Transfer Alert

This paper was transferred from another journal. As a result, its full editorial history (including decision letters, peer reviews and author responses) may not be present.

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Dear Fisun,

Thank you very much for submitting your Research Article entitled 'Cell elimination strategies upon identity switch via modulation of apterous in Drosophila wing disc' to PLOS Genetics. Your manuscript, transferred and revsied from PLoS Biology, was evaluated at the editorial level and has been seen by one of the four initial reviewers. This reviewer supported publication but identified some minor aspects of the manuscript that should be improved.

We therefore ask you to modify the manuscript according to the review recommendations before we can consider your manuscript for acceptance. Your revisions should address the specific points made by this reviewer.

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PLOS Genetics

Gregory P. Copenhaver

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Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Authors:

Please note here if the review is uploaded as an attachment.

Reviewer #1: The manuscript has improved and povides now interesting complementary quantifications. The manuscript is well written, the message is clear and supported by very carefull experiments. It illustrates the plasticity of the elimination processes used to get rid of misspecified cells. At this stage, I will therefore support publication. I only have few minor comments that may lead to text editing:

- line 381 "we wonder whether the size of the mutant clones or the tension...", I guess the authors should quote here the paper from Beilmeier and colleagues (Curr Biol 2016), otherwhise it is difficult to see where the rational comes from.

- line 424-427: " reduction of clone size does not increase the clone recovery rate" : actually I would have expected the contrary (reduction of clone size leading to a reduction of recovery rate), with a constant rate of apoptosis, if proliferation is reduced one would expect more clone disappearance. It is very interesting that the authors don't observe that. Maybe the authors should explain why they were expecting an increase of the recovery rate upon clone size reduction ?

- Discussion line 510-511: When refering to apoptosis occuring in and outside the clones, maybe the authors could quote the work from Piddini E and Vincent JP (Dev Cell 2011) showing that activation of Wg in clones can trigger apoptosis in the neighbouring cells.

- Methods: It would be good to give a bit more of details on the quantifications (measurement of clone area, determination of the location of the sibbling clones and of the category of elimination...)

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Reviewer #1: Yes

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Reviewer #1: No

Dear Dr Fisun Hamaratoglu,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript entitled "Cell elimination strategies upon identity switch via modulation of apterous in Drosophila wing disc" has been editorially accepted for publication in PLOS Genetics. Congratulations!

Before your submission can be formally accepted and sent to production you will need to complete our formatting changes, which you will receive in a follow up email. Please be aware that it may take several days for you to receive this email; during this time no action is required by you. Please note: the accept date on your published article will reflect the date of this provisional accept, but your manuscript will not be scheduled for publication until the required changes have been made.

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Thank you again for supporting open-access publishing; we are looking forward to publishing your work in PLOS Genetics!

Yours sincerely,

François Schweisguth

Guest Editor

PLOS Genetics

Gregory P. Copenhaver

Editor-in-Chief

PLOS Genetics

www.plosgenetics.org

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Comments from the reviewers (if applicable):

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Data Deposition

If you have submitted a Research Article or Front Matter that has associated data that are not suitable for deposition in a subject-specific public repository (such as GenBank or ArrayExpress), one way to make that data available is to deposit it in the Dryad Digital Repository. As you may recall, we ask all authors to agree to make data available; this is one way to achieve that. A full list of recommended repositories can be found on our website.

The following link will take you to the Dryad record for your article, so you won't have to re‐enter its bibliographic information, and can upload your files directly: 

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