Automated 1D Helmholtz coil design for cell biology: Weak magnetic fields alter cytoskeleton dynamics

Abasalt Bahrami; Leonardo Y. Tanaka; Ricardo C. Massucatto; Francisco R. M. Laurindo; Clarice D. Aiello

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0321133

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionAugust 23, 2024
18 Oct 2024 Decision Letter - Alexandre Bonatto, Editor PONE-D-24-28285Automated 1D Helmholtz coil design for cell biology: Weak magnetic fields alter cytoskeleton dynamicsPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Aiello, Despite the many invitations, along a extended period of time, we only managed to secure one reviewer to your manuscript. Hence, to prevent you from waiting for a longer time for a feedback, we (exceptionally) decided to consider a single reviewer report the long time to give you a feedback on your manuscript. 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 02 2024 11:59PM. 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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 was supported by: Young Investigator-FAPESP (Funda¸c˜ao de Amparo `a Pesquisa do Estado de S˜ao Paulo) grant 2018/07230-5, scholarship grants 2020/04280-1, 2022/16629-4, and 2023/05600-8 to L.Y.T.; CEPID (Centro de Pesquisa Inova¸c˜ao e Difus˜ao)/FAPESP grant 2013/07937–8 to F.R.M.L.; Pioneer Science–Instituto D’Or grant, ONR grant N00014-21-1-4011, NSF-Nano EAGER grant 2041158, and NSF-Bio EAGER grant 2114144 to C.D.A. Please include your amended statements within your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. 4. Please expand the acronym “NSF” (as indicated in your financial disclosure) so that it states the name of your funders in full. This information should be included in your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. 5. We note that you have included the phrase “data not shown” in your manuscript. Unfortunately, this does not meet our data sharing requirements. PLOS does not permit references to inaccessible data. We require that authors provide all relevant data within the paper, Supporting Information files, or in an acceptable, public repository. Please add a citation to support this phrase or upload the data that corresponds with these findings to a stable repository (such as Figshare or Dryad) and provide and URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers that may be used to access these data. Or, if the data are not a core part of the research being presented in your study, we ask that you remove the phrase that refers to these data. 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. 7. We notice that your supplementary files are included in the manuscript file. Please remove them and upload them with the file type 'Supporting Information'. Please ensure that each Supporting Information file has a legend listed in the manuscript after the references list. Additional Editor Comments: Dear Dr. Aiello, Despite the many invitations, along a extended period of time, we only managed to secure one reviewer to your manuscript. Hence, to prevent you from waiting for a longer time for a feedback, we (exceptionally) decided to consider a single reviewer report the long time to give you a feedback on your manuscript. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Does the manuscript report a protocol which is of utility to the research community and adds value to the published literature? Reviewer #1: Yes ******** 2. Has the protocol been described in sufficient detail? To answer this question, please click the link to protocols.io in the Materials and Methods section of the manuscript (if a link has been provided) or consult the step-by-step protocol in the Supporting Information files. The step-by-step protocol should contain sufficient detail for another researcher to be able to reproduce all experiments and analyses. Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 3. Does the protocol describe a validated method? The manuscript must demonstrate that the protocol achieves its intended purpose: either by containing appropriate validation data, or referencing at least one original research article in which the protocol was used to generate data. Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 4. If the manuscript contains new data, have the authors made this data fully available? 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Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please highlight any specific errors that need correcting in the box below. Reviewer #1: 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: ABSTRACT Please recast here ‘’For more than fifty years, scientists have been gathering evidence of the biological impacts of weak magnetic fields.’’ Please recast here ‘’However, the lack of systematics in experimental studies has hampered research progress on this subject. Please recast here and don’t start a sentence with’’ To’’ ‘’To systematically quantify magnetic field effects in cell biology, it is crucial to produce fields that can be automatically adjusted and that are stable throughout an experiment’s duration, usually operating inside an incubator.’’ Introduction Please recast here and don’t start a sentence with’’ As’’ ‘’As our environment becomes more polluted by electromagnetic fields from various sources, understanding the effects of being exposed to these small-magnitude fields is a timely endeavor.’’ Please recast here ‘’To unambiguously establish and understand the biological effects of weak MFs, it is crucial to perform well-controlled and reproducible experiments.’’ Please recast here ‘’Some experiments on bioelectromagnetics use permanent magnets, facing challenges such as fixed field strengths and non-uniformity.’’ ****** 7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). 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Revision 1
7 Feb 2025 Author Response December 31, 2024 Response to reviewers 1. Does the manuscript report a protocol which is of utility to the research community and adds value to the published literature? Reviewer #1: Yes. We thank the reviewer for acknowledging both the utility and the value to the community of our protocol paper detailing the effect of weak magnetic fields on cellular cytoskeleton configuration. 2. Has the protocol been described in sufficient detail? Reviewer #1: Yes. We thank the reviewer for acknowledging that our protocol, deposited in protocols.io, contains sufficient detail for another researcher to be able to construct our incubatorfriendly coils. 3. Does the protocol describe a validated method? Reviewer #1: Yes. We thank the reviewer for acknowledging that the protocol describes a validated method. 4. If the manuscript contains new data, have the authors made this data fully available? Reviewer #1: N/A. We respectfully point out that all our raw data and analyses are, in fact, publicly available and deposited in Github. 5. Is the article presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? Reviewer #1: Yes. We thank the reviewer for their assessment. 6. Review Comments to the Author Reviewer #1: Abstract: Please recast here: ‘For more than fifty years, scientists have been gathering evidence of the biological impacts of weak magnetic fields.’ The sentence has been amended as follows: ‘Evidence of the biological impacts of weak magnetic fields have been reported for more than fifty years.’ Please recast here: ‘However, the lack of systematics in experimental studies has hampered research progress on this subject.’ The sentence has been amended as follows: ‘However, research progress on such effects has been hampered by a lack of systematics in most experiments.’ Please recast here and don’t start a sentence with ‘To’: ‘To systematically quantify magnetic field effects in cell biology, it is crucial to produce fields that can be automatically adjusted and that are stable throughout an experiment’s duration, usually operating inside an incubator.’ The sentence has been amended as follows: ‘Efforts to increase the systematics in such cell biology experiments must include the capability of producing fields that can be automatically adjusted and that are stable throughout an experiment’s duration, usually operating inside an incubator.’ Reviewer #1: Introduction: Please recast here and don’t start a sentence with ‘As’: ‘As our environment becomes more polluted by electromagnetic fields from various sources, understanding the effects of being exposed to these small-magnitude fields is a timely endeavor.’ The sentence has been amended as follows: ‘Understanding the effects of being exposed to small-magnitude fields such as those produced by the low-level electromagnetic pollution that permeates our environment is a timely endeavor.’ Please recast here: ‘To unambiguously establish and understand the biological effects of weak MFs, it is crucial to perform well-controlled and reproducible experiments.’ The sentence has been amended as follows: ‘Well-controlled and reproducible experiments are crucial to unambiguously establish and understand the biological effects of weak MFs.’ Please recast here: ‘Some experiments on bioelectromagnetics use permanent magnets, facing challenges such as fixed field strengths and non-uniformity.’ The sentence has been amended as follows: ‘Certain bioelectromagnetics experiments employ permanent magnets, which present challenges like fixed field strengths and uneven magnetic fields.’ We do not find any additional comments in the report requiring further action. We sincerely thank the reviewer for the feedback and are pleased that the latter sections of the manuscript are acceptable as they are. 7. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? Reviewer #1: Yes: Prof. Charles Oluwaseun Adetunji. We wholeheartedly thank Prof. Adetunji for their time and interest, and appreciate their choice to have their identity disclosed. December 31, 2024 Additional journal requirements 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE’s style requirements. We confirm that the manuscript meets the above style requirements. 3. 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 was supported by: Young Investigator-FAPESP (Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo) grant 2018/07230-5, scholarship grants 2020/04280-1, 2022/16629-4, and 2023/05600-8 to L.Y.T.; CEPID (Centro de Pesquisa Inovação e Difusão)/FAPESP grant 2013/07937–8 to F.R.M.L.; Pioneer Science–Instituto D’Or grant, ONR grant N00014-21-1-4011, NSF-Nano EAGER grant 2041158, and NSF-Bio EAGER grant 2114144 to C.D.A.’ 2. Please state what role the funders took in the study. 4. Please expand the acronym ‘NSF’ (as indicated in your financial disclosure) so that it states the name of your funders in full. We have removed all funding information from the Acknowledgments section. The following sentence has been added to the Funding Statement: ‘The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.’ In the Funding Statement, ‘ONR’ now reads ‘Office of Naval Research’, and ‘NSF’ now reads National Science Foundation. In summary, the full and corrected Funding Statement now reads: ‘This work was supported by: Young Investigator-FAPESP (Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo) grant 2018/07230-5, scholarship grants 2020/04280-1, 2022/16629-4, and 2023/05600-8 to L.Y.T.; CEPID (Centro de Pesquisa Inovação e Difusão)/FAPESP grant 2013/07937–8 to F.R.M.L.; Pioneer Science–Instituto D’Or grant, ONR (Office of Naval Research) grant N00014-21-1-4011, NSF (National Science Foundation)-Nano EAGER grant 2041158, and NSF-Bio EAGER grant 2114144 to C.D.A. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.’ 5. We note that you have included the phrase ‘data not shown’ in your manuscript. Unfortunately, this does not meet our data sharing requirements. PLOS does not permit references to inaccessible data. We require that authors provide all relevant data within the paper, Supporting Information files, or in an acceptable, public repository. Please add a citation to support this phrase or upload the data that corresponds with these findings to a stable repository (such as Figshare or Dryad) and provide and URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers that may be used to access these data. The corresponding data has been uploaded to Github, and the two instances of the phrase ‘data not shown’ have been amended as follows, with corresponding hyperlinks: ‘The fluorescence of pyrene actin (360 nm excitation and emission at 420 nm) was measured at baseline (3 min), after exposure to the ambient geomagnetic field or to the MF (480 μT for 20 min, data not shown in this manuscript but deposited in Github), and after incubation with polymerization buffer during 1 h in the absence or presence of the same weak MF. Stimulation with the MF in the absence of a polymerization buffer does not affect the fluorescence level (data not shown in this manuscript but deposited in Github).’ 6. Please include captions for your Supporting Information files at the end of your manuscript, and update any in-text citations to match accordingly. We confirm that Supporting Information figures all have captions, and that in-text citations are matched accordingly. 7. We notice that your supplementary files are included in the manuscript file. Please remove them and upload them with the file type ’Supporting Information’. Please ensure that each Supporting Information file has a legend listed in the manuscript after the references list. We separated the main manuscript from the Supporting Information file, and added a list of the Supporting Information sections in the manuscript after the references list. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to reviewer.pdf https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0321133.r002
2 Mar 2025 Decision Letter - Baeckkyoung Sung, Editor Automated 1D Helmholtz coil design for cell biology: Weak magnetic fields alter cytoskeleton dynamics PONE-D-24-28285R1 Dear Dr. Aiello, 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, Baeckkyoung Sung, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): The authors have adequately responded to the reviewers’ comments. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0321133.r003
Formally Accepted
Acceptance Letter - Baeckkyoung Sung, Editor PONE-D-24-28285R1 PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Aiello, 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 You will receive further instructions from the production team, including instructions on how to review your proof when it is ready. Please keep in mind that we are working through a large volume of accepted articles, so please give us a few days 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. Baeckkyoung Sung Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0321133.r004

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