PONE-D-22-32078Culicoides jiangchengensis, a new species of the subgenus Sinocoides (Diptera, Ceratopogonidae) based on integrative taxonomy from ChinaPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Wang,

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.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Feb 05 2023 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. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. 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,

Bi-Song Yue, Ph.D

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. Thank you for stating the following in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript:

“This work is supported by grants from the Basic Research Projects of Yunnan Province (grant no. 2019FA015 and 202201AS070062), National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 32260896 and 81960605), Scientific and technological innovation team construction project of Kunming Medical University (grant no. CXTD202111), Projects funded by the central government to guide local scientific and Technological Development (202207AB110006), and Yunnan Chenggong expert workstation (202005AF150034). The funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.”

We note that you have provided funding information that is currently declared in your Funding Statement. However, funding information should not appear in the Acknowledgments section or other areas of your manuscript. We will only publish funding information present in the Funding Statement section of the online submission form.

Please remove any funding-related text from the manuscript and let us know how you would like to update your Funding Statement. Currently, your Funding Statement reads as follows:

“This work is supported by grants from the Basic Research Projects of Yunnan Province (grant no. 2019FA015 and 202201AS070062), National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 32260896 and 81960605), Scientific and technological innovation team construction project of Kunming Medical University (grant no. CXTD202111), Projects funded by the central government to guide local scientific and Technological Development (202207AB110006), and Yunnan Chenggong expert workstation (202005AF150034). The funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.”

Please include your amended statements within your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf.

4. Your ethics statement should only appear in the Methods section of your manuscript. If your ethics statement is written in any section besides the Methods, please move it to the Methods section and delete it from any other section. Please ensure that your ethics statement is included in your manuscript, as the ethics statement entered into the online submission form will not be published alongside your manuscript.

5. Please take this opportunity to be sure you have met all of our guidelines for new species. For proper registration of a new zoological taxon, we require two specific statements to be included in your manuscript.

a. In the Results section, the globally unique identifier (GUID), currently in the form of a Life Science Identifier (LSID), should be listed under the new species name, for example:

Anochetus boltoni Fisher sp. nov. urn:lsid:zoobank.org:act:B6C072CF-1CA6-40C7-8396-534E91EF7FBB

Another LSID for the manuscript itself should also appear within the Nomenclature statement. You will need to contact Zoobank (zoobank.org/About) to obtain a GUID (LSID). You should receive one LSID for your manuscript and a separate, unique LSID for the new species.

b. Please also insert the following text into the Methods section, in a sub-section to be called "Nomenclatural Acts":

The electronic edition of this article conforms to the requirements of the amended International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, and hence the new names contained herein are available under that Code from the electronic edition of this article. This published work and the nomenclatural acts it contains have been registered in ZooBank, the online registration system for the ICZN. The ZooBank LSIDs (Life Science Identifiers) can be resolved and the associated information viewed through any standard web browser by appending the LSID to the prefix "" ext-link-type="uri" xlink:type="simple">http://zoobank.org/". The LSID for this publication is: urn:lsid:zoobank.org:pub: XXXXXXX. The electronic edition of this work was published in a journal with an ISSN, and has been archived and is available from the following digital repositories: PubMed Central, LOCKSS [author to insert any additional repositories].

All PLOS ONE articles are deposited in PubMed Central and LOCKSS. If your institute, or those of your co-authors, has its own repository, we recommend that you also deposit the published online article there and include the name in your article.

Following a recent ruling by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, electronic journals are now a valid format for publication of new zoological taxa. In order to ensure the valid publication of your new species, please be sure to include the updated version of Nomenclatural Acts (above). A complete explanation of our guidelines for publishing new species can be found on our website: http://www.plosone.org/static/guidelines#zoological.

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

Reviewer #3: Partly

Reviewer #4: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: N/A

Reviewer #3: N/A

Reviewer #4: No

**********

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

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: 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: No

Reviewer #3: No

Reviewer #4: 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: Comments:

This manuscript described a new biting midge species from China along with checklist and keys to adult female of the subgenus Sinocoides. The mitochondrial COI sequences were also provided for the new species. Therefore, information present in this study is useful and interesting. Following are my comments and suggestions:

- Abstract, I suggested to modify the first sentence as “Biting midges of the genus Culicoides are medical and veterinary important because ....”

- Abstract, 3rd line, change “The” to “the”

- Abstract, 4th line, remove “both sexes”

- Abstract, 5th line, remove “in detail”

- Abstract, second page, 2nd and 3rd lines, Diptera, Ceratopogonidae should not italic, and remove underline from Culicoides.

- Introduction, 1st line, add “causing agents” after disease, vectors do not carry disease, they carrying disease causing agents.

- Materials and methods, more details of PCR should be provided e.g. primers, reaction conditions. Also, details of PCR product purification and sequencing must be provided. In addition, the details of MEGA-X software analysis must be provided e.g. analysis what? criteria setting for data analysis?

- Diagnosis, I am wondering why “only for Culicoides species in Yunnan”? Why not for Culicoides in other regions? Please explain this.

- Discussion, it will be very useful to add more details of morphological characteristics that a new species is different from previously described species. For examples, “C. jiangchegensis 1 ) without sensory pit in 3rdsegment of palpus; 2 ) sensilla coeloconica on flagellomere 1, 9-13; 3 ) m1 and m2 cell of the wings with pale spots, which were different from the other eight species of culicoides in subgenus Sinocoides, such as C. anthropophygas (with sensory pit in 3rd segment of palpus???, sensilla coeloconica on flagellomere ?????, m1 and m2 cell of the wings with ???? spots,)...” Details of morphological comparison like this should also provide for other species, particularly for morphologically closely related species, C. malipoensis.

- Figure 11, phylogenetic tree, the outgroup species should be included in the phylogenetic analysis. Bootstrap values lower than 50% should not show on the figure.

- English should be check again by native speaker.

Reviewer #2: I think that this type of studies should be published more in taxonomy journals. In this study, the existence of a new Culicoides species, its place in classification and its morphological features were described. Therefore, I think this research paper is not suitable for PLOS ONE.

Reviewer #3: The submitted manuscript provides very interesting and significant results. However, the text is not checked very carefully and it consists of many small technical mistakes. English should be revised. Structure of the manuscript should be modified in the direction to be simple to follow and to read. Descriptions should be given within the regular English structure of sentences. Verbs are missing in the description text.

Specific comments are given below:

Abstract

“blood-sucking feeding habits”: it is not the habit but the blood-feeding regime or haematophagous feeding regime.

The morphological: small letter

culicoides: capital letters. Culicoides should be in italic. If authors wanted to write in English than is biting midges

Genetically, C. jiangchengensis most closely related to C. malipoensis: missing verb ... are most closely related to....

Diptera: Ceratopogonidae: this should not be in italic.

Introduction

that transmit arboviruses .... is enough

This cannot be cited this way “Liu et al. (1990, 1996, 2003)” because first is Liu and Yu and other two are Liu et al.

Same comment as previous for Liu et al. (2006, 2011) and Wu et al. (2018).

Material and methods

august big lletter

Diagnosis: this text should be significantly improved because in this way is very difficult to follow and to read.

Page 13: Please delete redundant space

C.jiangchengensis: here is missing space

Table 2. Abbreviations should be given below the table or in the title

Figure titles are missing spaces

Reviewer #4: This manuscript reports a new species of the biting midge subgenus Sinocoides of the genus Culicoides by using integrative approaches from morphological and molecular evidence. The authors provide detail description and illustrations of the morphological characters of the new species and other described species of the same subgenus. The identification appears to be accurate. In general, the manuscript is technically solid. I made some minor notes in the pdf file of the manuscript. Besides, I suggest the authors provide more details about the molecular phylogenetic analysis. For example, in Material and Methods, please provide how the sampling was designed and what the analytical methods they used for the phylogenetic analysis.

**********

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: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

Reviewer #4: No

**********

[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.

Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: PONE-D-22-32078_reviewer.pdf

PONE-D-22-32078R1Culicoides jiangchengensis, a new species of the subgenus Sinocoides (Diptera, Ceratopogonidae) based on integrative taxonomy from ChinaPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Wang,

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.

In your revision, please address the minor stylistic corrections indicated by reviews 3.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Jun 01 2023 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. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-emailutm_source=authorlettersutm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Ulrike Gertrud Munderloh, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

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. 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

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

**********

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

Reviewer #2: Partly

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: N/A

Reviewer #3: N/A

**********

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

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: 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

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: 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: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: This is a taxonomical study and not suitable for plos one journal. Thetefore it can be published in another associated journal.

Reviewer #3: After I checked again the manuscript I could conclude that authors accepted almost all suggestions and improved the manuscript. Their findings can be considered as significant contribution to the science.

Here are some minor corrections that were missed to be done:

Again Diptera and Ceratopogonidae should not be in italic.

Ceratopogonidae transmit viruses and not one virus. Please correct that in the first sentence of introduction.

Please correct “china” to capital letter

Dallas et al. (2003) should all go into brackets.

culicoides should be in capital letter

**********

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

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

**********

[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.

Culicoides jiangchengensis, a new species of the subgenus Sinocoides (Diptera, Ceratopogonidae) based on integrative taxonomy from China

PONE-D-22-32078R2

Dear Dr. Wang,

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,

Ulrike Gertrud Munderloh, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments: