Peer Review History

Original SubmissionMay 23, 2024
Decision Letter - Shahid Akbar, Editor

PONE-D-24-20864PredIL13: stacking a variety of machine and deep learning methods by weight coefficient-based single-feature model selection for identifying IL13-inducing peptidesPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Kurata,

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.

Major Revision

Please submit your revised manuscript by Aug 16 2024 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,

Shahid Akbar, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

1. When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements.

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. Please note that PLOS ONE has specific guidelines on code sharing for submissions in which author-generated code underpins the findings in the manuscript. In these cases, we expect all author-generated code to be made available without restrictions upon publication of the work. Please review our guidelines at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/materials-and-software-sharing#loc-sharing-code and ensure that your code is shared in a way that follows best practice and facilitates reproducibility and reuse.

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

https://doi.org/10.1186/s12859-023-05248-6

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 in your Funding Statement: 

This work is supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science(JSPS) with grant number 22H03688. In relation to this, the funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Please provide an amended statement that declares all the funding or sources of support (whether external or internal to your organization) received during this study, as detailed online in our guide for authors at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submit-now.  Please also include the statement “There was no additional external funding received for this study.” in your updated Funding Statement. 

Please include your amended Funding Statement within your cover letter. We will change the online submission form on your behalf.

5. Thank you for uploading your study's underlying data set. Unfortunately, the repository you have noted in your Data Availability statement does not qualify as an acceptable data repository according to PLOS's standards.

At this time, please upload the minimal data set necessary to replicate your study's findings to a stable, public repository (such as figshare or Dryad) and provide us with the relevant URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers that may be used to access these data. For a list of recommended repositories and additional information on PLOS standards for data deposition, please see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/recommended-repositories.

[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: Partly

**********

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

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

**********

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: 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: In the abstract, the authors should mention the feature encoding methods , more specifically the protein language model.

2. In The introduction, the literature section is very poor, the authors should add some computational methods based papers related to PredIL13.

3. The contribution should be clearly mentioned in points at the end of introduction section.

4. The authors should mention the provided the hyper-parameters used for training the used machine learning and deep learning in the form of a table.

5. The code of the interpretation methods used in paper should be provided for the reimplementation purposes.

6. For the reader concerns the authors are advised to add the recent predictors such as AIPs-SnTCN, DeepAVP-TPPred, Deepstacked-AVPs,iAFPs-Mv-BiTCN and pAVP_PSSMDWT-EnC models

7.The feature vector size of the encoding methods should be provided in the paper.

8. What are limitations of the proposed model.

Reviewer #2: 1. How the authors handle the imbalance data while training the model. Did they used any oversampling or under sampling approach, authors should clearly mention.

2. What is justification of using the machine learning models in the proposed model? As there are several other training models available in the literature.

3. As the authors used several feature extraction methods to formulate peptide sequence. However, It should be convincing if the authors highlight the high contributory features using SHAP analysis.

4. What should be the future direction of the proposed model.

**********

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

**********

[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.

Revision 1

Reviewer #1:

Q1.In the abstract, the authors should mention the feature encoding methods, more specifically the protein language model.

A1. Thank you for your useful comment. We mentioned the ESM-2 protein language model in Abstract. In addition, we revised the title to attract many readers as follows: PredIL13: stacking a variety of machine and deep learning methods with ESM-2 language model for identifying IL13-inducing peptides.

Q2. In The introduction, the literature section is very poor, the authors should add some computational methods based papers related to PredIL13.

A2. A thorough search of the literature reveals that IL-13Pred (2022) is the first to predict the IL-13 inducing and non-inducing peptides from its amino acid sequence. To data only a few predictors have been presented. We mentioned that the development of IL-13 predictors has just begun in Introduction.

Q3. The contribution should be clearly mentioned in points at the end of introduction section.

A3. According to the suggestions, we mentioned the following points at the end of Introduction: (1) PredIL13 is a novel meta-classifier that effectively stacks a variety of single-feature models by using logistic regression to predict IL13-inducing peptides; (2) The SDIWC method is proposed to effectively select the 16 optimal single-feature models out of the 168 single-feature models according to their importance; (3) Language models including ESM-2 are effective in increasing the prediction performance and greatly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of prediction performances.

Q4. The authors should mention the provided the hyper-parameters used for training the used machine learning and deep learning in the form of a table.

A4. We provided the hyper-parameters used for training the used machine learning and deep learning in Table S1 at the end of the ML and DL classifiers section.

Q5. The code of the interpretation methods used in paper should be provided for the reimplementation purposes.

A5. We mentioned the availability of the data and program codes in Data availability statement.

The source codes are freely accessible at https://github.com/kuratahiroyuki/PredIL13. The web application is freely available at http://kurata35.bio.kyutech.ac.jp/PredIL13.

Q6. For the reader concerns the authors are advised to add the recent predictors such as AIPs-SnTCN, DeepAVP-TPPred, Deepstacked-AVPs,iAFPs-Mv-BiTCN and pAVP_PSSMDWT-EnC models

A6. These predictors are not directly related to prediction of interleukin 13-inducing peptides. Instead of them we added a general review on the computational approach of prediction of anti‑inflammatory in Introduction.

Q7.The feature vector size of the encoding methods should be provided in the paper.

A7. We described the vector size or the number of descriptors of all the features in the feature encoding method section.

Q8. What are limitations of the proposed model.

A8. We added the Limitation section to Results and discussion. One limitation of this study is that the number of experimentally validated IL-13-inducing peptides is small. Thus, we need to enlarge the dataset to increase the prediction performance. Furthermore, using the large dataset we construct a generative AI to design de novo peptide sequences and to ensure the generated sequences are biologically functional and potentially beneficial for medication.

Reviewer #2:

We revised the title to attract many readers from “PredIL13: stacking a variety of machine and deep learning methods by weight coefficient-based single-feature model selection for identifying IL13-inducing peptides” to “PredIL13: stacking a variety of machine and deep learning methods with ESM-2 language model for identifying IL13-inducing peptides”

Q1. How the authors handle the imbalance data while training the model. Did they use any oversampling or under sampling approach, authors should clearly mention.

A1. We neither used over-sampling nor under-sampling methods. We added this statement in the section of Dataset preparation.

Q2. What is justification of using the machine learning models in the proposed model? As there are several other training models available in the literature.

A2. We focused on widely-used, typical machine and deep learning methods. They would be sufficient to construct the best model or PredIL13.

Q3. As the authors used several feature extraction methods to formulate peptide sequence. However, It should be convincing if the authors highlight the high contributory features using SHAP analysis.

A3. At the section of Importance of each single-feature model, we discussed SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) analysis, while making Figure S2. Feature selection methods other than AWCLR, which represents the contribution of each single-feature model (feature) to the log-odds of binary classification, are known. For example, SHAP analysis provides a more nuanced view by showing how each feature contributes to individual predictions (Figure S2). In this study we used the AWCLR as it has a theoretical intelligible basis to overcome the-state-of-the-art methods. SHAP analysis will be considered in a next step.

Q4. What should be the future direction of the proposed model.

A4. We added the Limitation section to Results and discussion to mention the future direction. One limitation of this study is that the number of experimentally validated IL-13-inducing peptides is small. Thus, we need to enlarge the dataset to increase the prediction performance. Furthermore, using the large dataset we construct a generative AI to design de novo peptide sequences and to ensure the generated sequences are biologically functional and potentially beneficial for medication.

Decision Letter - Shahid Akbar, Editor

PredIL13: stacking a variety of machine and deep learning methods with ESM-2 language model for identifying IL13-inducing peptides

PONE-D-24-20864R1

Dear Dr. Kurata,

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 will be generated when your article is formally accepted. Please note, if your institution has a publishing partnership with PLOS and your article meets the relevant criteria, all or part of your publication costs will be covered. Please make sure your user information is up-to-date by logging into Editorial Manager at Editorial Manager® and clicking the ‘Update My Information' link at the top of the page. If you have any questions relating to publication charges, 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,

Shahid Akbar, 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 #1: All comments have been addressed

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 #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: 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

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 #1: Yes

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 #1: The required comments are successfully incorporated and I think the paper is significantly improved. The paper is acceptable from my side

Reviewer #2: the authors successfully addressed my previous concerns and now the paper is significantly improved. i think the paper can be accepted . no further comments from my side

**********

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

**********

Formally Accepted
Acceptance Letter - Shahid Akbar, Editor

PONE-D-24-20864R1

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Kurata,

I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now being handed over to our production team.

At this stage, our production department will prepare your paper for publication. This includes ensuring the following:

* All references, tables, and figures are properly cited

* All relevant supporting information is included in the manuscript submission,

* There are no issues that prevent the paper from being properly typeset

If revisions are needed, the production department will contact you directly to resolve them. If no revisions are needed, you will receive an email when the publication date has been set. At this time, we do not offer pre-publication proofs to authors during production of the accepted work. Please keep in mind that we are working through a large volume of accepted articles, so please give us a few weeks to review your paper and let you know the next and final steps.

Lastly, 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 customercare@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. Shahid Akbar

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Open letter on the publication of peer review reports

PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process. Therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. Reviewers remain anonymous, unless they choose to reveal their names.

We encourage other journals to join us in this initiative. We hope that our action inspires the community, including researchers, research funders, and research institutions, to recognize the benefits of published peer review reports for all parts of the research system.

Learn more at ASAPbio .