Thanks for the comment, following are our explanations:
1. As far as the matter of SI units used in our article is concerned, during the review process of our article, we did not receive any suggestion from the editorial board/production team of the journal as there is a common practice to use gm for grams and mM for millimole and so on. So, generally speaking, every journal has its own rules for the use of measurement units. The measurement units that have been used in our paper has also been used in an article that had been published in PNAS in 2009 (Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2009 Aug 18;106(33):13998-4003. See the whole text and table S1 in supporting material).
2. In fact, the misprint of HOME instead of HOMA is a human error. We will request the journal to correct them accordingly.
3. As far as the matter of nature of IL-1Ra used is concerned, it has already been mentioned in the "competing interests" heading of the article (first page of the article). this is the policy of the journal.
4. The number of rats mentioned in the figure legends is acceptable. The number of rats used in our article is also acceptable because it meets the minimum requirements for the use of number of animals for in vivo studies. We can find a huge list of articles in which the number of animals used in individual group is around 5 (Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2009 Aug 18;106(33):13998-4003. and Sci Rep. 2015 Oct 8;5:14872.).
5.Moreover, the serum levels of insulin and glucose that were used for the calculations of HOMA were measured under fasting conditions and it has been clearly mentioned in the last sentence under the heading of "Insulin Sensitivity Determinations".
6. The values mentioned in figure 2 are self explanatory and there was no need to provide the individual values. All parts of the figure 2 (A-F) have been labelled very clearly and significant difference can be seen visually.
7. No one can deny the short biological half-life of IL-1Ra and till now, various strategies have been used to prolong the half-life of IL-1Ra (Pharm Res. 2013 Nov;30(11):2951-66.). The purpose of our study has been clearly mentioned in the last paragraph of introduction section and the results were in consistent with our previous work (Pharm Res. 2012 Dec;29(12):3475-85.).
8. In this article, we used 10 mg/kg)of IL-1Ra that was the half-dose of IL-1Ra that had been used previously used (Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2009 Aug 18;106(33):13998-4003. and Eur J Pharmacol. 2013 Feb 15;701(1-3):87-95.). The results obtained in this study were highly significant than that of the 20 mg/kg dose of IL-1Ra (Table 3 of this article).
9. Here we would also like to state that every research work done in any scientific field particularly related to medicine never claims that there product or agent of focus is best therapeutically and can be used clinically from the very next day. The conclusion is made upon the results obtained and observations made from their work and that is what we have done.
10. The referees and Editor of the journal know their work and they make the author revise and correct their work as they have expertise in the relevant field. The papers publish in this journal undergo an extensive review process where the expert reviewers and the editors critically review and raise constructive comments for the the work done and only publish the papers that are technically sound, however, minor typographical misprints are not technical errors.