eLife

2 weeks ago | elifesciences.org | Elvis Quiroz |Tianyuan Wang |Xin Xu |Lin Evlin

eLife Assessment This valuable study employed a multi-omics approach to elucidate the regulatory mechanism underlying parturition and myometrial quiescence. The data presented to support the main conclusion are solid. This work will be of interest to both basic researchers who work on reproductive biology and clinicians who practice reproductive medicine.

2 weeks ago | elifesciences.org | Shengze Yao |Yesu Jeon |Barry Kesner |Jeannie Lee

eLife Assessment This valuable study addresses the potential roles of the master regulator of X chromosome inactivation, the Xist long non-coding RNA, in the regulation of autosomal genes. Using data from mouse cells, the authors propose that Xist can coat specific autosomal promoters, which in turn leads to the attenuation of their transcriptional activity. The evidence from individual genes is interesting, and the model aligns with recently published results from humans.

3 weeks ago | elifesciences.org | John Buglino |Yaprak Ozakman |Anna Benjamin |Derek Tan

eLife Assessment In this important study, the authors advance our understanding of copper uptake by chalkophores and their targeted metalloproteins in Mycobacterium tuberculosis. These convincing data demonstrate that chalkophore-acquired copper is solely incorporated into the Mtb bcc:aa3 copper-iron respiratory oxidase under low copper conditions, and that chalkophore-mediated protection of the respiratory chain is critical to Mtb virulence.

3 weeks ago | elifesciences.org | Akiko Saiki-Ishikawa |Mark Agrios |Sajishnu Savya |Adam Forrest

Point-process Granger causality with exogenous temporal modulations (GC Casile et al., 2021) was utilized to assess directional bias in the predictivity of neuronal firing between CFA and RFA. Using GC, predictive models are generated to fit spiking data of a target neuron using the spiking data from the entire neuronal ensemble, both with and without the source neuron. In our conditions, this neural ensemble contains neurons from both CFA and RFA.

4 weeks ago | elifesciences.org | Sarah R Mullinax |Andrea M Darby |Anjali Gupta |Patrick Chan

eLife Assessment This valuable study investigates evolutionary aspects around a single amino acid polymorphism, known to be under long-term balancing selection, in an immune peptide of Drosophila melanogaster. Using alleles with different substitutions, the investigators demonstrate that while one allele provides better survival after systemic infections by a bacterial pathogen, the alternative allele endows its carriers with a longer lifespan under certain conditions.