump should be when the activity comes back on line. Can the authors please explain more how the model accounts for this?

Can the authors comment on why the sweep lengths oscillate in the bottom panel of Fig 5b during starting at time 0.5 seconds before crossing the choice point of the T-maze? Is this oscillation in sweep length another prediction of the model? If so, it should definitely be remarked upon and included in the discussion section.

Perhaps I missed this, but I'm curious whether the authors have considered what factors might modulate the adaptation strength. In particular, might rat speed modulate adaptation strength? If so, would have interesting predictions for theta sequences at low vs high speeds.

I think the paper has a number of predictions that would be especially interesting to experimentalists but are sort of scattered throughout the manuscript. It would be beneficial to have them listed more prominently in a separate section in the discussion. This should include (1) a prediction that the bump height in the forward direction should be higher than in the backward direction, (2) predictions about bimodal and unimodal cells starting with line 366, (3) prediction of another possible kind of theta cycling, this time in the form of sweep length (see comment above), etc.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

The study isolated extracellular vesicles (EV) from healthy controls (HCs) and Parkinson patients (PwP), using plasma from the venous blood of non-fasting people. Such EVs were characterized and validated by the presence of markers, their size, and their morphology. The main aim of the manuscript is to correlate the presence of synaptic proteins, namely SNAP-25, GAP-43, and SYNAPTOTAGMIN-1, normalized with HSP70, with the clinical progression of PwP. Changes in synaptic proteins have been documented in the CSF of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's patients. The demographics of participants are adequately presented. One important limiting, as well as puzzling aspect, is the fact that authors did not find differences between groups at the beginning of the study nor after one year, after age and sex adjustment.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> The authors used several zebrafish reporter lines to demonstrate the presence, regional distribution, and transcriptional profile of the immune cells in adult zebrafish brains. They identified DC-like cells distinct from microglia or other macrophages, resembling murine cDC1s. Analysis of different mutants further revealed that this DC population was dependent on Irf8, Batf3, and Csf1rb, but did not rely on Csf1ra.

Strengths:<br /> It is an elegantly designed study providing compelling evidence for further heterogeneity among brain mononuclear phagocytes in zebrafish, consisting of microglia, macrophages, and DC-like cells. This will provide a better understanding of the immune landscape in the zebrafish brain and will help to better distinguish the different cell types from microglia, and to assign specific functions.

Weaknesses:<br /> While scRNA-seq data clearly revealed different subsets of microglia, macrophages, and DCs in the brain, it remains somewhat challenging to distinguish DC-like cells from P2ry12- macrophages by immunohistochemistry or flow cytometry.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> This is a detailed description of the role of PKCδ in Drosophila learning and memory. The work is based on a previous study (Placais et al. 2017) that has already shown that for the establishment of long-term memory, the repetitive activity of MP1 dopaminergic neurons via the dopamine receptor DAMB is essential to increase mitochondrial energy flux in the mushroom body.

In this paper, the role of PKCδ is now introduced. PKCδ is a molecular link between the dopaminergic system and the mitochondrial pyruvate metabolism of mushroom body Kenyon cells. For this purpose, the authors establish a genetically encoded FRET-based fluorescent reporter of PKCδ-specific activity, δCKAR.

Strengths:<br /> This is a thorough study of the long-term memory of Drosophila. The work is based on the extensive, high-quality experience of the senior authors. This is particularly evident in the convincing use of behavioral assays and imaging techniques to differentiate and explore various memory phases in Drosophila. The study also establishes a new reporter to measure the activity of PKCδ - the focus of this study - in behaving animals. The authors also elucidate how recurrent spaced training sessions initiate a molecular gating mechanism, linking a dopaminergic punishment signal with the regulation of mitochondrial pyruvate metabolism. This advancement will enable a more precise molecular distinction of various memory phases and a deeper comprehension of their formation in the future.

Weaknesses:<br /> Apart from a few minor technical issues, such as the not entirely convincing visualisation of the localisation of a PKCδ reporter in the mitochondria, there are no major weaknesses. Likewise, the scientific classification of the results seems appropriate, although a somewhat more extensive discussion in relation to Drosophila would have been desirable.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> This manuscript reports the effects of a heterozygous mutation in the KCNT1 potassium channels on the properties of ion currents and the firing behavior of excitatory and inhibitory neurons in the cortex of mice expressing KCNT1-Y777H. In humans, this mutation as well as multiple other heterozygotic mutations produce very severe early-onset seizures and produce a major disruption of all intellectual function. In contrast, in mice, this heterozygous mutation appears to have no behavioral phenotype or any increased propensity to seizures. A relevant phenotype is, however, evident in mice with the homozygous mutation, and the authors have previously published the results of similar experiments with the homozygotes. As perhaps expected, the neuronal effects of the heterozygous mutation presented in this manuscript are generally similar but markedly smaller than the previously published findings on homozygotes. There are, however, some interesting differences, particularly on PV+ interneurons, which appear to be more excitable than wild type in the heterozygotes but more excitable in the heterozygotes. This raises the interesting question (which could be more explicitly discussed by the authors) as to whether the reported changes represent homeostatic events that suppress the seizure phenotype in the mouse heterozygotes or simply changes in excitability that do not reach the threshold for behavioral outcomes.

Strengths and Weaknesses:<br /> 1) The authors find that the heterozygous mutation in PV+ interneurons increases their excitability, a result that is opposite from their previous observation in neurons with the corresponding homozygous mutation. They propose that this results from the selective upregulation of a persistent sodium current INaP in the PV+ interneurons. While the observations are very interesting, there are three issues concerning this interpretation that should be addressed:<br /> A) The protocol for measuring the INaP current could potentially lead to results that could be (mis)interpreted in different ways in different cells. First, neither K currents nor Ca currents are blocked in these experiments. Instead, TTX is applied to the cells relatively rapidly (within 1 second) and the ramp protocol is applied immediately thereafter. It is stated that, at this time, Na currents and INaP are fully blocked but that any effects on Na-activated K currents are minimal. In theory, this would allow the pre- to post-difference current to represent a relatively uncontaminated INaP. This would, however, only work if activation of KNa currents following Na entry is very slow, taking many seconds. A good deal of literature has suggested that the kinetics of activation of KNa currents by Na influx vary substantially between cell types, such that single action potentials and single excitatory synaptic events rapidly evoke KNa currents in some cell types. This is, of course, much faster than the time of TTX application. Most importantly, the kinetics of KNa activation may be different in different neuronal types, which would lead to errors that could produce different estimates of INaP in PV+ interneurons vs other cell types.<br /> B) As the authors recognize, INaP current provides a major source of cytoplasmic sodium ions for the activation. An expected outcome of increased INaP is, therefore, further activation of KNa currents, rather than a compensatory increase in an inward current that counteracts the increase in KNa currents, as is suggested in the discussion.<br /> C) Numerical simulations, in general, provide a very useful way to evaluate the significance of experimental findings. Nevertheless, while the in-silico modeling suggests that increases in INaP can increase firing rate in models of PV+ neurons, there is as yet insufficient information on the relative locations of the INaP channels and the kinetics of sodium transfer to KNa channels to evaluate the validity of this specific model.

2) The greatest effect of TTX application would be expected to be the elimination of large transient inward sodium currents. Why are no such currents visible in the control (pre-TTX) or the difference currents (Fig. 2)? Is it possible I missed something in the methods?

3) As expected, the changes in many of the measured parameters are smaller in the present study with heterozygotes than those previously reported for the homozygous mutation. Some of the statements on the significance of some of the present findings need to be stated more clearly. For example, in the results section describing Fig. 2, it is stated that "In glutamatergic and NFS GABAergic YH-HET neurons, the overall KNa current was increased ...as measured by a significant effect of genotype ...." Later in the same paragraph it is stated that the increases in KNa current are not significant. Apparently, different tests lead to different conclusions. Both for the purpose of understanding the pathophysiological effects of changes in KNa current and for making further numerical simulations, more explicit clarifying statements should be made.

4) The effects of the KCNT1 channel blocker VU170 on potassium currents are somewhat larger and different from those of TTX, suggesting that additional sources of sodium may contribute to activating KCNT1, as suggested by the authors. Because VU170 is, however, a novel pharmacological agent, it may be appropriate to make more careful statements on this. While the original published description of this compound reported no effect on a variety of other channels, there are many that were not tested, including Na and cation channels that are known to activate KCNT1, raising the possibility of off-target effects.

5) The experiments were carried out at room temperature. Is it possible that different effects on firing patterns in heterozygotes and homozygotes would be observed at more physiological temperatures?

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary: This paper reported interesting aberrant calcium microwaves in the hippocampus when synapsin promoter driven GCaMPs were expressed for a long period of time. These aberrant hippocampal Ca2+ micro-waves depend on the viral titre of the GECI. The microwave of Ca2+ was not observed when GECI was expressed only in a sparse set of neurons.

Strengths: These findings are important to the wide neuroscience community, especially considering a great number of investigators are using similar approaches. Results look convincing and are consistent across several laboratories.

Weaknesses: One important question is needed to further clarify the mechanisms of aberrant Ca2+ microwaves as described below.

Synapsin promoter labels both excitatory pyramidal neurons and inhibitory neurons. To avoid aberrant Ca2+ microwave, a combination of Flex virus and CaMKII-Cre or Thy-1-GCaMP6s and 6f mice were tested. However, all these approaches limit the number of infected pyramidal neurons. While the comprehensive display of these results is appreciated, a crucial question remains unanswered. To distinguish whether the microwave of Ca2+ is caused selectively via the abnormality of interneurons, or just a matter of pyramidal neuron density, testing Flex-GCaMP6 in interneuron specific mouse lines such as PV-Cre and SOM-Cre will be critical.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> This study delves into the roles of dact1 and dact2 during zebrafish embryonic axis formation and craniofacial morphogenesis. The researchers seek to unravel the mechanisms by which dact1/2 influences Wnt signaling modulation throughout embryonic development and patterning. They propose distinct spatiotemporal roles for Dact1 and Dact2 proteins in zebrafish embryonic development, highlighting their involvement in modulating noncanonical Wnt signaling during convergent extension events. Their findings demonstrate that dact1 and dact2 exhibit distinct spatiotemporal expression domains during development and that dact1/2 mutation leads to convergent extension defects. Furthermore, the study attempts to establish a link between convergent extension defects resulting from dact1/2 mutation and subsequent craniofacial abnormalities during development. To investigate the connection between dact1 and dact2, compound mutants were employed since single mutants did not exhibit craniofacial phenotypes. Additionally, the research encompasses comprehensive transcriptomics and pathway analyses of differentially expressed genes in dact1/2 mutants. This analysis reveals the overexpression of a calcium-dependent cysteine protease, calpain 8. The study suggests a connection between the upregulation of calpain 8 and the observed craniofacial dysmorphology in dact1/2 mutants, implying a potential link between the altered expression of calpain 8 and the craniofacial abnormalities observed in these mutants.

Strengths:<br /> The study beautifully recapitulates previous findings on the role of dact1/2 in modulating convergent extension during zebrafish embryogenesis.

A combination of multiple approaches, including in vivo time-lapse imaging, has been employed to elucidate the etiology of the rod-like neurocranial phenotype in dact1/2 double mutant.<br /> This study utilizes and discusses several 'traditional' mutant lines and newly created ones, analyzing them through single-cell transcriptomics.

Weaknesses:<br /> 1. Enhancing Reproducibility and Robustness:<br /> To enhance the reproducibility and robustness of the findings, it would be valuable for the authors to provide specific numbers of animals used in each experiment.<br /> Explicitly stating the penetrance of the rod-like neurocranial shape in dact1/2-/- animals would provide a clearer understanding of the consistency of this phenotype.

2. Strengthening Single-Cell Data Interpretation:<br /> To further validate the single-cell data and strengthen the interpretation of the gene expression patterns, I recommend the following:<br /> -Provide a more thorough explanation of the rationale for comparing dact1/2 double mutants with gpc4 mutants.<br /> -Employ genotyping techniques after embryo collection to ensure the accuracy of animal selection based on phenotype and address the potential for contamination of wild-type "delayed" animals.<br /> -Supplement the single-cell data with secondary validation using RNA in situ or immunohistochemistry techniques.

3. Directly Investigating Non-Cell-Autonomous Effects:<br /> To directly assess the proposed non-cell-autonomous role of dact1/2, I suggest conducting transplantation experiments to examine the ability of ectodermal/neural crest cells from dact1/2 double mutants to form wild-type-like neurocranium.

4. Further Elucidating Calpain 8's Role:<br /> To strengthen the evidence supporting the critical role of Calpain 8, I recommend conducting overexpression experiments using a sensitized background to enhance the statistical significance of the findings.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

In this work Wu, J., et al., highlight the importance of a previously overlooked region on kinases: the αC-β4 loop. Using PKA as a model system, the authors extensively describe the conserved regulatory elements within a kinase and how the αC-β4 loop region integrates with these important regulatory elements. Previous biochemical work on a mutation within the αC-β4 loop region, F100A showed that this region is important for the synergistic high affinity binding of ATP and the pseudo substrate inhibitor PKI. In the current manuscript, the authors assess the importance of the αC-β4 loop region using computational methods such as Local Spatial Pattern Alignment (LSP) and MD simulations. LSP analysis of the F100A mutant showed decreased values for degree centrality and betweenness centrality for several key regulatory elements within the kinase which suggests a loss in stability/connectivity in the mutant protein as compared to the WT. Additionally, based on MD simulation data, the side chain of K105, another residue within the αC-β4 loop region had altered dynamics in the F100A mutant as compared to the WT protein. While these changes in the αC-β4 loop region seem to be consistent with the previous biochemical data, the manuscript can be strengthened with additional experiments.

Comments on the revised version:

Additional experiments (both computational and experimental) assessing the role of the αC-β4 loop region (especially residues such as K105) are needed to bolster their hypothesis. My initial assessment therefore remains unchanged. While this manuscript falls short of expectations when it comes to experimental findings, it is an excellent review on the structural elements of kinases and how the newly identified αC-β4 loop region integrates with these important regions. Perhaps the experimental section (LSP analysis and MD simulation data) could be removed and this manuscript could be converted into a Review Article?

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:

The authors try to use a gene therapy approach to cure urofacial symptoms in an HSPE2 mutant mouse model.

Strengths:

The authors have convincingly shown the expression of AAV9/HSPE2 in pelvic ganglion and liver tissues. They have also shown the defects in urethra relaxation and bladder muscle contraction in response to EFS in mutant mice, which were reversed in treated mice.

Weaknesses:

Some important and interesting data are missing. For example, whether the gene therapy can extend the life span of these mutants? The overall in vivo voiding function is missing. AAV9/HSPE2 expression in the bladder wall is not shown.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary<br /> Here the authors have tethered a Pgp substrate to strategically place cysteine residues in the protein. Notably, the cysteine-linked substate (ANC-DNPT)- stimulate ATP hydrolyse and so are able to undergo IF to OF transitions. The authors then determined cryo-EM structures of these complexes and MD simulations of bound states. By capturing unforeseen OF conformations with substate they propose that TM1 undergoes local conformational changes that are sufficient to translocate substrates, rather than large bundle movements.

Strengths: This paper provides the first substrate (ANC-DNPT)- bound conformations of PgP and a new mechanistic model of how substrates are translocated.

Weaknesses: Although the cross-links stimulate ATP hydrolysis, it is unclear if the TM1 conformations are exactly the same under physiological conditions, since they have been covalently-trapped to the substrate.

Joint Public Review:

The authors previously showed that expressing formate dehydrogenase, rubisco, carbonic anhydrase, and phosphoribulokinase in Escherichia coli, followed by experimental evolution, led to the generation of strains that can metabolise CO2. Using two rounds of experimental evolution, the authors identify mutations in three genes - pgi, rpoB, and crp - that allow cells to metabolise CO2 in their engineered strain background. The authors make a strong case that mutations in pgi are loss-of-function mutations that prevent metabolic efflux from the reductive pentose phosphate autocatalytic cycle. The authors also use proteomic analysis to probe the role of the mutations in crp and rpoB. While they do not reach strong conclusions about how these mutations promote autotrophic growth, they provide some clues, leading to valuable speculation.

Comments on revised version:

The authors have thoroughly addressed the reviewers' comments. The major addition to the paper is the proteomic analysis of single and double mutants of crp and rpoB. These new data provide clues as to the role of the crp and rpoB mutations in promoting autotrophic growth, which the authors discuss. The authors acknowledge that it will require additional experiments to determine whether the speculated mechanisms are correct. Nonetheless, the new data provide valuable new insight into the role of the crp and rpoB mutations. The authors have also expanded their description of the crp and rpoB mutations, making it clearer that the effects of these mutations are likely to be distinct, albeit with potential for overlap in function.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary and strengths<br /> This is an interesting paper that concludes that hiring more women will do more to improve the gender balance of (US) academia than improving the attrition rates of women (which are usually higher than men's). Other groups have reported similar findings but this study uses a larger than usual dataset that spans many fields and institutions, so it is a good contribution to the field.

Weaknesses<br /> The paper uses a mixture of mathematical models (basically Leslie matrices, though that term isn't mentioned here) parameterised using statistical models fitted to data. However, the description of the methods needs to be improved significantly. The author should consider citing Matrix Population Models by Caswell (Second Edition; 2006; OUP) as a general introduction to these methods, and consider citing some or all of the following as examples of similar studies performed with these models:<br /> Shaw and Stanton. 2012. Proc Roy Soc B 279:3736-3741<br /> Brower and James. 2020. PLOS One 15:e0226392<br /> James and Brower. 2022. Royal Society Open Science 9:220785<br /> Lawrence and Chen. 2015. [http://128.97.186.17/index.php/pwp/article/view/PWP-CCPR-2015-008]<br /> Danell and Hjerm. 2013. Scientometrics 94:999-1006

The analysis also runs the risk of conflating the fraction of women in a field with gender diversity! In female-dominated fields (e.g. Nursing, Education) increasing the proportion of women in the field will lead to reduced gender diversity. This does not seem to be accounted for in the analysis. It would also be helpful to state the number of men and women in each of the 111 fields in the study.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> Herneisen et al characterise the Toxoplasma PDK1 orthologue SPARK and an associated protein SPARKEL in controlling important fate decisions in Toxoplasma. Over recent years this group and others have characterised the role of cAMP and cGMP signalling in negatively and positively regulating egress, motility, and invasion, respectively. This manuscript furthers this work by showing that SPARK and SPARKEL likely act upstream, or at least control the levels of the cAMP and cGMP-dependent kinases PKA and PKG, respectively, thus controlling the transition of intracellular replicating parasites into extracellular motile forms (and back again).

The authors use quantitative (phospho)proteomic techniques to elegantly demonstrate the upstream role of SPARK in controlling cAMP and cGMP pathways. They use sophisticated analysis techniques (at least for parasitology) to show the functional association between cGMP and cAMP signalling pathways. They therefore begin to unify our understanding of the complicated signalling pathways used by Toxoplasma to control key regulatory processes that control the activation and suppression of motility. The authors then use molecular and cellular assays on a range of generated transgenic lines to back up their observations made by quantitative proteomics that are clear in their design and approach.

The authors then extend their work by showing that SPARK/SPARKEL also control PKAc3 function. PKAc3 has previously been shown to negatively regulate differentiation into bradyzoite forms and this work backs up and extends this finding to show that SPARK also controls this. The authors conclude that SPARK could act as a central node of regulation of the asexual stage, keeping parasites in their lytic cell growth and preventing differentiation. Whether this is true is beyond the scope of this paper and will have to be determined at a later date.

Strengths:<br /> This is an exceptional body of work. It is elegantly performed, with state-of-the-art proteomic methodologies carefully being applied to Toxoplasma. Observations from the proteomic datasets are masterfully backed up with validation using quantitative molecular and cellular biology assays.

The paper is carefully and concisely written and is not overreaching in its conclusions. This work and its analysis set a new benchmark for the use of proteomics and molecular genetics in apicomplexan parasites.

Weaknesses:<br /> This reviewer did not identify any weaknesses.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> The authors previously demonstrated that species-specific variation in primate CD4 impacts its ability to serve as a functional receptor for diverse SIVs. Here, Warren and Barbachano-Guerrero et al. perform population genetics analyses and functional characterization of great ape CD4 with a particular focus on gorillas, which are natural hosts of SIVgor. They first used ancestral reconstruction to derive the ancestral hominin and hominid CD4. Using pseudotyped viruses representing a panel of envelopes from SIVcpz and HIV strains, they find that these ancestral reconstructions of CD4 are more similar to human CD4 in terms of being a broadly susceptible entry receptor (in the context of mediating entry into Cf2Th cells stably expressing human CCR5). In contrast, extant gorilla and chimpanzee CD4 are functional entry receptors for a narrower range of HIV and SIVcpz isolates. Based on these differences, authors next surveyed gorilla sequences and identified several CD4 haplotypes, specifically in the region encoding the CD4 D1 domain, which directly contacts the viral glycoprotein and thus may impact the interaction. Consistent with this possibility, the authors demonstrated that gorilla CD4 haplotypes are, on average, less capable of supporting entry than human CD4, and that some are largely unable to function as SIV entry receptors. Interestingly, individual residues found at key positions in the gorilla CD4 D1 when tested in the context of human CD4 reduce entry of some virions pseudotyped with diverse SIVcpz envelopes, suggesting that individual amino acids can in part explain the observed differences across gorilla CD4 haplotypes. Finally, the authors perform statistical tests to infer that CD4 from great apes with endemic SIV (i.e., chimpanzees and gorillas) but not non-reservoirs (i.e., orangutans, bonobos) or recent spillover hosts (i.e., humans), have been subject to selection as a result of pressure from endemic SIV.

The conclusions of this paper are mostly well supported by data.

Strengths:<br /> The functional assays are appropriate to test the stated hypothesis, and the authors use a broad diversity of envelopes from HIV and SIVcpz strains. The authors also partially characterize one potential mechanism of gorilla CD4 resistance - receptor glycosylation at the derived N15 found in 5/6 gorilla haplotypes.

Ancestral reconstruction provides a particularly interesting aspect of the study, allowing authors to infer the ancestral state of hominid CD4 relative to modern CD4 from gorillas and chimpanzees. This, coupled with evidence supporting SIV-driven selection of gorilla CD4 diversity and the characterization of functional diversity of extant haplotypes provides several interesting findings.

Weaknesses:<br /> The major inference of the work is that SIV infection of gorillas drove the observed diversity in gorilla CD4. This is supported by the majority of SNPs being localized to the CD4 D1, which directly interacts with the envelope, and the demonstrated functional consequences of that diversity for viral entry. However, SIVgor (to the best of my knowledge) only infects Western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla), and one Gorilla gorilla diehli and three Gorilla beringei graueri individuals were included in the haplotype and allele frequency analyses. The presence of these haplotypes or the presence of similar allele frequencies in Eastern lowland and mountain gorillas would impact this conclusion. It would be helpful for the authors to clarify this point.

The authors appear to use a somewhat atypical approach to assess intra-population selection to compensate for relatively small numbers of NHP sequences (Fig. 6). However, they do not cite precedence for the robustness of the approach or the practice of grouping sequences from multiple species for the endemic vs other comparison. They also state in the methods that some genes encoded in the locus were removed from the analysis "because they have previously been shown to directly interact with a viral protein." This seems to undercut the analysis and prevents alternative explanations for the observed diversity in CD4 (e.g., passenger mutations from selection at a neighboring locus).

Data in Figure 5 is graphed as % infected cells instead of virus titer (TDU/mL). It's unclear why this is the case, and prevents a comparison to data in Figure 2 and Figure 4.

The lack of pseudotyping with SIVgor envelope is a surprising omission from this study, that would help to contextualize the findings. Similarly, building gorilla CD4 haplotype SNPs onto the hominin ancestor (as opposed to extant human CD4) may provide additional insights that are meaningful toward understanding the evolutionary trajectory of gorilla CD4.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Wang et al investigated the evolution, expression, and function of the X-linked miR-506 miRNA family. They showed that the miR-506 family underwent rapid evolution. They provided evidence that miR-506 appeared to have originated from the MER91C DNA transposons. Human MER91C transposon produced mature miRNAs when expressed in cultured cells. A series of mouse mutants lacking individual clusters, a combination of clusters, and the entire X-linked cluster (all 22 miRNAs) were generated and characterized. The mutant mice lacking four or more miRNA clusters showed reduced reproductive fitness (litter size reduction). They further showed that the sperm from these mutants were less competitive in polyandrous mating tests. RNA-seq revealed the impact of deletion of miR-506 on the testicular transcriptome. Bioinformatic analysis analyzed the relationship among miR-506 binding, transcriptomic changes, and target sequence conservation. The miR-506-deficient mice did not have apparent effect on sperm production, motility, and morphology. Lack of severe phenotypes is typical for miRNA mutants in other species as well. However, the miR-506-deficient males did exhibit reduced litter size, such an effect would have been quite significant in an evolutionary time scale. The number of mouse mutants and sequencing analysis represent a tour de force. This study is a comprehensive investigation of the X-linked miR-506 miRNA family. It provides important insights into the evolution and function of the miR-506 family.

The conclusions of this preprint are mostly supported by the data except being noted below. Some descriptions need to be revised for accuracy.

L219-L285: The conclusion that X-linked miR-506 family miRNAs are expanded via LINE1 retrotransposition is not supported by the data. LINE1s and SINEs are very abundant, accounting for nearly 30% of the genome. In addition, the LINE1 content of the mammalian X chromosome is twice that of the autosomes. One can easily find flanking LINE1/SINE repeat. Therefore, the analyses in Fig. 2G, Fig. 2H and Fig. S3 are not informative. In order to claim LINE1-mediated retrotransposition, it is necessary to show the hallmarks of LINE1 retrotransposition, which are only possible for new insertions. The X chromosome is known to be enriched for testis-specific multi-copy genes that are expressed in round spermatids (PMID: 18454149). The conclusion on the LINE1-mediated expansion of miR-506 family on the X chromosome is not supported by the data and does not add additional insights. I think that the LINE1 related figure panels and description (L219-L285) need to be deleted. In discussion (L557-558), "...and subsequently underwent sequence divergence via LINE1-mediated retrotransposition during evolution" should also be deleted. This section (L219-L285) needs to deal only with the origin of miR-506 from MER91C DNA transposons, which is both convincing and informative.

Fig. 3A: can you speculate/discuss why the miR-506 expression in sperm is higher than in round spermatids?

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> The cohesin complex maintains sister chromatid cohesion from S phase to anaphase. Beyond that, DSBs trigger cohesin recruitment and post-replication cohesion at both damage sites and globally, which was originally reported in 2004. In their recent study, Ayra-Plasencia et al reported in telophase, DSBs are repaired via HR with re-coalesced sister chromatids (Ayra-Plasencia & Machín, 2019). In this study, they show that HR occurs in a Smc3-dependent way in late mitosis.

Strengths:<br /> The authors take great advantage of the yeast system, they check the DSB processing and repair of a single DSB generated by HO endonuclease, which cuts the MAT locus in chromosome III. In combination with cell synchronization, they detect the HR repair during G2/M or late mitosis. and the cohesin subunit SMC3 is critical for this repair. Beyond that, full-length Scc1 protein can be recovered upon DSBs.

Weaknesses:<br /> These new results basically support their proposal although with a very limited molecular mechanistic progression, especially compared with their recent work.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:

This manuscript reports that a combination of two small molecules, 2C (CHIR99027 and A-485) enabled to induce the dedifferentiation of hESC-derived cardiomyocytes (CMs) into regenerative cardiac cells (RCC). These RCCs had disassembled sarcomeric structures and elevated expression of embryonic cardiogenic genes such as ISL1, which exhibited proliferative potential and were able to differentiate into cardiomyocytes, endothelial cells, and smooth muscle cells. Lineage tracing further suggested that RCCs originated from TNNT2+ cells, not pre-existing ISL1+ cells. Furthermore, 2C treatment increased the numbers of RCC cells in neonatal rat and adult mouse hearts and improved cardiac function post-MI in adult mice. Mechanistically, bulk RNA-seq analysis revealed that 2C led to elevated expression of embryonic cardiogenic genes while down-regulation of CM-specific genes. Single-cell RNA-seq data showed that 2C promoted cardiomyocyte transition into an intermediate state that is marked with ACTA2 and COL1A1, which subsequently transformed into RCCs. Finally, ChIP-seq analysis demonstrated that CHIR99027 enhanced H3K9Ac and H3K27Ac modifications in embryonic cardiac genes, while A-485 inhibited these modifications in cardiac-specific genes. These combined alterations effectively induced the dedifferentiation of cardiomyocytes into RCCs.

Strengths:

Overall, this work is quite comprehensive and is logically and rigorously designed. The phenotypic and functional data on 2C are strong.

Weaknesses:

The mechanistic insights of 2C are primarily derived from transcriptomic and genomic datasets without experimental verification.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> The manuscript authored by Stockner and colleagues delves into the molecular simulations of Na+ binding pathway and the ionic interactions at the two known sodium binding sites site 1 and site 2. They further identify a patch of two acidic residues in TM6 that seemingly populate the Na+ ions prior to entry into the vestibule. These results highlight the importance of studying the ion-entry pathways through computational approaches and the authors also validate some of their findings through experimental work. They observe that sodium site 1 binding is stabilized by the presence of the substrate in the s1 site and this is particularly vital as the GABA carboxylate is involved in coordinating the Na+ ion unlike other monoamine transporters and binding of sodium to the Na2 site stabilizes the conformation of the GAT1 by reducing flexibility among the helical bundles involved in alternating access.

Strengths:<br /> The study displays results that are generally consistent with available information from experiments on SLC6 transporters particularly GAT1 and puts forth the importance of this added patch of residues in the extracellular vestibule that could be of importance to the ion permeation in SLC6 transporters. This is a nicely performed study and could be improved if the authors could comment on and fix the following queries.

Weaknesses:<br /> 1. How conserved are the residue pair of D281-E283 in other SLC6 transporters. The authors commented on the presence of these residues in SERT but it would be nice to know how widespread these residues are in other SLC6 transporters like NET, GlyT, and DAT.

2. Further, one would like to see the effect of individual mutations D281A and E283A on transport, surface expression, and EC50 of Na+ to gauge the effect on transport.

3. A clear figure of the S1 site where Na+ tends to stay prior to Na1 site interactions needs to be provided with a clear figure. Further, it is not entirely clear how access to S1 is altered if the transporter is in an outward-occluded conformation if F294 is blocking solvent access. Please comment.

4. The p-value of the EC50 differences between GAT1WT and GAT1double mutant need to be mentioned. The difference in sodium dependence EC50 seems less than twofold and it would be useful to mention how critical the role of the recruitment site is. Since the transport is not affected the site could play a transient role in attracting ions.

5. It would be very nice to know how K+ ions are attracted by this recruitment site. This could further act as a control simulation to test the preference for Na+ ions among SLC6 members.

6. Some of the important figures are not very clear. For instance, there should be a zoomed-in view of the recruitment site. The current one in Fig. 1b and 1c could be made clearer. Similarly as mentioned earlier the Na residence at the S1 site away from the Na1 and Na2 sites needs to be shown with greater clarity by putting side chain information in Fig. 6d.

7. The structural features that comprise the two principle components PC1 and PC2 should be described in greater detail.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> Bendzunas, Byrne et al. explore two highly topical areas of protein kinase regulation in this manuscript. Firstly, the idea that Cys modification could regulate kinase activity. The senior authors have published some standout papers exploring this idea of late, and the current work adds to the picture of how active site Cys might have been favoured in evolution to serve critical regulatory functions. Second, BRSK1/2 are understudied kinases listed as part of the "dark kinome" so any knowledge of their underlying regulation is of critical importance to advancing the field.

Strengths:<br /> In this study, the author pinpoints highly-conserved, but BRSK-specific, Cys residues as key players in kinase regulation. There is a delicate balance between equating what happens in vitro with recombinant proteins relative to what the functional consequence of Cys mutation might be in cells or organisms, but the authors are very clear with the caveats relating to these connections in their descriptions and discussion. Accordingly, by extension, they present a very sound biochemical case for how Cys modification might influence kinase activity in cellular environs.

Weaknesses:<br /> I have very few critiques for this study, and my major points are barely major.

Major points<br /> 1. My sense is that the influence of Cys mutation on dimerization is going to be one of the first queries readers consider as they read the work. It would be, in my opinion, useful to bring forward the dimer section in the manuscript.

2. Relatedly, the effect of Cys mutation on the dimerization properties of preparations of recombinant protein is not very clear as it stands. Some SEC traces would be helpful; these could be included in the supplement.

3. Is there any knowledge of Cys mutants in disease for BRSK1/2?

4. In bar charts, I'd recommend plotting data points. Plus it is crucial to report in the legend what error measure is shown, the number of replicates, and the statistical method used in any tests.

5. In Figure 5b, the GAPDH loading control doesn't look quite right.

6. In Figure 7 there is no indication of what mode of detection was used for these gels.

9. Recombinant proteins - more detail should be included on how they were prepared. Was there a reducing agent present during purification? Where did they elute off SEC... consistent with a monomer of higher order species?

Joint Public Review:

This article is a direct follow-up to the paper published last year in eLife by the same group. In the previous article, the authors discovered a zinc finger protein, Kipferl, capable of guiding the HP1 protein Rhino towards certain genomic regions enriched in GRGGN motifs and packaged in heterochromatin marked by H3K9me3. Unlike other HP1 proteins, Rhino recruitment activates the transcription of heterochromatic regions, which are then converted into piRNA source loci. The molecular mechanism by which Kipferl interacts specifically with Rhino (via its chromodomain) and not with other HP1 proteins remained enigmatic.

In this latest article, the authors go a step further by elucidating the molecular mechanisms important for the specific interaction of Rhino and not other HP1 proteins with Kipferl. A phylogenetic study carried out between the HP1 proteins of 5 Drosophila species led them to study the importance of an AA Glycine at position 31 located in the Rhino chromodomain, an AA different from the AA (aspartic acid) found at the same position in the other HP1 proteins. The authors then demonstrate, through a series of structure predictions, biochemical, and genetic experiments, that this specific AA in the Rhino-specific chromodomain explains the difference in the chromatin binding pattern between Rhino and the other Drosophila HP1 proteins. Importantly, the G31D conversion of the Rhino protein prevents interaction between Rhino and Kipferl, phenocopying a Kipfer mutant.

Strengths:

The authors' effective use of phylogenetic analyses and protein structure predictions to identify a substitution in the chromodomain that allows Rhino's specific interaction with Kipferl is very elegant. Both genetic and biochemical approaches are applied to rigorously probe the proposed explanation. They used a point mutation in the endogenous locus that replaces the Rhino-specific residue with the aspartic acid residue present in all other HP1 family members. This novel allele largely phenocopies the defects in hatch rate, chromatin organization, and piRNA production associated with kipferl mutants, and does not support Kipferl localization to clusters. The data are of high quality, the presentation is clear and concise, and the conclusions are generally well-supported.

Weaknesses:

The reviewers identified potential ways to further strengthen the manuscript.

1) The one significant omission is RNAseq on the rhino point mutant, which would allow direct comparison to cluster, transposon, and repeat expression in kipferl mutants.

2) The manuscript would benefit from adding more evolutionary comparisons. The following or similar analyses would help put the finding into a broader evolutionary perspective: i) Is Kipferl's surface interacting with Rhino also conserved in Kipferl orthologs? In other words, are the Rhino-interacting amino acids of Kipferl under any pressure to be conserved? ii) The remarkable conservation of Rhino's G31 is at odds with the arms race that is proposed to be happening between the fly's piRNA pathway proteins and transposons. Does this mean that Rhino's chromodomain is "untouchable" for such positive selection?

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

My main concern is the use of the 700K SNP dataset. This set of SNPs suffers from a heavy ascertainment bias, which can be seen in the PCA in the supplementary material where all the aurochs cluster in the center within the variation of cattle. Given the coverage of some of the samples, multiple individuals would have less than 10K SNP covered. The majority of these are unlikely to be informative here given that they would just represent fixed positions between taurine and indicine or SNPs mostly variable in milk cattle breeds. The authors would get a much better resolution (i.e. many more SNPs to work with their very low genome coverage data) using the 1000 bull genome project VCF data set: https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB42783 which based on whole genome resequencing data from many cattle. This will certainly help with improving the resolution of qpAdm and f4 analysis, which have huge confidence intervals in most cases. Right now some individuals have huge confidence intervals ranging from 0 to 80% auroch ancestry...

I agree with the authors that qpAdm is likely to give quite a noisy estimate of ancestry here (likely explain part of the issue I mentioned above). Although qpAdm is good for model testing here for ancestry proportion the authors instead could use an explicit f4 ratio - this would allow them to specify a model which would make the result easier to interpret.

The interpretation of the different levels of allele sharing on X vs autosome being the result of sex-bias admixture is not very convincing. Could these differences simply be due to a low recombination rate on the X chromosome and/or lower effective population size, which would lead to less efficient purifying selection?

The authors suggest that 2 pop model rejection in some domestic population might be due to indicine ancestry, this seems relatively straightforward to test.

The first sentence of the paper is a bit long-winded, also dogs were domesticated before the emergence of farming societies.

It would be good to be specific about the number of genomes and coverage info in the last paragraph of the intro.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:<br /> Doxorubincin has long been known to cause bone loss by increasing osteoclast and suppressing osteoblast activities. The study by Wang et al. reports a comprehensive investigation into the off-target effects of doxorubicin on bone tissues and potential mechanisms. They used a tumor-free model with wild-type mice and found that even a single dose of doxorubicin has a major influence by increasing leukopenia, DAMPs, and inflammasomes in macrophages and neutrophils, and inflammation-related cell death (pyroptosis and NETosis). The gene knockout study shows that AIM2 and NLRP3 are the major contributors to bone loss. Overall, the study confirmed previous findings regarding the impact of doxorubicin on tissue inflammation and expanded the research further into bone tissue. The presented data are consistent; however, a major question remains regarding whether doxorubicin drives inflammation and its related events. Most in vitro studies showed that the effect of doxorubincin cannot be demonstrated without LPS priming. This observation raises the question of whether doxorubincin itself could activate the inflammasome and the related events. In vivo study, on the other hand, suggested that it doesn't require LPS. The inconsistency here was not explained further. Moreover, a tumor-free mouse model was used for the study; however, immune responses in tumor-bearing models would likely be distinct from tumor-free ones. The justification for using tumor-free models is not well-established.

Strengths:<br /> The paper includes a comprehensive study that shows the effects of doxorubincin on cytokine levels in serum, the release of DAMPs and NETosis, and leukopenia using both in vivo and in vitro models. Bone marrow cells, macrophages, and neutrophils were isolated from the bone marrow, and the levels of cytokines in serum were also determined.

They employed multiple knockout models with a deficiency in Aim 2, Nlirp3, and double deficiencies to dissect the functional involvement of these two inflammasomes.

The experiments in general are well designed. The paper is also logically written, and the figures were clearly labeled.

Weaknesses:<br /> Most of the data presented are correlative, and there is not much effort to dissect the underlying molecular mechanism.

It is not entirely clear why a tumor-free model is chosen to study immune responses, as immune responses can differ significantly with or without tumor-bearing.

Immune responses in isolated macrophages, neutrophils, and bone marrow cells require priming with LPS, while such responses are not observed in vivo. There is no explanation for these differences.

The band intensities on Western blots in Fig. 4 and Fig. 5 are not quantified, and the numbers of repeats are also not provided.

Many abbreviations are used throughout the text, and some of the full names are not provided.

Fig. 5B needs a label on the X axis.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary and strengths:

This is an interesting, timely and informative article. The authors used publicly available data (made available by a funding agency) to examine some of the academic characteristics of the individuals recipients of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) k99/R00 award program during the entire history of this funding mechanism (17 years, total ~ 4 billion US dollars (annual investment of ~230 million USD)). The analysis focuses on the pedigree and the NIH funding portfolio of the institutions hosting the k99 awardees as postdoctoral researchers and the institutions hiring these individuals. The authors also analyze the data by gender, by whether the R00 portion of the awards eventually gets activated and based on whether the awardees stayed/were hired as faculty at their k99 (postdoctoral) host institution or moved elsewhere. The authors further sought to examine the rates of funding for those in systematically marginalized groups by analyzing the patterns of receiving k99 awards and hiring k99 awardees at historically black colleges and universities.

The goals and analysis are reasonable and the limitations of the data are described adequately. It is worth noting that some of the observed funding and hiring traits are in line with the Matthew effect in science (Merton, 1968: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.159.3810.56) and in science funding (Bol et al., 2018: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1719557115). Overall, the article is a valuable addition to the research culture literature examining the academic funding and hiring traits in the United States. The findings can provide further insights for the leadership at funding and hiring institutions and science policy makers for individual and large-scale improvements that can benefit the scientific community.

Weaknesses:

The authors have addressed my recommendations in the previous review round in a satisfactory way.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

This manuscript deftly combines cryo-EM and electrophysiology to investigate gating mechanisms of human CLC-2. Although another structure of CLC-2 was recently reported, this is the first structure to report density for the absolutely critical gating glutamate, and - an even more exciting result - the first structure to identify the N-terminal gating peptide that is the heart of this manuscript. There has been previous controversy over such a gating peptide in CLC-2, but the combined structural/functional approach appears to establish a role for this peptide in gating, and sets up future experiments to understand why its effects might change under different physiological scenarios. The experiments reported here are thoughtful and well-controlled and the data presentation is excellent. For the electrophysiology experiments, the use of inhibitor AK-42 (developed by the current senior author's lab) to establish a zero current level is a welcome advance and should become standard for electrophysiological studies of CLC-2.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

In the best genetically and biochemically understood model of eukaryotic DNA replication, the budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the genomic locations at which DNA replication initiates are determined by a specific sequence motif. These motifs, or ARS elements, are bound by the origin recognition complex (ORC). ORC is required for loading of the initially inactive MCM helicase during origin licensing in G1. In human cells, ORC does not have a specific sequence binding domain and origin specification is not specified by a defined motif. There have thus been great efforts over many years to try to understand the determinants of DNA replication initiation in human cells using a variety of approaches, which have gradually become more refined over time.

In this manuscript Tian et al. combine data from multiple previous studies using a range of techniques for identifying sites of replication initiation to identify conserved features of replication origins and to examine the relationship between origins and sites of ORC binding in the human genome. The authors identify a) conserved features of replication origins e.g. association with GC-rich sequences, open chromatin, promoters and CTCF binding sites. These associations have already been described in multiple earlier studies. They also examine the relationship of their determined origins and ORC binding sites and conclude that there is no relationship between sites of ORC binding and DNA replication initiation. While the conclusions concerning genomic features of origins are not novel, if true, a clear lack of colocalization of ORC and origins would be a striking finding. However, the majority of the datasets used do not report replication origins, but rather broad zones in which replication origins fire. Rather than refining the localisation of origins, the approach of combining diverse methods that monitor different objects related to DNA replication leads to a base dataset that is highly flawed and cannot support the conclusions that are drawn, as explained in more detail below.

Methods to determine sites at which DNA replication is initiated can be divided into two groups based on the genomic resolution at which they operate. Techniques such as bubble-seq, ok-seq can localise zones of replication initiation in the range ~50kb. Such zones may contain many replication origins. Conversely, techniques such as SNS-seq and ini-seq can localise replication origins down to less than 1kb. Indeed, the application of these different approaches has led to a degree of controversy in the field about whether human replication does indeed initiate at discrete sites (origins), or whether it initiates randomly in large zones with no recurrent sites being used. However, more recent work has shown that elements of both models are correct i.e. there are recurrent and efficient sites of replication initiation in the human genome, but these tend to be clustered and correspond to the demonstrated initiation zones (Guilbaud et al., 2022).

These different scales and methodologies are important when considering the approach of Tian et al. The premise that combining all available data from five techniques will increase accuracy and confidence in identifying the most important origins is flawed for two principal reasons. First, as noted above, of the different techniques combined in this manuscript, only SNS-seq can actually identify origins rather than initiation zones. It is the former that matters when comparing sites of ORC binding with replication origin sites, if a conclusion is to be drawn that the two do not co-localise.

Second, the authors give equal weight to all datasets. Certainly, in the case of SNS-seq, this is not appropriate. The technique has evolved over the years and some earlier versions have significantly different technical designs that may impact the reliability and/or resolution of the results e.g. in Foulk et al. (Foulk et al., 2015), lambda exonuclease was added to single stranded DNA from a total genomic preparation rather than purified nascent strands), which may lead to significantly different digestion patterns (ie underdigestion). Curiously, the authors do not make the best use of the largest SNS-seq dataset (Akerman et al., 2020) by ignoring these authors separation of core and stochastic origins. By blending all data together any separation of signal and noise is lost. Further, I am surprised that the authors have chosen not to use data and analysis from a recent study that provides subsets of the most highly used and efficient origins in the human genome, at high resolution (Guilbaud et al., 2022).

References

Akerman I, Kasaai B, Bazarova A, Sang PB, Peiffer I, Artufel M, Derelle R, Smith G, Rodriguez-Martinez M, Romano M, Kinet S, Tino P, Theillet C, Taylor N, Ballester B, Méchali M (2020) A predictable conserved DNA base composition signature defines human core DNA replication origins. Nat Commun, 11: 4826

Foulk MS, Urban JM, Casella C, Gerbi SA (2015) Characterizing and controlling intrinsic biases of lambda exonuclease in nascent strand sequencing reveals phasing between nucleosomes and G-quadruplex motifs around a subset of human replication origins. Genome Res, 25: 725-735

Guilbaud G, Murat P, Wilkes HS, Lerner LK, Sale JE, Krude T (2022) Determination of human DNA replication origin position and efficiency reveals principles of initiation zone organisation. Nucleic Acids Res, 50: 7436-7450

Update in response to authors' comments on the original review:

While the authors have clarified their approach to some aspects of their analysis, I believe they and I are just going to have to disagree about the methodology and conclusions of this work. I do not find the authors responses sufficiently compelling to change my mind about the significance of the study or veracity of the conclusions. In my opinion, the method for identification of strong origins is not robust and of insufficient resolution. In addition, the resolution and the overlap of the MCM Chip-seq datasets is poor. While the conclusion of the paper would indeed be striking and surprising if true, I am not at all persuaded that it is based on the presented data.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

The mutation rate and spectrum have been found to differ between populations as well as across individuals within the same population. Hypothesizing that some of the observed variation has a genetic basis, the authors of this paper have made important contributions in the past few years in identifying genetic variants that modify mutation rate or spectrum in natural populations. This paper makes one significant step further by developing a new method for mapping genetic variants associated with the mutation spectrum, which reveals new biological insights.

Using traditional quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping in the BXD mouse recombinant inbred lines (RILs), the authors of this paper previously identified a genetic locus associated with C>A mutation rate. However, this approach has limited power, as it suffers from multiple testing burden as well as noise in the "observed mutation spectrum phenotype" due to rarity and randomness of mutation events. To overcome these limitations, the authors developed a new method that they named "aggregate mutation spectrum distance" (AMSD), which in short measures the difference in the aggregate mutation spectrum between two groups of individuals with distinct genotypes at a specific genomic locus. With this new approach, they recover the previously reported candidate mutator locus (near Mutyh gene) and identify a new candidate locus that modifies the C>A mutation rate on only the mutator allele genetic background at the Mutyh locus. Using more rigorous statistical testing, the authors show convincingly synergistic epistatic effects between the mutator alleles at the two loci.

Overall, the analyses presented are well done and provide convincing evidence for the major findings, including the new candidate mutator locus and its epistatic interaction with the Mutyh locus. The new AMSD method introduced is innovative and outperforms traditional QTL mapping under most conditions, as demonstrated by extensive simulations. I identify no major issues with this paper and think it is very well written.

One of the major advantages of the AMSD method over QTL mapping is alleviation of the multiple testing burden, as one comparison tests for any changes in the mutation spectrum, including simultaneous, small changes in the relative abundance of multiple mutation types. The flip side of this advantage of AMSD is that, when a significant association is detected, it is not immediately clear which mutation type is driving the signal. To narrow the signal to specific candidate mutation type(s), additional analyses are needed, such as testing for differential proportions of each mutation type between individuals with or without the candidate mutator allele. However, such analysis may be less powerful when the mutator allele leads to small changes in the relative abundance of multiple mutation types. This will be an area of improvement for future studies.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

This is an interesting study by Pinos and colleagues that examines the effect of beta carotene on atherosclerosis regression. The authors have previously shown that beta carotene reduces atherosclerosis progress and hepatic lipid metabolism, and now they seek to extend these findings by feeding mice a diet with excess beta carotene in a model of atherosclerosis regression (LDLR antisense oligo plus Western diet followed by LDLR sense oligo and chow diet). They show some metrics of lesion regression are increased upon beta carotene feeding (collagen content) while others remain equal to normal chow diet (macrophage content and lesion size). These effects are lost when beta carotene oxidase (BCO) is deleted. The study adds to the existing literature that beta carotene protects from atherosclerosis in general, and adds new information regarding regulatory T-cells. However, the study does not present significant evidence about how beta-carotene is affecting T-cells in atherosclerosis. For the most part, the conclusions are supported by the data presented, and the work is completed in multiple models, supporting its robustness. However there are a few areas that require additional information or evidence to support their conclusions and/or to align with the previously published work.

Specific additional areas of focus for the authors:<br /> The premise of the story is that b-carotene is converted into retinoic acid, which acts as a ligand of the ROR transcription factor in T-regs. The authors measure hepatic markers of retinoic acid signaling (retinyl esters, Cyp26a1 expression) but none of these are measured in the lesion, which calls into question the conclusion that Tregs in the lesion are responsible for the regression observed with b-carotene supplementation.

There does not appear to be a strong effect of Tregs on the b-carotene induced pro-regression phenotype presented in Figure 5. The only major CD25+ cell dependent b-carotene effect is on collagen content, which matches with the findings in Figure 1 +2. This mechanistically might be very interesting and novel, yet the authors do not investigate this further or add any additional detail regarding this observation. This would greatly strengthen the study and the novelty of the findings overall as it relates to b-carotene and atherosclerosis.

The title indicates that beta-carotene induces Treg 'expansion' in the lesion, but this is not measured in the study.

Revised manuscript:<br /> In the revised manuscript, the authors provide quantification of an RA-responsive gene in the plaque as evidence that RA signalling is indeed elevated upon b-carotene supplementation. It is not reduced upon blocking CD25 (Tregs) which implies that other cells in addition to Tregs are impacted by b-carotene supplementation that favourably remodels the plaque. The authors properly account for this by tempering their conclusions and recognize that Tregs are only partially responsible for the plaque phenotype upon b-carotene supplementation.

The authors chose not to further investigate why b-carotene impacted collagen production, instead including a discussion point. In this reviewer's opinion, it is a missed opportunity but hopefully something that can be investigated further by others.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:

The authors demonstrate that the immunosuppressive environment in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) can be mitigated by a combination of ionizing radiation (IR), CCR5 inhibition, and PD1 blockade. This combination therapy increases tissue-resident natural killer (trNK) cells that facilitate CD8 T cell activity, resulting in a reduction of E-cadherin positive tumor cells. They identify a specific "hypofunctional" NK cell population in both mouse and human PDAC that supports CD8 T cell involvement. A trNK signature is found to be associated with better survival outcomes in PDAC and other solid tumors.

Strengths:

Overall, I think this is an interesting study that combines testing of therapeutic concepts in mice with bioinformatics analysis of single-cell transcriptome data in primary tumors and exploration of clinical outcomes using signature genes in TCGA data. The key finding is that immunoregulatory properties of tumor-infiltrating/resident CD56-bright NK cells (assumed to be non-cytotoxic) are beneficial for outcome through cross-talk with DC and recruitment of CD8 T cells. The latter is specifically induced by irradiation combined with CCR5i and PD1 blockade.

"These results collectively support the notion that IR/CCR5i/αPD1 combination treatment alters immune infiltration by reducing Tregs and increasing NK and CD8 T cells, thereby resulting in greater local tumor control." I agree with this conclusion.

Weaknesses:

There are a few points to discuss and that the authors may want to address.

1) "Notably, CCR5i significantly reduced Treg infiltration but had no effect on the infiltration of other immune cells, indicating the active recruitment of CCR5+ Tregs in PDAC (Figure 2B)."<br /> CCR5i treatment seems to inhibit infiltration of CD8 T cells and NK cells to a greater extent, in relative terms, compared to Treg, albeit it is not statistically significant. If this visual inspection of the graph does not reflect reality, additional experiments may be needed to verify the selective targeting of Tregs or confirm the fact that also CD8 T cells and NK cells are affected by single agent CCR5i. The reduced recruitment of Treg, NK cells, and CD8T cells was completely reversed when combined with irradiation. In the data shown in Figure 3E it seems as if CCR5i induced infiltration of Tregs along with other immune cells. However, this said, I agree with the conclusion of the authors that this combined treatment leads to an altered immune composition and ratio between Tregs and effector cells (CD8T cells and NK cells). Could this altered composition be displayed more clearly?

2) The definition of active and hypofunctional NK cells based on solely NKG2D expression alone seems like an oversimplification. I realize it is not trivial to test tumor-infiltrating NK cells from these tumors functionally but perhaps scRNAseq of the tumors would allow for characterization of cytotoxicity scores using KEGG or GO analysis or reversed gene set enrichment in responders/non-responders. It seems as if the abstract refers to this phenotype incorrectly since the "hyporesponsive" subset is described as NKG2C-negative.

3) "The NK_C1 cluster correlates best with the hypofunction NK phenotype observed in mice as similarly displayed reduced activation (reduced NKG7, NKp80, GZMA, and PRF1) with additional expression of tissue residency markers CD103, CD49a and, surprisingly, the adaptive activating receptor NKG2C (KLRC2) (Figure 5B, C)."

There is no doubt that NK_C1 represents tumor-infiltrating NK cells with a CD56bright gene signature with a strong tissue resident score. However, the transcriptional expression of KLRC2 on these is not surprising! It is well established that KLRC2 transcripts (but not protein) are highly expressed on conventional CD56bright NK cells. There are several published sources where the authors can find such data for confirmation. Thus, this is not to be confused with adaptive NK cells having an entirely different transcriptional signature and expressing high levels of NKG2C at the cell surface. I strongly recommend re-interpreting the results based on the fact that KLRC2 is expressed at high levels in conventional CD56bright NK cells. If not, it would be important to verify that these tissue-resident NK cells express NKG2C and not NKG2A at the cell surface.

4) NCAM1 transcript alone is not sufficient to deconvolute CD56bright NK cells in TCGA data (Figure 7A). As a single marker, it likely reflects NK cell infiltration without providing further evidence on the contribution of the bright/dim components. Therefore, the use of the bright Tr NK signature described in Table 1 is very important (Figure 7B). Table 1 is not provided. Nor Supplementary Table 1. There is only one supplementary figure in the ppt attached.

Reviewer #2 (Public Review):

Summary:

The study demonstrates that deletion of a small cytoplasmic membrane protein, Tmem263, caused severe impairment of longitudinal bone growth and that the impaired bone growth was caused by suppression of expression and/or protein levels of growth hormone receptor in the liver.

Strengths:

The experimental design of the study is sound and the results are in general of supportive of the conclusions.

Weaknesses:

The study lacks mechanistic investigation into how the deletion of a gene corresponding to a small cytoplasmic membrane protein would lead to substantial reduction in the gene expression of growth hormone receptor, which takes place in the nuclei. Accordingly, the manuscript is of largely descriptive nature.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary<br /> Developing vaccination capable of inducing persistent antibody responses capable of broadly neutralizing HIV strains is of high importance. However, our ability to design vaccines to achieve this is limited by our relative lack of understanding of the role of T-follicular helper (Tfh) subtypes in the responses. In this report Verma et al investigate the effects of different prime and boost vaccination strategies to induce skewed Tfh responses and its relationship to antibody levels. They initially find that live-attenuated measles vaccine, known to be effective at inducing prolonged antibody responses has a significant minority of germinal center Tfh (GC-Tfh) with a Th1 phenotype (GC-Tfh1) and then explore whether a prime and boost vaccination strategy designed to induce GC-Tfh1 is effective in the context of anti-HIV vaccination. They demonstrate that a vaccine formulation referred to as MPLA induces higher GC-Tfh1 and link this to increased antibody production.

Strengths:<br /> While there is a lot of literature on Tfh subtypes in blood, how this related to the germinal centers is not always clear. The strength of this paper is that they use a relevant model to allow some longitudinal insight into the detailed events of the germinal center Tfh (GC-Tfh) compartment across time and how this related to antibody production.

Weaknesses:<br /> The authors focus strongly on the proportion of GC-Tfh1 of GC-Tfh. There seems to be an assumption that since the MPLA vaccine has a higher number of GC-Tfh1 that this explains the higher levels of antibodies. This is not an entirely unreasonable assumption but the mechanistic link between the two is never tested.

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

The authors isolated a novel marine Planctomycetes bacterium with unique characteristics using a budding mode of division from the deep-sea cold seep sediment and named it Poriferisphaera heterotrophicis ZRK32. This work demonstrated that strain ZRK32 preferred nutrient-rich medium, moreover, the addition of nitrate or ammonia promoted the growth of strain ZRK32 and further caused the release of bacteriophage without killing the host. These results are interesting, well presented and documented in the revised manuscript.