PONE-D-21-19124

Virulence and antimicrobial resistance profile of non-typhoidal Salmonella enterica serovars recovered from poultry processing environments at wet markets in Dhaka, Bangladesh

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Samad,

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Kumar Venkitanarayanan, DVM, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

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Comments to the Author

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Partly

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

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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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: This manuscript outlines the prevalence, serovar identification, virulence and antimicrobial resistance profile typing of non-typhoidal Salmonella enterica isolated from poultry processing environments of wet markets in Dhaka. Specifically, the samples were collected from dressing water, chopping board and knives, which are potential abiotic routes for Salmonella entry during preharvest processing of poultry meat. The information provided by the authors would be beneficial to categorize the prevalence of Salmonella in poultry production systems and consider to use to data to enforce food safety precautionary measures to reduce the incidence of foodborne Salmonella outbreaks. This information is highly relevant for food safety and public health experts.

However, the manuscript requires a lot editing and revision as there were a lot of issues related grammatical structure and phrasing in the scientific context. I would highly recommend that the authors make of use of professional language editing and copyediting services to improve the presentation of the manuscript overall.

In addition, the authors should also improve the description in the statistical analysis section. In this section, the authors may consider to describe this in the following order - the kind of data generated from this study (percent prevalence, MAR index, etc., ), the tests used, the way the data is expressed (mean +/- SD or SE), statistical test chosen for analyzing each data type, the level of significance and then finally the statistical software that was used.

In the methods section, I would suggest that the authors describe more about how the MAR index calculation is performed apart from providing the reference for the method. Also, how was this data analyzed in the current study?

Reviewer #2: General Comments: The authors did a great job in determining the virulence and pathogenicity of Salmonella isolated from wet markets. however, the manuscript was poorly written with many sentences either copied and pasted or rearranged from another article published by the same author.

Specific comments:

1. Introduction:

a. There were numerous grammatical errors throughout the manuscript

b. Several statements were mentioned repeatedly. For example: Poultry as a source of Salmonella infections has been repeatedly mentioned

c. Lines 92 -103: Plagiarism noted from another article from the same author

2. Materials and Methods

a. Please explain the number of samples collected per site. Were samples collected on a single visit for each of the site?

b. Figure 1, Title should explain the inset and the pointers marked in the figure

c. Plagiarism- Lines 149-150, 156 – 160

d. Table 1: Please include the target gene names

e. Please explain MAR

3. Results

a. It would be better to represent Figure 2A-C as a table with the percentage of resistance.

b. sul3 gene was detected in both KS and CBS. Please correct line 279

c. Please explain “There was a strong correlation exist among the virulence genes in CDW, CBS, and KS (p < 0.05)” (line 293). It would be better to give figure 4 as a table as it is difficult to understand the results and, to identify the correlation between samples.

4. Discussion

a. Please rewrite the discussion section to contain only relevant data pertaining to the results.

b. 416- 419-Plagiarism noted

c. Please add reference for the statement Line 475

d. Line 344 – “Furthermore, China and some European countries detected S. Enteritidis and S. Typhimurium as the most prevalent serotypes” Did not explain from where they detected the serotypes.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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Virulence and antimicrobial resistance profile of non-typhoidal Salmonella enterica serovars recovered from poultry processing environments at wet markets in Dhaka, Bangladesh

PONE-D-21-19124R1

Dear Dr. Samad,

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.

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Kind regards,

Kumar Venkitanarayanan, DVM, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE