Peer Review History
Original SubmissionMay 14, 2020 |
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PONE-D-20-14342 A new preferentially outcrossing monoecious species of Volvox sect. Volvox (Chlorophyta) from Thailand PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Nozaki, 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. I and two experts have read and reviewed your manuscript. All of us are in agreement that it is suitable for publication pending minor revision and adequate responses to the Reviewers' comments. If you intend to include data on out-crossing please make sure to describe the experiments adequately in the Methods and pay attention to replication and statistics needed to support your conclusions. I have two additional minor comments. 1. Please indicate in your Methods whether the cultures were maintained axenically. If not, could the presence of microbial contaminants have affected the outcomes of the crossing experiments? 2. Terminology in the field is changing. Although traditionally monoecy/monecious dioecy/dioecious have been used for volvocine algae, these could be replaced by monoicy/monoicous and dioicy/dioicous that are used for plants that have haploid-phase sex determination (e.g. bryophytes); while the former terms are reserved for plant species with diploid-phase sex determination. 10.1016/j.tplants.2018.06.005. It is fine if you leave your terminology as is, but wanted to bring this alternative nomenclature system to your attention. Please submit your revised manuscript by Jul 19 2020 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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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 in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript: 'W.M. gratefully acknowledge financial support from Department of Biology & Applied Taxonomic Research Center, Faculty of Science, Khon Kaen University, Thailand.' We note that you have provided funding information that is not 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 study was supported by a Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (grant numbers 16H02518 for HN and 19K22446 for HN) from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT)/Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI (https://www.jsps.go.jp/english/e-grants/). The funders had no role in 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. [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: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: No 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: Review of Nozaki et al; A new preferentially outcrossing monoecious species of Volvox sect. Volvox (Chlorophyta) from Thailand. This manuscript describes a new monoecious, or hermaphroditic, species of green algae in the Volvox section Volvox of the volvocine green algae, Volvox longispiniferus. The authors provide clear and detailed methods and results regarding both asexual and sexual lifecycles of V. longispiniferus, and provide very interesting results on the preferential outcrossing of this hermaphrodite. This is good research and forms a workhorse species description that is worth publication upon a few improvements. My only major comment is that the preferential outcrossing suggestion is not sufficiently discussed and should be expanded upon. This experiment is very interesting, as well as the suggestion that V. longispiniferus may be on a transition towards heterothallic obligate outcrossing. For the suggestion that V. longispiniferus may be transitioning to heterthallic obligate outcrossing, please clarify whether or not differences in proportion of eggs and sperm are seen between isolates of V. longispiniferus. However, these results, despite making up the title and much of the discussion are in the supplemental file, not the main document. The authors should move Figure S1 into the main text. Furthermore, they may have enough quantitative data regarding egg number and fertilization rates to perform a statistical test, likely t test or Mann-Whitney U test depending on whether the data is normal or not, on the differences between fertilization rates between single colony and mixed colony experiments. Lastly, for these experiments, please add to the methods section clarifying whether a similar number of colonies and density of colonies could be expected based on adding 0.3-0.8 mL of culture to the experiment. Minor comments: 1. Hanschen et al 2018 (see below) also described a Volvox section Volvox species and further explored the evolution of dioecy in Volvox section Volvox. 2. Did the authors observe hatching of the fertilized or unfertilized zygotes? 3. Please provide (brief) justification that this species is not V amboensis or V. kirkiorum in the main text. 4. Is it possible to add known geographical distribution to Table S1? 5. Page 5, line 94, please clarify which model of evolution was used in phylogenetic analyses and if a partitioning scheme was implemented in the psbC/rbcL phylogeny. 6. Figure 1, panel D, please ensure consistency of labelling eyespot (figure) or stigma (figure legend). Reviewer #2: This is a nice, brief paper describing a new species of Volvox with some interesting features. It is well-written, understandable, and rigorous. I have just a few concerns, all but one of which are trivial. My one substantive concern is regarding the justification for considering the new strains a separate species from V. merrillii. The phylogenetic position of V. merrillii is unclear and genetic data are unavailable (understandably, since — I think— this species is not available for examination), so we have to make do without those lines of evidence. The only justification that is given is the number of eggs and sperm packets in sexual colonies. Table S1 indicates a few other differences, for example number of cells in asexual spheroids, shape of anterior cells, and number of cells in sexual spheroids, but these are not discussed in the main text. The reason these differences don’t convince me that V. longispiniferus and V. merrillii are distinct species is that these traits are known to vary in response to culture conditions and by the length of time the strain has been cultured. The descriptions of V. merrillii are based on two very old (but authoritative) papers, and it’s not clear whether the culture conditions and the age of the strains are similar to the present study. Dr. Nozaki is, by far, the world’s leading expert on the phylogeny and taxonomy of Volvox and its relatives, and if he says they are distinct species they probably are, but the current version of the manuscript does not sufficiently explain the justification. I realize that the unfortunate lack of V. merrillii cultures limits the information that can be obtained. I would nevertheless like to see a much expanded discussion of the differences between V. longispiniferus and V. merrillii that addresses intraspecific variation, variation in response to strain age and culture conditions, and any other factors that might inform the distinctness of the putative new species. Minor comments: Regarding V. merrillii, a short explanation of the reason genetic and more recent morphological data are not available would be great. The preference for outcrossing figures prominently in the abstract, but it is barely mentioned in the main text, with no methods provided and the relevant figure relegated to a supplement. Since this is the aspect of the paper that is most likely to interest the poor benighted souls who study organisms less interesting than Volvox, I urge the authors to consider discussing the experiment in more detail and moving the figure to the main text. Line 19: I would like to know what Charles Darwin said about inbreeding depression, but Correspondence Volume 9, at 645 pages, is a bit much to wade through in search of the passage the authors have in mind. I know page numbers are generally only provided for direct quotes, but I hope the editors will allow an exception. 23: water samples IN which strains were cultured, or water samples FROM which strains were cultured? 53: please provide the color temperature in K of the lamps. Table 1: I love that the authors have included the NIES strain designations. This is a service to future Volvox researchers. 110: it’s not clear to me whether these numbers are based on collected or cultured spheroids. The world’s leading authority on the phylogeny and taxonomy of Volvox and its relatives once told me that spheroids in culture rarely obtain the sizes of their wild-caught sisters. 139-140: What happened to the unfertilized eggs? 223: If the branching order in Fig. 3 is correct, V. longispiniferus is equally related to all of the other species in Clade A. There is no reason to focus this comparison on V. barberi in particular, since V. ferrisii (for example) is just as closely related to V. longispiniferus. 224: Some discussion of the value of compensatory base changes in ITS-2 in distinguishing species is needed. ********** 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 |
A new preferentially outcrossing monoicous species of Volvox sect. Volvox (Chlorophyta) from Thailand PONE-D-20-14342R1 Dear Dr. Nozaki, 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, James G. Umen, Ph. D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: |
Formally Accepted |
PONE-D-20-14342R1 A new preferentially outcrossing monoicous species of Volvox sect. Volvox (Chlorophyta) from Thailand Dear Dr. Nozaki: 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. James G. Umen Academic Editor PLOS ONE |
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