Major Advances. Expert Opinions.

He explains that: "This is a comprehensive study that makes use of several pharmacological properties of nicotine for which the authors demonstrate the selective participation of endogenous cannabinoids and CB1 receptors in nicotine abuse-related behaviors."
and perhaps most importantly that "This finding has relevance for new drug development and for new therapeutic approaches to the treatment of tobacco abuse."

Read the comments in full here.

"Now that the lives of scientists are so badly dominated by the journal impact factors, I think that it is really important to highlight interesting and significant papers, irrespectively of where they are published. F1000 is doing a great job at that."

Anna has been a Faculty Member of the Cell Biology Faculty since 2006. Of the service, she says that "[it] helps my research in several ways... F1000 Biology alerts are very helpful for finding interesting, and sometimes extremely useful papers, often outside of my own specific field. This is my favourite feature of the service. I must confess that writing an evaluation for F1000 every month or so has made me much more disciplined in following new literature."

Anna's own research centres around cytoskeletal organisation and trafficking processes, which contribute to cell polarisation, differentiation, vertebrate development and human disease. She notes that "One of the main topics of our research is the structure and function of microtubule plus-end tracking proteins - a group of factors that associate specifically with the growing microtubule ends, regulate microtubule dynamics and their interactions with various cellular structures. We also study the mechanisms of targeting of microtubule-based motors to membrane organelles and the signalling pathways, which control motor activity."

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Leonard and Gary point out that "Despite the relevance of the concept of surprise or unexpectedness for sensory processing, few analytical tools were available to manipulate this concept in a practical way. The authors hypothesized that the firing rate of some higher-level auditory neurons is proportional to the level of surprise of the stimulus." Commenting on the value of this article, they note that "Although the idea that higher brain regions encode more abstract features of the stimulus is not new, this paper has the merit of providing a useful analytical tool to test this idea." [See full evaluation]

The technical advance presented by these authors paves the way for future studies to model neural responses in other poorly understood sensory areas.

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