Transfer Alert

This paper was transferred from another journal. As a result, its full editorial history (including decision letters, peer reviews and author responses) may not be present.

PONE-D-23-27369Bacteria-mediated green synthesis of nano-silver particles and their anti-fungal potentials against Aspergillus flavusPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Hajare,

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 Dec 14 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,

Arumugam Sundaramanickam, 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. Note from Emily Chenette, Editor in Chief of PLOS ONE, and Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, Director of Open Research Solutions at PLOS: Did you know that depositing data in a repository is associated with up to a 25% citation advantage (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0230416)? If you’ve not already done so, consider depositing your raw data in a repository to ensure your work is read, appreciated and cited by the largest possible audience. You’ll also earn an Accessible Data icon on your published paper if you deposit your data in any participating repository (https://plos.org/open-science/open-data/#accessible-data)

3. We noticed you have some minor occurrence of overlapping text with the following previous publication(s), which needs to be addressed:

https://journals.asm.org/doi/pdf/10.1128/am.25.2.319-321.1973

In your revision ensure you cite all your sources (including your own works), and quote or rephrase any duplicated text outside the methods section. Further consideration is dependent on these concerns being addressed.

4. Thank you for stating the following financial disclosure: 

"NO"

At this time, please address the following queries:

a) Please clarify the sources of funding (financial or material support) for your study. List the grants or organizations that supported your study, including funding received from your institution. 

b) State what role the funders took in the study. If the funders had no role in your study, please state: “The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.”

c) If any authors received a salary from any of your funders, please state which authors and which funders.

d) If you did not receive any funding for this study, please state: “The authors received no specific funding for this work.”

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

5. 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.

6. 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.

Additional Editor Comments:

ACADEMIC EDITOR:I have carefully reviewed your submission and would like to offer some feedback based on the Submission Guidelines. It is essential to ensure that your manuscript complies with the provided guidelines to enhance the quality and suitability of your work for publication.Please find below the necessary modifications:Submission Guidelines Compliance: Ensure that your manuscript aligns with the provided Submission Guidelines. This includes adhering to formatting, style, and length requirements. Particularly the Materials and Methods should moved before the results section Methodology Section Revision: The methodology section requires major revisions. Please consider the following: Sampling Procedure Details: Provide a comprehensive description of the sampling procedure, How the bacterial strain  Bacillus subtilis was  isolated? include the sampling methods. This will help readers understand about your research. Proper References: Ensure that all references in the methodology section are accurate and appropriately cited. This is crucial for establishing the credibility of your research. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-manuscript-organization

[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: Partly

Reviewer #2: No

**********

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

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: 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: 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: No

**********

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: 1. In table 4, Most susceptible groundnut GG 20 has mentioned but in your abstract “The GG-22 was identified as most susceptible groundnut variety and was served in further study.” has mentioned. Same you have mentioned in figure 6 that “Efficacy of bacterial nanoparticles on production of seed aflatoxin content infected with A. flavus JAM-JKB-BHA-GG20 to most susceptible groundnut GG 20”.

2. Screening of susceptible groundnut variety and bio-efficacy of antagonists green silver Nanoparticles.

After 5 days, the ground nut variety GJG-19 (101 μg.kg-1) was identified as most resistant variety whereas, ground nut variety TG-51 (6111 μg.kg-1) was identified as most susceptible variety among all 25 JAU released groundnut varieties. After 10 days, the groundnut variety GG-22 (35585 μg.kg-1) was identified as most susceptible variety whereas, GJG-17 (551 μg.kg-1) was identified as most resistant variety among 25 JAU realized groundnut varieties. The GG-22 was selected as most susceptible groundnut variety and used in further study.

Why they have used G22 for further studies not TG-51? Scientific Explanation?

3. From where you have isolated Bacillus subtilis and Aspergillus flavus?

4. Synthesis and characterization of green silver nanoparticles from best antagonist

As you have mentioned there, the cultured flasks were incubated for 48 hours at room temperature on a revolving shaker set at 200 rpm. The culture was then centrifuged for 10 minutes at 12,000 rpm. What do you mean by culture flask?

5. For this reason, the present work has been focused on the development of Ag-NPs using culture supernatant of antagonist bacteria and the evaluation of their antimicrobial activity against Aspergillus species producing aflatoxigenic, which cause serious problems about aflatoxin contamination, worldwide in agricultural commodities including groundnut.

What do you mean by cultured supernatant antagonist?

6. In figure 5, X-axis labelling “Ground varities” spelling has wrong.

Reviewer #2: English-wise, the manuscript is poorly written and needs major careful revision.

The manuscript suffers from poor information about the mechanism of synthesis of nanoparticles.

How did the bacteria synthesize the nanoparticles and stabilize NPs? What analysis proved this statement? What is the proposed mechanism?

The study lacks statistical analyses to show the significance of the results.

The discussion part is written poorly, and the available data is much more; the authors need to improve the study with more literature review.

What was the yield of biosynthesis of silver nanoparticles?

The authors are suggested including a paragraph to mention the different physical, chemical, and biological techniques for synthesis of inorganic nanoparticles and explain the superiorities of microbial synthesis of nanoparticles over traditional physical and chemical synthesis.

The abbreviations should come later than the actual words and provide the details when used for first time in the manuscript.

There are lots of spelling and grammatical mistakes that occur throughout the manuscript, for example interection, grinded, nanoparticals etc..; authors should check them carefully and need to proofread the paper by English professionals.

None of the characterization figures are clear and unsuitable; please improve their quality.

The authors must put each chemical purity or grade and make in the material and methods section.

In the SEM image, I couldn’t see any nanoparticles; I strongly recommend authors should improve the image quality. There are no measurement details in the SEM micrograph, which is very important in the analysis.

In the DLS image complete peak should be visible there is no clear data found

FTIR graph not clear provide images with clarity; Standard scanning range of FTIR is 4000-400 cm-1; the author mentioned only 1800-1100, what is the reason behind? Please provide complete scan data and discuss the functional groups.

Provide proper subheadings, change improper headings like ‘By color change’

Avoid abbreviations in the abstract part

The word ‘Anti-fungicidal activity’ should replace by ‘Anti-fungal activity’

Figure (4) is badly shown, I suggest separating that figure into five to make things clear;

Centre of the cultural plates showed visual Aspergillus growth, how can you claim that NPs inhibit the fungus more than 70%.

How the silver nanoparticles are better than the existing methods, since silver is an expensive material? How it can be cost-effective in large scale production?

What is the purification of nanoparticles in the study?

How the bacterial strains were discarded after synthesis of nanoparticles?

What is the product drying process in the study?

Invitro fungicidal activity of different concentrations of silver nanoparticles can be included (Culture plates) as visual evidence.

**********

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: Yes: Surabhi Awasthi

Reviewer #2: 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.

Bacteria-mediated green synthesis of nano-silver particles and their anti-fungal potentials against Aspergillus flavus

PONE-D-23-27369R1

Dear Dr. Hajare,

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,

Arumugam Sundaramanickam, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

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 #2: All comments have been addressed

**********

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 #2: Partly

**********

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

Reviewer #2: No

**********

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 #2: 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 #2: 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 #2: I would like to appreciate author’s effort, it is highly commendable. Authors have addressed all the comments raised by me. The manuscript is now acceptable for publication

**********

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 #2: No

**********