I've not been here much lately, but here's a bit more about our paper just out in the Journal of Cell Biology, “Presynapses contain distinct actin nanostructures” (Twitter trained me to come up with short titles 🤏 and long threads 🧵, which are also doable in Mastodon I hope)
The article is available here:
https://rupress.org/jcb/article-abstract/222/10/e202208110/276185/Presynapses-contain-distinct-actin1/23
Presynapses contain distinct actin nanostructures | Journal of Cell Biology | Rockefeller University Press
Bingham et al. use bead-induced isolated presynapses and CRISPR-mediated tagging of endogenous actin in neurons coupled to super-resolution microscopy to reveal
I want to highlight the work that went into the revision of the manuscript, crediting the contribution of lab members and collaborators, as well as give an overview of the Review Commons process we used (see
https://www.reviewcommons.org/) 2/23
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Improve your paper and streamline publication through journal-independent peer-review.
We previously shared this work as a bioRxiv preprint in May last year, as the main work of Dominic Bingham who graduated in July 2022 (see Twitter thread:
https://twitter.com/christlet/status/1527183879643201536?s=20) 3/23
Christophe Leterrier on Twitter
“🚌 Next stop on the NeuroCyto lab axonal journey: the presynapse🚏 Ever wondered how is presynaptic actin organized beyond the blobs seen by diffraction-limited microscopy? We certainly did! So why not do some STORM on it? https://t.co/0HFfmgQcm0 (1/6)”
In this work, we used beads to induce isolated presynapses along axons of cultured neurons, making it possible to directly visualize and quantify presynaptic actin without interference from the concentrated postsynaptic actin 4/23
We directly visualized the selective enrichment of actin at presynapses, and could get good SMLM images of presynaptic actin at the nanoscale within bead-induced presynapses 5/23
This led us to define three types of presynaptic actin nanostructures: a faint actin mesh at the active zone, actin rails within the presynapse, and dense perisynaptic actin corrals 6/23
I was curious to try Review Commons and have our work openly reviewed upstream of journal submission so we submitted our preprint there, and the reviews were posted next to the preprint in July 2022 7/23
The reviewers found the work interesting and important, but they wanted 1) more controls about the bead-induced presynapses, 2) better characterization of the actin structures at the nanoscale, and 3) confirmation in “real” synapses between two neurons 8/23
We had 4 weeks to draft a detailed revision plan, then submitted the preprint together with reviews and revision plan to journals of the Review Commons consortium, with assurance they would reply within 10 days that they would consider a revised manuscript for publication 9/23
@christlet Does this mean one can submit revcom reviews to several journals in parallel and than choose in case one gets more than one offer?
Christophe Leterrier 🔬
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