Peer Review History
| Original SubmissionJanuary 9, 2021 |
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PONE-D-21-00863 De novo assembly of the freshwater prawn Macrobrachium carcinus brain transcriptome for identification of potential targets to develop antibodies specific for crustacean neural structure and function markers. PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Sosa, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it is a nice contribution to the field, but does yet 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. Please submit your revised manuscript by Mar 21 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're 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. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:
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The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and 2. Please include captions for your Supporting Information files at the end of your manuscript, and update any in-text citations to match accordingly. Please see our Supporting Information guidelines for more information: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/supporting-information [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: N/A Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 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: No ********** 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: Review of PONE-D-21-00863 De novo assembly of the freshwater prawn Machrobrachium carcinus brain transcriptome for identification of potential targets to develop antibodies specific for crustacean neural structure and function markers Authors: Crooke-Rosado et al. Corresponding author: Maria A. Sosa Summary. This manuscript is a very important but straight-forward contribution describing the generation of a transcriptome from the brain of a prawn, and the detection of five glutamate receptor transcripts with homologies to known arthropod and mammalian sequences. The work described makes a significant contribution to our knowledge about glutamate receptors crustacean species, and alludes to the production of antibodies and localization efforts that are now underway based on the transcriptome analysis presented. I enjoyed reading this paper very much! The presentation of this transcriptome work is clear and accessible. The motivations for pursuing this work (use of crustacean species as bioindicators, lack of transcriptomic information about the nervous system and particularly glutamate receptors) are clearly articulated in the introduction. The seven figures are thoughtfully composed to illustrate the results of their analysis, and Figures 3-7 present the glutamine receptor contig sequence data, antigenic propensity values and 3D reconstruction models. The text is exceptionally well organized, and is written using smooth and direct language. I have no major criticisms of this manuscript, but do have a few suggestions for improvement, enumerated below. 1. The title seems long and cumbersome. I suggest perhaps “De novo assembly of the freshwater prawn Macrobrachium carcinus brain transcriptome for identification of potential targets for antibody development”. I think the rest of the original title is actually implicit ---if antibodies are being generated against M. carcinus sequences from brain, these antibodies will by definition be useful as markers in the nervous system. 2. Although glutamate is often referred to as an “excitatory neurotransmitter”, this is actually a misnomer because the effect of a transmitter is defined by the receptor ---not the transmitter. As one example provided in this manuscript, the GluR4 receptor has some inhibitory effects. I suggest rewording “excitatory neurotransmitter” (found on lines 101 and 394), e.g., generally involved in excitatory influences. 3. I believe that the models in part D of Figures 3-7 actually describe the tertiary structure of these contig sequences (not secondary structure as stated in the text and legends), because folds indicative of the side chain interactions are indicated. Minor editorial suggestions: Line 54: constituents “of” (not to) Line 86: American lobster (“American” should be capitalized) Line 92: “…and pigment-dispersing hormone” (“the” is awkward here) Lines 105-108: This sentence is long and difficult to read. How about “Feinstein and colleagues….presynaptic membranes of neuromuscular junctions in the crayfish Procambarus clarkii, using electron microscopy and immunocytochemistry with both monoclonal and polyclonal antibodies against the mammalian NMDA receptor.” Line 110: “specific in the thoracic appendages” (not “at”) Line 131: “continuously filtered” Line144: “filter cartridge” does not need to be capitalized Line 165: “related to” (rather than “with”) Line 187: “…markers in the prawn CNS and neuromuscular junction…” Line 211: “a total…was annotated” Line 220: “associated with” (not “to”) Line 239: “which contigs” (not “what”) Line 251: “when examined individually” (not “looked”) Line 252: “above 1, are predicted to elicit” Line 265: I suggest that after the comment “showing 6 determinants”, you might include in parenthesis “(peaks in graph)” for those who are not familiar with these plots. Line 270: “shows reliable sequence conservation” (remove “a”) Line 341: “European” and “Indian” should be capitalized. Line 379: use present tense here? “…this is the first study that reports genomic information” Line 392: “on identifying” (rather than “in”) Line 397: “…about glutamate receptor distribution and localization…” (possessive not necessary) Line 406: “Xenopus laevis” ?? Line 430: “…and their most potent agonist…” (should be plural, “their”) Line 438: This needs clarification, as it’s not clear what a “mammalian-raised” antibody is. I believe you are trying to say “…using an antibody raised against the mammalian form of the receptor…” Line 440: “This provides the advantage…” Line 443: “increasing the reproducibility of labeling.” Line 444: “With the transcriptome contribution and the availability…” Reviewer #2: This manuscript describes the generation of a transcriptome from the brain of a species of crustacean, the freshwater prawn Macrobrachium carcinus. The authors nicely frame the relevance of their work for their own interests, which is to use sequences of metabotropic and ionotropic glutamate receptors to generate antibodies to examine changes in patterns of expression of these receptors in the brain that are associated with environmental changes and perturbations. I have three major and important comments, all of which the authors should be able to add or clarify in order to round out the paper. Major Comments 1. Methods: Need more detail about the tissue used in generating the transcriptome. a. Was only one transcriptome generated? (Why not more than one, for statistical purposes?) b. How many animals were used? c. Why use males only? (what might be the consequences of this with respect to capturing of the glutamate receptors of interest?) d. What about conditions of the animals used? (size and weight? molt stage? how long were they in the lab after capture in the wild before being used)? e. It is stated that “brain ganglia” were collected, but what is meant by this? Supraesophageal ganglion? No subesophageal ganglion? Eyestalks with all ganglion and retina? All nerve roots including circumesophageal connectives? 2. Give more information about the intent of the study, especially about the desired specificity of the antibodies and whether the methods have achieved that. a. It is stated variously that what is desired is “specific antibodies” or “crustacean specific antibodies.” Does the former mean “species specific antibodies”? If either of these, then the method for deciding what amino acid sequences to use may be inadequate. For example, for the antibody for the mGluR1 in Figure 3, the 15-amino acid sequence used for antibody production is identical or virtually so (14 or 15 of the amino acids are identical) in the other three species compared – one other crustacean and two insects. So at best this might be considered a pancrustacean specific antibody, and possibility even less specific than this if the sequence is compared more broadly. For the antibody for mGluR4 in Figure 4, a comparison is made between the sequence for Macrobrachium and three mammals (rodents and primates), with no comparisons of crustaceans, insects, or any other protostomes. So while the sequence similarity between the 15-amino acid sequence used to generate the antibody in Macrobrachium carcinus is relatively dissimilar to the other three sequences, it is impossible to say anything about species-specificity or crustacean-specificity without comparing the Macrobrachium to other crustaceans and insects. And those comparators are available, such as for the other Macrobrachium species with published genomes and transcriptomes, for two other decapod crustaceans in Northcutt et al. 2016 (as cited by the authors), and other crustaceans with sequences in publically available databases. The same applies to the other three GluRs in Macrobrachium, which are compared to only either 3 insect species (Figs. 5 and 6) or three mammal species (Fig. 7). Given this, then while it is clear that there is optimization to produce antibodies that are effective in identifying the receptors of interest in this species, it is not at all clear if the antibodies will be species specific (compared to other crustacean species) or crustacean specific (compared to other pancrustaceans or beyond). In fact, given that there are numerous antibodies to GluRs publicly available, mostly generated to mammalian GluRs, whether these other antibodies would work on Macrobrachium or what might be the relative specificities is not really addressed. Again, I want to emphasize that the approach of the authors is perfectly reasonable to generate antibodies to Macrobrachium carcinus, which I think is the authors’ main goal. However, the authors also mention an interest in making “specific” or “crustacean specific” antibodies, but their methodology does not really make it possible to predict how specific (e.g. species or crustacean specific) their antibodies will be. b. The authors might mention that their results could be used not only for generating antibodies, but also for generating nucleotide sequences as probes for in situ hybridization. Given the large number of receptors of interest, in situ hybridization could be another method, possibly even more efficient method, to describe changing patterns of express of receptors of interest due to environmental influences. 3. Data availability: the authors state that their data are available in the manuscript and as supplemental data. But they really need to make their data available in more accessible forms, that is, public databases, as is expected from published work. Besides the usual databases that the authors know about, another database of special relevance to the authors is CrustyBase (https://crustybase.org/). Please make the entire transcriptome available, not just these GluR sequences. Minor Comments Line 56: “destroying” is not the correct word Line 63: This reads “The depth of the studies characteristic specificity….is a current research focus.” This does not make sense. Perhaps delete “The depth of the studies”? Line 75: “SNPs” not “SNP’s” Line 86: “American” not “American” Line 110: should be spelled “amphitrite” Line 123: “spp.” should not be italicized Daphnia is called a “microcrustacean.” It is small, but what is most relevant is its phylogeny relative to the other species. The authors should use modern phylogenetic terms – perhaps using Schwentner et al. 2017 Current Biology or some other scheme. Daphnia should be called a cladoceran or branchiopod. Line 316: “Indian jumping ant” (capital "I") ********** 6. 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| Revision 1 |
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De novo assembly of the freshwater prawn Macrobrachium carcinus brain transcriptome for identification of potential targets for antibody development. PONE-D-21-00863R1 Dear Dr. Sosa, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. 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 help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- 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. Kind regards, Irene Söderhäll Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: |
| Formally Accepted |
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PONE-D-21-00863R1 De novo assembly of the freshwater prawn Macrobrachium carcinus brain transcriptome for identification of potential targets for antibody development. Dear Dr. Sosa: I'm 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 let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, 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. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Irene Söderhäll Academic Editor PLOS ONE |
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