Movement in low gravity environments (MoLo) programme–The MoLo-L.O.O.P. study protocol

Nolan Herssens; James Cowburn; Kirsten Albracht; Bjoern Braunstein; Dario Cazzola; Steffi Colyer; Alberto E. Minetti; Gaspare Pavei; Jörn Rittweger; Tobias Weber; David A. Green

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0278051

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionJuly 6, 2022
24 Oct 2022 Decision Letter - Luigi Cattaneo, Editor PONE-D-22-19122Movement in Low gravity environments (MoLo) programme – The Molo-L.O.O.P. study protocolPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Herssens, I deeply apologiuze for the delay that characterized the processing of your paper. This was entirely due to the difficulty in securing available reviewers. 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. as you wil see the reviewer is enthusiastic about the work, but with a minor comment. Could you please return a manuscript with a sentence addressing the issue of skipping frequency and the suggested reference. Please not that, of course, the revised version would not go through review, but will undergo an instantaneous editroial evaluation. Please again accept my apologies for the difficulties in manuscript processing. ============================== Please submit your revised manuscript by Dec 08 2022 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: A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'. A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. 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Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols. We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Luigi Cattaneo, MD, PhD Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. 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 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf 2. We note that the grant information you provided in the ‘Funding Information’ and ‘Financial Disclosure’ sections do not match. When you resubmit, please ensure that you provide the correct grant numbers for the awards you received for your study in the ‘Funding Information’ section. 3. We note that you have indicated that data from this study are available upon request. PLOS only allows data to be available upon request if there are legal or ethical restrictions on sharing data publicly. For more information on unacceptable data access restrictions, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-unacceptable-data-access-restrictions. In your revised cover letter, please address the following prompts: a) If there are ethical or legal restrictions on sharing a de-identified data set, please explain them in detail (e.g., data contain potentially sensitive information, data are owned by a third-party organization, etc.) and who has imposed them (e.g., an ethics committee). Please also provide contact information for a data access committee, ethics committee, or other institutional body to which data requests may be sent. b) If there are no restrictions, please upload the minimal anonymized data set necessary to replicate your study findings as either Supporting Information files or to a stable, public repository and provide us with the relevant URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers. For a list of acceptable repositories, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-recommended-repositories. We will update your Data Availability statement on your behalf to reflect the information you provide. 4. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Does the manuscript provide a valid rationale for the proposed study, with clearly identified and justified research questions? The research question outlined is expected to address a valid academic problem or topic and contribute to the base of knowledge in the field. Reviewer #1: Yes ******** 2. Is the protocol technically sound and planned in a manner that will lead to a meaningful outcome and allow testing the stated hypotheses? The manuscript should describe the methods in sufficient detail to prevent undisclosed flexibility in the experimental procedure or analysis pipeline, including sufficient outcome-neutral conditions (e.g. necessary controls, absence of floor or ceiling effects) to test the proposed hypotheses and a statistical power analysis where applicable. As there may be aspects of the methodology and analysis which can only be refined once the work is undertaken, authors should outline potential assumptions and explicitly describe what aspects of the proposed analyses, if any, are exploratory. Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 3. Is the methodology feasible and described in sufficient detail to allow the work to be replicable? Descriptions of methods and materials in the protocol should be reported in sufficient detail for another researcher to reproduce all experiments and analyses. The protocol should describe the appropriate controls, sample size calculations, and replication needed to ensure that the data are robust and reproducible. Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 4. Have the authors described where all data underlying the findings will be made available when the study is complete? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception, at the time of publication. 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 and, if applicable, provide comments about issues authors must address before this protocol can be accepted for publication. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about research or publication ethics. You may also provide optional suggestions and comments to authors that they might find helpful in planning their study. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: The paper describes in details a research protocol to study locomotion and movements in low gravity environments. The manuscript is well written and the topic of great interests. The renewed interest in space exploration is providing new momentum to many research topics, including physio mechanics of locomotion. The introduction is correctly focused on the topics of the investigation and the state of the art. References are sound. As one of the objective would be the estimation of joint reaction forces, maybe it would be worth to take into account the results of McDonnell et al. (2019, Gait & Posture 70, 414-419). The protocol is very well designed. I only have one remark, or one question, about the range of speed and gaits. I noticed that the skipping trials would start at 1.94 m/s, and I'm wondering about the reasons of this choice. At lunar gravity the walk-run transition is estimated at a speed around 1 m/s, and it is known, from previous experiments and from the Apollo missions reports, that when astronauts can't walk, they start skip. It is also true that the walk-skip gait change would imply an abrupt increase of the speed. However, I would have expected a wider range of speed for skipping trials. ****** 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: Yes: Carlo M. Biancardi ******** [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.] 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 PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278051.r001
Revision 1
7 Nov 2022 Author Response Response to Reviewers Editor Comments: 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. 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 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf � We have checked and made some changes to the style of the revised manuscript in order to adhere to the PLOS ONE style requirements. Please note that changes to the formatting have not been highlighted in the revised manuscript. 2. We note that the grant information you provided in the ‘Funding Information’ and ‘Financial Disclosure’ sections do not match. When you resubmit, please ensure that you provide the correct grant numbers for the awards you received for your study in the ‘Funding Information’ section. � We have checked both the “Funding information” and “Financial Disclosure” sections and both sections should now contain the same information. This work was supported by the European Space Agency: ESA contract No. 4000123348/18/NL/MH with the University of Bath; ESA contract DN RFP 3-16782/20/NL/AT MoLo Milano with the University of Applied Sciences Aachen. The "Locomotion On Other Planets (L.O.O.P.): Hypogravity Analogue" of the University of Milan is supported by the European Space Agency as an ESA ground-based facility through the Continuously Open Research Announcement Opportunity for Ground-Based Facilities (ESA-CORA-GBF), ESA contract No. 4000137794/22/NL/PA/pt. This study was funded by CAMERA, the RCUK Centre of the Analysis of Motion, Entertainment Research and Applications, EP/M023281/1. Authors DG and TW are employed by KBR GmbH on behalf of the European Space Agency. The funder KBR GmbH provided support in the form of salaries for the authors DG and TW but did not have any role in the study design, data collection, and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The funders had and will not have a role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. 3. We note that you have indicated that data from this study are available upon request. PLOS only allows data to be available upon request if there are legal or ethical restrictions on sharing data publicly. For more information on unacceptable data access restrictions, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-unacceptable-data-access-restrictions. In your revised cover letter, please address the following prompts: a) If there are ethical or legal restrictions on sharing a de-identified data set, please explain them in detail (e.g., data contain potentially sensitive information, data are owned by a third-party organization, etc.) and who has imposed them (e.g., an ethics committee). Please also provide contact information for a data access committee, ethics committee, or other institutional body to which data requests may be sent. b) If there are no restrictions, please upload the minimal anonymized data set necessary to replicate your study findings as either Supporting Information files or to a stable, public repository and provide us with the relevant URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers. For a list of acceptable repositories, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-recommended-repositories. We will update your Data Availability statement on your behalf to reflect the information you provide. � We have updated the Data Availability statement in the online submission environment to “Yes – any pilot data reported in this submission are fully available.” as the pilot data used to perform the sample size calculations are available as Supporting Information (S1 File). We have also addressed this within the revised cover letter as requested. 4. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. � We have reviewed the reference list and have made the following changes: - We have added the following reference as suggested by Reviewer #1: [40]: McDonnell J, Zwetsloot KA, Houmard J, DeVita P. Skipping has lower knee joint contact forces and higher metabolic cost compared to running. Gait Posture 2019;70:414–9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gaitpost.2019.03.028. - We have removed the following references as the manuscript is still under preparation and is not essential to the figure it is pointing to, as the figure has been made specifically for the protocol submission, and is not included in the paper referred to: Previously: [64] Cowburn J, Serrancolí G, Pavei G, Minetti A, Salo A, Colyer S, et al. The Biomechanical Handbook: a novel computational framework for the estimation of internal musculoskeletal loading in hypogravity. Manuscr Prep 2021. Reviewer #1: Reviewer #1: The paper describes in details a research protocol to study locomotion and movements in low gravity environments. The manuscript is well written and the topic of great interests. The renewed interest in space exploration is providing new momentum to many research topics, including physio mechanics of locomotion. The introduction is correctly focused on the topics of the investigation and the state of the art. References are sound. As one of the objective would be the estimation of joint reaction forces, maybe it would be worth to take into account the results of McDonnell et al. (2019, Gait & Posture 70, 414-419). � Thank you for this comment, we have read the paper the reviewer has referred to and have added a statement discussing the relevant information within the introduction, lines 121-130. The protocol is very well designed. I only have one remark, or one question, about the range of speed and gaits. I noticed that the skipping trials would start at 1.94 m/s, and I'm wondering about the reasons of this choice. At lunar gravity the walk-run transition is estimated at a speed around 1 m/s, and it is known, from previous experiments and from the Apollo missions reports, that when astronauts can't walk, they start skip. It is also true that the walk-skip gait change would imply an abrupt increase of the speed. However, I would have expected a wider range of speed for skipping trials. � Thank you for this comment, we agree with the reviewer that at lunar gravity skipping will be adopted as the gait of choice at lower speeds than the two here analysed. We were forced to address skipping with just those two speeds due to a time restriction (the protocol would be longer of about twenty minutes) and also the knowledge that at 1, 0.7 and 0.5 g the skipping gait at 1.39 m/s is not that natural and meaningful. However, we will do our best to add the 1.39 m/s acquisition to Moon and Mars gravity, according to this right suggestion and in order to collect more interesting data. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278051.r002
9 Nov 2022 Decision Letter - Luigi Cattaneo, Editor Movement in Low gravity environments (MoLo) programme – The MoLo-L.O.O.P. study protocol PONE-D-22-19122R1 Dear Dr. Herssens, 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, Luigi Cattaneo, MD, PhD Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278051.r003
Formally Accepted
14 Nov 2022 Acceptance Letter - Luigi Cattaneo, Editor PONE-D-22-19122R1 Movement in low gravity environments (MoLo) programme – The MoLo-L.O.O.P. study protocol Dear Dr. Herssens: 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. Luigi Cattaneo Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278051.r004

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