Peer Review History

Original SubmissionMay 26, 2021
Decision Letter - Jeong-Sun Seo, Editor

PONE-D-21-17430

Signal-based optical map alignment

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Mehmet Akdel,

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PLOS ONE

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"This work is part of the Open Technology Programme with project number 14516,

(partly) financed by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO),

domain Applied and Engineering Sciences, and supported by Bayer CropScience NV,

Genetwister Technologies BV, Rijk Zwaan BV and SESVanderHave NV. Yeast optical

map data was generated in a ZonMW Enabling Technologies Hotels project (435002001)."

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"This work is supported by the research programme "High-throughput haplotyping using optical mapping" with grant number TTW 14516, which is financed by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO, https://www.nwo.nl). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript."

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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

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

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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

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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

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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: In this manuscript, authors have developed signal-based tools to extract (OptiScan) and analyze (OptiMap) data from raw image data generated with BioNano Genomics devices. These tools generally perform better than the softwares produced by the manufacturer. However, as the authors also have pointed out, OptiMap and RefAligner are methodologically different and can be combined to achieve better performance.

Although optical mapping has a not short history, the development of its analysis tool has not been much. Also, as this manuscript shows, there is a lot of room for analytical improvement. Therefore, this manuscript will contribute to broadening the scope of genomics research in accordance with this principle. But overall, there are some parts that are lacking in detailed explanation, and those are listed below.

1. Fig. 5 is not used in the text.

2. The authors used signal intensities to measure the real length between the peaks. Do the signal intensities from the peaks also reflect the number of cut sites in the pixel?

3. The alignment was iterated 20 times to compare OptiMap and RefAligner. Is this done on the same references with the same molecules?

4. In “For RefAligner, we chose 10 × 10^10 for the maximum p − value threshold”, What does this mean? How was p-value calculated for this?

5. What is (¿125 kb) in the “OptiMap performs better all-round” section?

6. In “ For OptiMap (dense mode), we used a score threshold of t = 0.65 for the naive mode (first round) and 0.55 for the sparse mode (second round)”, what does “t” mean?

7. Are the graphs in Fig 10 made with Optiscan or BGN (Are the data stretched)?

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Reviewer #1: No

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Revision 1

Dear Editor,

We thank the reviewer for their comments and suggestions. We believe the revisions made in response to these suggestions have improved the clarity of the manuscript. Please find below a point-by-point response to the comments. The changes are marked red in the manuscript.

* Reviewer's comment: Fig. 5 is not used in the text.

We thank the reviewer for picking this up. We intended to mention the figure in the text under the "Naive mode" and "Sparse overlap mode" sections. We have now added references to Fig. 5 (A, B and C) in the text (lines 199, 223, 226).

* Reviewer's comment: The authors used signal intensities to measure the real length between the peaks. Do the signal intensities from the peaks also reflect the number of cut sites in the pixel?

This is a good observation. We previously studied the relationship between peak height and the number of labels in the same pixel, however we could only find a low correlation. We trained a logistic regression model on a window centered on peaks to predict whether it contained single dual labels (one or two cuts/labels within a pixel). The model's precision was 63% at a recall of 43%. Some possible explanations of the low performance can be that the peak intensities have a high level of noise and/or there are more factors involved in peak height, such as surrounding sequence or local DNA structure. Further analysis is needed for a clearer view on this relationship. We have now added some sentences suggesting that further study is needed to look into what different patterns of peaks mean (lines 320-321).

* Reviewer's comment: The alignment was iterated 20 times to compare OptiMap and RefAligner. Is this done on the same references with the same molecules?

A random set of references (with corresponding molecules) as selected at each of 20 total iterations. We realise that this was not clear from the text. We have now changed the wording (lines 349-351).

* Reviewer's comment: In “For RefAligner, we chose 10 × 10^10 for the maximum p − value threshold”, What does this mean? How was p-value calculated for this?

We thank the reviewer for bringing this up. The score threshold had a typo and should have p < 10^-10; and we have now fixed this in the text (line 348). For the second part of the question, we could not find any literature or software manual on how the p was calculated by the Bionano Genomics software (RefAligner).

* Reviewer's comment: What is (¿125 kb) in the “OptiMap performs better all-round” section?

This was a typo and now changed to >125kb (line 349).

* Reviewer's comment: In “ For OptiMap (dense mode), we used a score threshold of t = 0.65 for the naive mode (first round) and 0.55 for the sparse mode (second round)”, what does “t” mean?

We tried to explain as score threshold in text here:

"We designate a pair of molecules as an aligning pair if the score S is above the threshold (t, default 0.60) and discard the remaining pairs."

However, we think that this was confusing and we replaced altogether and used the following notation: "S>0.65" throughout the paper to denote score threshold (lines 208, 229, 237, 243, 346, 347, 357).

* Reviewer's comment: Are the graphs in Fig 10 made with Optiscan or BGN (Are the data stretched)?

We thank the reviewer for their attention to the figure. The figures were made from the perspective of Optimap, after linear stretching, as it shows where Optimap goes wrong (Fig 10 B.: in the top example there is local stretching just after 200bp and in the bottom example after 150bp). This is now explained in the figure caption.

Attachments
Attachment
Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.pdf
Decision Letter - Jeong-Sun Seo, Editor

Signal-based optical map alignment

PONE-D-21-17430R1

Dear Dr. Mehmet Akdel,

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.

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Kind regards,

Jeong-Sun Seo

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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

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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 authors have appropriately addressed all of my comments. Hence, I would like to recommend this manuscript to be accepted.

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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

Formally Accepted
Acceptance Letter - Jeong-Sun Seo, Editor

PONE-D-21-17430R1

Signal-based optical map alignment

Dear Dr. Akdel:

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.

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Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access.

Kind regards,

PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff

on behalf of

Dr. Jeong-Sun Seo

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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