Peer Review History
Original SubmissionJuly 1, 2021 |
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PONE-D-21-21486 Host-symbiont stress response to lack-of-sulfide in the giant ciliate mutualism PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Espada-Hinojosa, 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 Sep 24 2021 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:
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Kind regards, Marcos Pileggi, 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 2. Thank you for stating the following financial disclosure: “Funding came from two Austrian Science Fund projects FWF P24565 B22 and FWF 32197 granted to MB. (https://www.fwf.ac.at)” Please state what role the funders took in the study. If the funders had no role, please state: "The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript." If this statement is not correct you must amend it as needed. Please include this amended Role of Funder statement in your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. 3. 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. [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: 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: The paper is descriptive. It is primary research. There are lots of data and they are thoroughly analyzed. I believe that it meets the criteria for publication in PLOS One except for some statements not supported by data. I recommend that the text be revised to qualify more carefully statements and conclusions about why the colonies died. My problems are with the statements (conclusions) that the ciliates and bacteria died because conditions were made oxic and sulfide was removed. Evidently, when taken into the laboratory and placed into well plates, the organisms invariably died. The cause is uncertain. There were no controls showing that the colonies could be kept alive if conditions were sulfidic and/or hypoxic. There are a number of alternative reasons that the colonies died. Failure to keep the colonies alive is puzzling because Rinke et al., 2007, described growing them in the lab, and Prof. Bright was a coauthor on that publication. It is unclear to me how long the collections were held in the aquarium and how they fared. That may answer my concerns. In my initial reading, I wondered: what exactly are microzooids, macrozoids, swarmers, colonies, and branches. It took me a while to realize that macrozooids, swarmers, and propagules are all nearly the same thing. “Symbiont” confused me; the problem is, in my mind, that both bacteria and ciliates are symbionts. I finally understood “symbionts” to be the bacteria. Some of these terms were defined in various places in the text and figure captions, but it would have been helpful to me to have terms defined at the beginning of the paper. A labeled figure would be best, showing a colony and how large it is, such as Fig. S2. I was not familiar this association and had to do several days of background reading. Bright(2019) was particularly helpful. I suggest “presumed propagules” because they have not been shown to be viable. That is particularly true of the last ones to be released which are smaller and not known to carry bacteria. In this symbiosis, the presumption is that the bacteria are transferring organic compounds to the ciliate. But the way in which bacteria completely cover the ciliate suggests that the bacteria are getting something from the ciliates. That would be consistent with the statement that the bacteria cannot be cultured separate from the ciliate. The younger ciliates are phagotrophic filter feeders, and might be transferring nutrients to the bacteria. Throughout, the authors write “sulfur” where it should be “sulfide”. Sulfur is S(0) such as S(8), and sulfide is H2S and HS-. L 28, please explain why this is an example of an r-strategy species. I ask that because some swarmers were retained on the colony until conditions became stressful. My understanding of an r-strategy would be to release the swarmers immediately for more offspring and a shortened reproductive cycle. Some trees retain their seeds until after there has been a fire, and I don’t believe that is an r-strategy. It is “serotiny”. L 30, for “symbionts” I suggest using the word “bacteria”. The ciliates are symbionts too. L 54, sentence needs work. Which organism is taking up nutrients? Since they live in a rich detrital environment, it is possible that both symbionts take up organics. L 61, why “abiotic”? That is confusing because the text before was just describing biological sulfide production. L 62, initially I read the list to be examples of “more suitable habitats.” This sentence could use work. L 144, I had to read this sentence several times. Just, “filtered sea water” would be best, and describe earlier how it is filtered. L 148, do not start a sentence with an Arabic number. If unavoidable, it should be spelled out. In any event, this sentence needs work because it can be read to mean 60 colonies in each well. And are colonies entire “stalks”? This could be made clear with a diagram and definitions of terms up front. L 151, “prior” should be “at”. There is a missing word in this sentence. L 155, pooled with water from other wells? It could be more clear. L 190 “anymore until”, replace with “at”. L 308, “maximal” is not right. Maybe, “at least”. L 311, please mark the start of figure captions more clearly. I was confused on the initial reading. L 457, “sign”-- I think means “significance”, but don’t leave the reader guessing. Punctuation could make it more clear. Fig. 4, please describe briefly what the box and whisker plots show. For example, are the whiskers the total range or central 90%. L 558, finding bacterial DNA in the water does not mean that bacteria were necessarily released. If they are disintegrating DNA will be released. L 577, regarding maximum dispersal distances, that is affected mostly by currents. To Salvador and the other authors I apologize for any incorrect readinds. It is well written and interesting material. I tend to get excited and too deeply involved. Reviewer #2: Unfortunately the manuscript is not ready for review in its current form. The authors should review the manuscript for unusual syntax and unnecessarily wordy and convoluted sentence structure. These failings place an undue burden on the reviewer and make the job of reviewing the manuscript extremely difficult. Fortunately, the writing was mostly inteligible in the methods section and, based on this, it appears that the methods are sound. Unfortunately, the other sections are so poorly written that I gave up on my review after several hours of sentence-by-sentence translation into intelligible English. I am unable to determine whether the conclusions are supported by the data in this poorly written manuscript, although I suspect that they are. A complete revision is needed. Additionally a diagram and text description of the life cycle of the host and symbionts would make the manuscript more accessible to a general scientific audience. In summary, the study appears to relatively simple and straightforward in design and execution. It is quite possible that the research is of acceptable quality for publication. However, the manuscript is simply not ready for review. ********** 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 |
PONE-D-21-21486R1Host-symbiont stress response to lack-of-sulfide in the giant ciliate mutualismPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Espada-Hinojosa, 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. Although the reviewer's suggestions were accepted by the authors, some more corrections are still needed. Please submit your revised manuscript by Jan 20 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:
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, Marcos Pileggi, 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 ********** 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: (No Response) ********** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: 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 ********** 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. 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: It's a good revision. I recommend acceptance. However, I ask the authors to consider the following suggestions. line 81. Addition of Fig. 1 has helped me to understand what the symbiosis looks like, but for readers who are unfamiliar with it (such as me) zooids are still not well described upfront. My dictionary defines zooids as individual units of colony, but in the present case the description could be more precise. That would make the paper more accessible. Please consider something like: “Each colony consists of a central stalk of the giant ciliate Zoothamnium niveum and side branches that are additional cells of Z. niveum. Attached to the branches are zooids that consist each of a central cell of Z. niveum covered with ectosymbiotic bacteria. Zooids are of two types. Microzoids occur along the branches are vegetative, providing nutrients and energy to the other colony parts. Macrozooids develop at the base of each branch and are released as “swarmers” for reproductive and dispersal functions." The above description may not be accurate, but something similar would be helpful to readers upon their first reading of the paper. By the time the reader sees Fig. 4 it becomes clearer, I suppose. Fig. 1, in the figure the base of the stalk is black on black and does not show. Was there a last minute color reversal? (I.e.- a negative image.) To me, S1Fig is more helpful. S Tables, how did you measure sulfide and salinity? Probably you can insert that information as a footnote to a Table. PLOS may want to publish my reviews. I suggest, "No." These are private comments to you. ********** 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 [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 2 |
Host-symbiont stress response to lack-of-sulfide in the giant ciliate mutualism PONE-D-21-21486R2 Dear Dr. Espada-Hinojosa, 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, Marcos Pileggi, Ph.D 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 ********** 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 ********** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: 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 ********** 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. 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: Good! I have no further comments. Hey, the plos one machine just rejected my review for being too short. ********** 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 |
Formally Accepted |
PONE-D-21-21486R2 Host-symbiont stress response to lack-of-sulfide in the giant ciliate mutualism Dear Dr. Espada-Hinojosa: 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. Marcos Pileggi Academic Editor PLOS ONE |
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