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As well as the usual crop of interesting evaluations this week (see our Facebook page for some free links) there have been a couple of comments about papers and their evaluations.

David Enard of Stanford University responds to an evaluation of his own paper, Human and non-human primate genomes share hotspots of positive selection^{10.1371/journal.pgen.1000840}. In essence, Mike Eisen and Devin Scannell wonder about the null hypothesis in Enard’s report of ‘positive selection hotspots’ shared among humans and other primates. Enard explains why the ‘coldspot’ model cannot hold in this case.

Another controversy appears to be brewing over lactate and acidosis in brain tissue. Yuri Zilberter in Marseille doesn’t quite agree with the assessment of Faculty Member Yehezkel Ben-Ari of a paper in J Neurosci, Spontaneous network events driven by depolarizing GABA action in neonatal hippocampal slices are not attributable to deficient mitochondrial energy metabolism^{10.1523/​JNEUROSCI.3355-10.2010}.

Now, this is a very long way from my own expertise, but my eye was caught by Zilberter’s comment that “in the absence of glucose lactate is fully capable of maintaining synaptic function in vitro and, importantly, in vivo”. And that is interesting, because I’ve just been reading about astrocytes, and how lactate is actually a necessary energy source, and is essential for long-term memory formation. There’ll be more about that in an up-coming issue of The Scientist.

With that, I’d like to say thanks to all F1000 Members and contributors, and have a great weekend!