Tissue-Specific and Differential Cold Responses in the Domesticated Cold Tolerant Fugu
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The Fishes_1778365 article collects the different responses that the fish Takifugu abscurus puts into effect during the maintenance at a lower temperature than the range that is considered as normal.
The paper well done appears to be particularly difficult to understand also due to the complexity of the physiological mechanisms put in place, highlighted and described by the authors.
Not all parts are always easy to use, also due to the considerable complexity of the subject which is extremely important. The paper in general is well articulated even if at times it is not always fluid.
The introduction is well written and clarifies the points that the authors have taken into consideration.
The dynamics of sampling are unclear in the Materials and Methods and it does not seem that replicas have been foreseen to have a more robust statistical support. Perhaps it would be useful to clarify and simplify this part (sub-chapter 2.1) to facilitate the usability of the text. Throughout the text there are often mismatches between words.
The results are more than satisfactory, even if not always easily clear.
The discussion is well argued and often clarifies points that are unclear or difficult to understand in the results.
Given the complexity of the topic and the difficulty of unfolding all the various mechanisms, the paper is well constructed and, in my opinion, needs only a minor revision as reported in the text above.
Author Response
Dear Editors and Reviewers,
Thanks very much for taking your time to review this manuscript. We really appreciate all your generous comments and suggestions. Please find my itemized responses in below and my revisions in the re-submitted files.
Response to the referee’s comments
Response to Reviewer:
We are very grateful to your comments for the manuscript. According to your advice, we amended the relevant part in manuscript.
- In the Materials and Methods section we have calculated and re-described the samples of fugu that participated in the experiment, described in detail of the fugu samples used for the study and the method of the cooling experiment.
- We have tried our best to improve the manuscript and have modified some mismatches between words. The manuscript has also been double-checked, and the types and grammar errors we found have been corrected. For example, the descriptions of cold tolerant and the wild type fugu that appear in the article have been changed in a uniform way.
- In our study results we focused on transcriptomic changes in the brain and liver tissues of cold tolerant and wild type fugu. The expression of apoptosis-related pathways is higher in wild type fugu at cold stress, which could cause the brain damage induced coma and death. But for the cold tolerant fugu, cold stress improved glucose and lipid metabolism in the liver which provide better sufficient energy for the organism. We have highlighted and revised the content in the results and discussion.
Thank you and all the reviewers for the kind advice again. If you have any questions, please contact us without hesitate.
Yours sincerely,
Shuang Han
Reviewer 2 Report
I would like to felicitate the authors for this excellent work that clearly is well detailed, focused, and comprehensive in terms of the selection of cold-resistant fugu population, that showed higher stress tolerance and no indications of apoptosis activation pathways compared to the wild type.
I will only suggest adding a further analysis and/or further research section on the selected population at the end (ie, identified genetic modifications, SNPs, etc) that I think is missing from the paper, which could also give an insight into what is next and what genetic differences are driving this cold tolerance in fugu.
Author Response
Dear Editors and Reviewers,
We would like to thank you for your careful reading, helpful comments, and constructive suggestions, which has significantly improved the presentation of our manuscript.
Response to the referee’s comments
Response to Reviewer:
We thank the reviewer for reading our paper carefully and giving the above positive comments.
- In our study focused on transcriptomic changes in cold tolerant fugu after artificial domestication. We compared the dynamic changes in the transcriptome level of wild type and cold tolerant fugu from the brain and liver in response to cold stress, try to explain some part of the mechanism of fish response to cold stress.
- Thank you so much for giving us a particularly important reference, some signaling pathways involved in apoptosis and energy metabolism genes which are modified by phosphorylation and methylation. Our next study will be to analyses in depth the mechanisms of cold tolerance fugu under cold stress at the level of genomic and epigenetic changes.
In all, I found the reviewer’s comments are quite helpful, and I revised my paper point-by-point. Thank you and the review again for your help.
Yours sincerely,
Shuang Han
