Preserving cultural heritage: Analyzing the antifungal potential of ionic liquids tested in paper restoration

Kevin Schmitz; Sebastian Wagner; Manfred Reppke; Christian Ludwig Maier; Elisabeth Windeisen-Holzhauser; J. Philipp Benz

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0219650

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionJune 25, 2019
7 Aug 2019 Decision Letter - Binod Bihari Sahu, Editor PONE-D-19-17935 Preserving cultural heritage: Analyzing the antifungal potential of ionic liquids tested in paper restoration PLOS ONE Dear M.Sc. Schmitz, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. We would appreciate receiving your revised manuscript by Sep 21 2019 11:59PM. When you are ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. 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Thank you for stating the following in the Financial Disclosure section: This research was partly funded by the Nitrochemie Aschau GmbH (https://www.nitrochemie.com/en/nitrochemie_group/home.php). Christian L. Maier is an employee of this company, supplied the ionic liquids used in this study and was involved in data interpretation and manuscript proof reading. The study design was nevertheless independent of any influence by the company. We note that you received funding from a commercial source:Nitrochemie Aschau GmbH a) Please provide an amended statement that declares all the funding or sources of support (whether external or internal to your organization) received during this study, as detailed online in our guide for authors at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submit-now. Please also include the statement “There was no additional external funding received for this study.” in your updated Funding Statement. Please include your amended Funding Statement within your cover letter. 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Please note that we cannot proceed with consideration of your article until this information has been declared.Please know it is PLOS ONE policy for corresponding authors to declare, on behalf of all authors, all potential competing interests for the purposes of transparency. PLOS defines a competing interest as anything that interferes with, or could reasonably be perceived as interfering with, the full and objective presentation, peer review, editorial decision-making, or publication of research or non-research articles submitted to one of the journals. Competing interests can be financial or non-financial, professional, or personal. Competing interests can arise in relationship to an organization or another person. Please follow this link to our website for more details on competing interests: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/competing-interests [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: I Don't Know ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: The manuscript presented by Schmitz entitled " Preserving cultural heritage: Analyzing the antifungal potential of ionic liquids tested in paper restoration " can be accepted after clarification of the following points: 1. The experiments are performed taking DMSO as the medium which itself shows zwiterionic properties and bear a appreciable value of polarity. So inorder to understand the effects of the planted Ionic liquids, other solvent mediums like ethanol, acetone, ethers may be done in presence of ionic liquids. Also blank tests in these solvents have to be done and reported with comparisons with DMSO. 2. The authors have presented a model of the spatial orientation of the ionic liquid, solvent on cellular fibres on paper in Fig.2. The logical design may be explained clearly. Reviewer #2: Paper is good and very much applied aspects. It definitely, open a new area of research in the field of conservation work. But, personally, I feel if there is scope for modification, specially in discussion section. ****** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review?** For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: Yes: Debayan Sarkar Reviewer #2: Yes: Ramesh Sahani [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files to be viewed.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email us at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0219650.r001
Revision 1
21 Aug 2019 Author Response To the editor: We have made the amended formal changes and included required statements in the Funding and Competing Interest sections as requested (Editor Requests 1-3). ------------------ To the reviewers: We would like to gratefully thank you for your kind appreciation of our work and for your critical review of our article "Preserving cultural heritage: Analyzing the antifungal potential of ionic liquids tested in paper restoration". We value your constructive remarks and would like to respond to them point-by-point in the following: To reviewer #1: "The manuscript presented by Schmitz entitled "Preserving cultural heritage: Analyzing the antifungal potential of ionic liquids tested in paper restoration" can be accepted after clarification of the following points: 1. The experiments are performed taking DMSO as the medium which itself shows zwitterionic properties and bear a appreciable value of polarity. So in order to understand the effects of the planted Ionic liquids, other solvent mediums like ethanol, acetone, ethers may be done in presence of ionic liquids. Also blank tests in these solvents have to be done and reported with comparisons with DMSO." Answer: We highly appreciate your constructive suggestions. However, as the original process, in which our ILs are applied, involves initial solubilization and subsequent precipitation of cellulose onto printed document surfaces, we are tightly limited in terms of the solvents we can use. Ethanol and acetone, for example, do not facilitate solubilization of cellulose fibers and strongly impair legibility of the treated documents due solubilization of the ink. We would also like to clarify that DMSO was only used as a solvent for Clotrimazole and 1-Butyl-3-Methylimidazolium chloride (both solid at room temperature), while the other ionic liquids were applied as pure liquids (without the need for additional solvents during potency assessment in this study). In order to clarify the methodological sequence for the reader, we made some amendments in the methods section. Moreover, a blank test of the antifungal activity of DMSO had already been included in the initial antifungal activity screening (Figure 3 A, B). Overall, we therefore do not think that additional tests with further solvents would give relevant results that could actually be used in the process. "2. The authors have presented a model of the spatial orientation of the ionic liquid, solvent on cellular fibers on paper in Fig.2. The logical design may be explained clearly." Answer: We believe that the reviewer is actually referring to Figure 1 and – after reconsideration - agree with the reviewer that the initial illustration was partially misleading in terms of how the ionic liquid and DMSO entities were positioned. We have therefore now adapted the figure including its figure legend accordingly. We believe that the figure is now more accurately representing the process. To reviewer #2: Paper is good and very much applied aspects. It definitely open a new area of research in the field of conservation work. But, personally, I feel if there is scope for modification, especially in discussion section." Answer: We have gladly modified the discussion section and hope to have improved it by doing so. Firstly, we have re-arranged the discussion paragraphs to better mirror the presentation sequence of the results. We believe that this allows a better orientation for the reader and hence could benefit the level of comprehensiveness. We have rearranged the last bit of the first paragraph (i) to bring the sections discussing the correlation of IL potency and IL structure closer together in the text and (ii) to be able to discuss the long-term stability of the antifungal activity in the broader context of the paper-based application. We furthermore included a statement in the second paragraph that points out the necessity for further studies on the contribution of non-polar group size and structure to the respective antifungal activity of an ionic liquid – as was done in the third paragraph as well. Lastly, we extended the second-to-last paragraph. We aimed at putting stronger emphasis on the proposed future directions for research on biotic preservation implementation in paper restoration processes. Additional minor modifications were made to improve overall readability and to clarify certain statements. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response To Reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0219650.r002
27 Aug 2019 Decision Letter - Binod Bihari Sahu, Editor [EXSCINDED] Preserving cultural heritage: Analyzing the antifungal potential of ionic liquids tested in paper restoration PONE-D-19-17935R1 Dear Dr. Schmitz, We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it complies with all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you will receive an e-mail containing information on the amendments required prior to publication. When all required modifications have been addressed, you will receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will proceed to our production department and be scheduled for publication. Shortly after the formal acceptance letter is sent, an invoice for payment will follow. To ensure an efficient production and billing process, please log into Editorial Manager at https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the "Update My Information" link at the top of the page, and update your user information. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to enable them to help maximize its impact. If they will be preparing press materials for this manuscript, you must inform our press team as soon as possible and no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. With kind regards, Binod Bihari Sahu, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed ******** 2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: The suggested corrections with details have been incorporated. The paper can be accepted for publication. ****** 7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review?** For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0219650.r003
Formally Accepted
9 Sep 2019 Acceptance Letter - Binod Bihari Sahu, Editor PONE-D-19-17935R1 Preserving cultural heritage: Analyzing the antifungal potential of ionic liquids tested in paper restoration Dear Dr. Schmitz: I am pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper at this point, to enable them to help maximize its impact. If they will be preparing press materials for this manuscript, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. For any other questions or concerns, please email plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE. With kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Binod Bihari Sahu Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0219650.r004

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