7,306 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2021
    1. Beneficial educational outcomes are also supported byAstin’s (1984)theory of involvement, which suggests that students learn more when they are moreinvolved in both the academic and social aspects of the school experience.

      This comment is really making me think: I feel that we have done so much to move the academic/learning components of schooling online, but it doesn't seem that we have done nearly as much to move the social components of the campus experience online (like campus clubs, social events, etc.). I wonder what the effect would be of having a large, open chatroom (if feasible) on a college's website; one that would sort of simulate or compensate for the types of socializing that students would typically do with one another "in the halls" in between their classes. I recall asking other students for help with things (like navigating the campus and whatnot) in between classes, but now in an online environment, I typically have to locate and fill out a form or send a formal email to get anything answered. There may be a lot of lost opportunities to make friends/acquaintances this way, since all online communications seem more "high stake" and formal in current e-learning environments (for example, most my communications with my classmates are associated with or tied to my grades right now).

    1. ‘If we tend to think of guns...as instruments that aredeliberately used to hurt others, rather than as objects ofsport and enjoyment, the mere presence of a gun...may

      This is true, however it is the person holding the gun; it is not the gun itself.

    Annotators

    1. ‘Mr Wrayburn,’ proceeded the boy, ‘we not only know this that I have charged upon you, but we know more. It has not yet come to my sister’s knowledge that we have found it out, but we have. We had a plan, Mr Headstone and I, for my sister’s education, and for its being advised and overlooked by Mr Headstone, who is a much more competent authority, whatever you may pretend to think, as you smoke, than you could produce, if you tried. Then, what do we find? What do we find, Mr Lightwood? Why, we find that my sister is already being taught, without our knowing it. We find that while my sister gives an unwilling and cold ear to our schemes for her advantage—I, her brother, and Mr Headstone, the most competent authority, as his certificates would easily prove, that could be produced—she is wilfully and willingly profiting by other schemes. Ay, and taking pains, too, for I know what such pains are. And so does Mr Headstone! Well! Somebody pays for this, is a thought that naturally occurs to us; who pays? We apply ourselves to find out, Mr Lightwood, and we find that your friend, this Mr Eugene Wrayburn, here, pays. Then I ask him what right has he to do it, and what does he mean by it, and how comes he to be taking such a liberty without my consent, when I am raising myself in the scale of society by my own exertions and Mr Headstone’s aid, and have no right to have any darkness cast upon my prospects, or any imputation upon my respectability, through my sister?’

      Charley's main grievance seems to be that his sister hasn't consulted him in this. As though he views himself as being very knowledgeable now that he's had schooling, and now he should be the one to be in charge of everything, or as though he sees himself as his sister's superior now. I can also see this as him being protective of his sister, since Wrayburn's intentions are unknown, but because Dickens characterizes this speech as "boyish" and "selfish," I'm more inclined to see Charley as proud than protective.

    1. Note: This rebuttal was posted by the corresponding author to Review Commons. Content has not been altered except for formatting.

      Learn more at Review Commons


      Reply to the reviewers

      We thank both reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. We propose to address these as described below.

      Reviewer 1

      **Major points:**

      Point 1

      1. A logical question comes up and I do not think the authors addressed, in a human body what happens to the extracted drugs after loading on HDLs? This requires some mentioning in the discussion.

      1. This is indeed a good question. We have now added in the discussion what may happen to the HDL-extracted drugs in a whole organism. It reads as follows: The likely fate of HDL-extracted drugs in humans is that they are carried to the liver by HDLs. Scavenger receptors such as SR-BI expressed by hepatocytes can then bind HDLs carrying the extracted drugs allowing the drugs to be taken up by the cells. In hepatocytes, the drugs may be inactivated and excreted in the bile (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cld.2016.08.001, https://doi.org/10.1161/CIRCRESAHA.119.312617). Point 2

      2. Is the effect specific to the fully mature HDL molecule or do apo-lipoproteins that compose HDLs have similar effects?

      1. This is an interesting question. Apo-AI is the characteristic and most abundant apolipoprotein found in HDLs. It is however not trivial to compare the activities of ApoAI and HDLs because of the difficulty of producing large amounts of ApoAI. In the present paper, the lowest concentration of HDLs that induces drug efflux is 0.125 mM. As there are about 3 molecules of Apo-AI per HDL molecule, we should use 0.375 (3 x 0.125) mM Apo-AI to see if the Apo-AI content of these HDLs can mediate or mimic the drug efflux capacity of the lipoproteins. About 100 mg of recombinant Apo-AI would be required to make 10 ml of a ~0.3 mM Apo-AI cell culture solution. This is an enormous task requiring substantial time and money investment. We are therefore not in a position to perform this experiment that would be of interest but which is not central for supporting the main message of our manuscript. Point 3

      2. What are non-SERCA-mediated effects of TG?

      1. The SERCA-independent toxic effects of TG have been shown to be a consequence of mitochondrial dysfunction resulting from the ability of TG to induce mitochondrial permeability transition (DOI: 10.1046/j.1432-1327.1999.00724.x). This is now mentioned in the discussion. Point 4

      2. Why don't HDLs protect cells from low dose TG despite its removal?

      1. Our data indicate indeed that HDLs do not affect the ability of TG to inhibit SERCA and the low ER stress response that ensues. This can be explained by the fact that very low concentrations of TG inhibit SERCA in an irreversible manner (Ki values of 0.2, 1.3, and 12 nM for SERCA1b, SERCA2b, and SERCA3a, respectively) (DOI:https://doi.org/10.1074/jbc.M510978200). Hence, even though HDLs can remove a substantial amount of TG from cells, the concentration of TG that remains in cells is presumably still sufficient to fully inhibits the SERCA pumps. This explanation is now included in the discussion. Point 5

      Line 144. No information on the siRNA was given (refer to the materials section to guide the reader).

      The siPOOLs we have used correspond, for each targeted gene, to a pool of 30 optimally-designed proprietary siRNAs from Biotech. The company does not disclose the sequences of these siRNAs.

      Minor comments:

      Point 6

      1. There needs to be an abbreviation section. Make sure that you only abbreviate the terms that are used more than once in the text.

      1. An abbreviation list is now provided. Point 7

      2. Lines 104, 277, 283 and anywhere else: use TG instead of thapsigargin.

      1. Thank you for noting this. This has now been done. Point 8

      2. Line 262: you don't have to redefine SERCA.

      1. Done Point 9

      2. I suggest adding structures of the used drugs.

      1. The structures of the drugs used in this work are now presented in Figure S9. Point 10

      2. I suggest using a table for the RT-PCR primers. Protein Direction Number Sequence Description NCBI entryh-SERCA2 Fwd #1612 5'ATG GGG CTC CAA CGA GTT AC nucleotides 648-667 of human SERCA2, variant a NM_001681.4

      1. Thank you for this suggestion that we have now followed and that indeed facilitates the reading of the RT-PCR method section. Point 11

      2. Line 93: DMEM (Gibco; ref 61965-059;) the lot number is missing.

      1. The lot number is now indicated. Point 12

      2. Line 102: 500'000 (and all other thousand numbers) the apostrophe's place is strange.

      1. We have now removed the apostrophe in numbers. Point 13

      2. Line 381: cholesterol carriers.

      1. This typo has now been corrected Reviewer #2 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)):

      **Major concerns**

      Point 14

        1. Figure 2, The authors should perform western blot to evaluate the protein expression levels (not only mRNA levels by Q-PCR)
      1. We have performed these experiments in the past in MIN6 cells (Pétremand et al. Diabetes 2012 May; 61(5): 1100-1111; Figure 2). This earlier work showed that HDLs reduce the induction of TG-induced ER stress markers at the protein (CHOP and BiP) and functionality (IRE1 activity on XBP1 splicing). We will repeat these experiments in DLD1 cells as per the reviewer’s suggestion. Point 15.
      1. Could the authors evaluate whether HDL treatment reduces the amount of SERCA (mRNA/protein) in their cells? The loss of SERCA could explain the reduced accumulation of the BODIPY-TG in the cell?

      We would argue that it is unlikely that a reduction in SERCA expression from cells has any significant impact on TG cell loading as the cell-associated drug is certainly in vast excess compared to the number of SERCA molecules in cells. We will nevertheless perform the requested experiment using DLD-1 cells and assess whether HDLs modulate their SERCA2 expression.

      Point 16.

      1. To generalize their observation, It would have been interesting to test more lipophilic/hydrophilic drugs to quantitatively validate that HDLs are selective of lipophilic drugs.

      We will test 2 new lipophilic (letermovir and lumefantrine) and 2 new hydrophilic drugs (levetiracetam and cefepime) for their ability to be extracted by HDLs (experiment set-up as in Figure 4).

      Point 17.

      1. The ABC transporter part in this manuscript has to be improved with the down-regulation of extinction of ABCA1 and ABCG1 to determine in a comprehensive manner the effect of these transporters in the pro-survival role of HDL.

      We will invalidate the genes encoding ABCA1, ABCB1, ABCG1, and ABCG2 using the CRISPR/Cas9 technology and test the ability of the invalidated cells to promote efflux of thapsigargin to HDLs (experiment set-up as in Figure 6) and to protect them from the drug (experiment set-up as in Figure 6). The choice of the cell lines to be used for the invalidation depends on what ABC transporters they express. No single cell line expresses all four ABC transporters to high levels. The following cell lines will be used because, according to the literature or to the Human Protein Atlas (https://www.proteinatlas.org/), they display strong expression of the indicated transporters: for ABCA1: HCT116; for ABCB1: HEK293T; for ABCG1 and ABCG2: MCF7. For consistency with the experiments already performed in the manuscript, the invalidation will also be performed in the DLD1 cell line.

      **Minor point:** Point 18.

        1. ABCB1 blot in figure 7B is not convincing and should be improved.
      1. We will redo this WB to improve the quality of the blot.
    1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.10.31.20220608: (What is this?)

      Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

      Table 1: Rigor

      <table><tr><td style="min-width:100px;margin-right:1em; border-right:1px solid lightgray; border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">Institutional Review Board Statement</td><td style="min-width:100px;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">IACUC: The animal study was reviewed and approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee of Universidad de Chile, under protocol number 20370–VET–UCH, Biosafety Committee of Facultad de Ciencias Veterinarias y Pecuarias, Universidad de Chile under protocol number 161 and the human study was reviewed and approved under protocol 16-066 Scientific Ethical Committee on Health Sciences of Pontifical Universidad Católica de Chile.</td></tr><tr><td style="min-width:100px;margin-right:1em; border-right:1px solid lightgray; border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">Randomization</td><td style="min-width:100px;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">Sequences were aligned to a set of reference SARS-CoV-2 sequences including all Chilean sequences submitted to GISAID(20) (n=167), sequences with highest similarity deposited on GenBank identified using BLAST(21) (n=337), and a total of 1000 sequences randomly selected from the GISAID repository using FastaUtils package in R(22).</td></tr><tr><td style="min-width:100px;margin-right:1em; border-right:1px solid lightgray; border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">Blinding</td><td style="min-width:100px;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">Cell cultures with no CPE were frozen, thawed, and subjected to three blind passages with inoculation of fresh Vero E6 cell cultures with the lysates as described above.</td></tr><tr><td style="min-width:100px;margin-right:1em; border-right:1px solid lightgray; border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">Power Analysis</td><td style="min-width:100px;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">not detected.</td></tr><tr><td style="min-width:100px;margin-right:1em; border-right:1px solid lightgray; border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">Sex as a biological variable</td><td style="min-width:100px;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">On May 2020 a COVID-19 diagnosis was confirmed by SARS-CoV-2 rtRT-PCR for the humans in the studied household – a male of around 30 years old and a female of around 60 years old.</td></tr><tr><td style="min-width:100px;margin-right:1em; border-right:1px solid lightgray; border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">Cell Line Authentication</td><td style="min-width:100px;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">not detected.</td></tr></table>

      Table 2: Resources

      <table><tr><th style="min-width:100px;text-align:center; padding-top:4px;" colspan="2">Antibodies</th></tr><tr><td style="min-width:100px;text=align:center">Sentences</td><td style="min-width:100px;text-align:center">Resources</td></tr><tr><td style="min-width:100px;vertical-align:top;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">Serological testing: Serum samples were tested via a commercial ELISA test for SARS-CoV-2 antibody detection, the ID SCREEN® SARS-COV-2 Double Antigen Multi Species(18) (IDVET, Grabels, FRANCE).</td><td style="min-width:100px;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray"><div style="margin-bottom:8px"><div>SARS-CoV-2</div><div>suggested: None</div></div></td></tr><tr><th style="min-width:100px;text-align:center; padding-top:4px;" colspan="2">Experimental Models: Cell Lines</th></tr><tr><td style="min-width:100px;text=align:center">Sentences</td><td style="min-width:100px;text-align:center">Resources</td></tr><tr><td style="min-width:100px;vertical-align:top;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">Cell cultures with no CPE were frozen, thawed, and subjected to three blind passages with inoculation of fresh Vero E6 cell cultures with the lysates as described above.</td><td style="min-width:100px;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray"><div style="margin-bottom:8px"><div>Vero E6</div><div>suggested: RRID:CVCL_XD71)</div></div></td></tr><tr><th style="min-width:100px;text-align:center; padding-top:4px;" colspan="2">Software and Algorithms</th></tr><tr><td style="min-width:100px;text=align:center">Sentences</td><td style="min-width:100px;text-align:center">Resources</td></tr><tr><td style="min-width:100px;vertical-align:top;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">Sequences were aligned to a set of reference SARS-CoV-2 sequences including all Chilean sequences submitted to GISAID(20) (n=167), sequences with highest similarity deposited on GenBank identified using BLAST(21) (n=337), and a total of 1000 sequences randomly selected from the GISAID repository using FastaUtils package in R(22).</td><td style="min-width:100px;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray"><div style="margin-bottom:8px"><div>FastaUtils</div><div>suggested: None</div></div></td></tr><tr><td style="min-width:100px;vertical-align:top;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">The sequences were aligned using MAFFT v7.402 using CIPRESS computational resources(23).</td><td style="min-width:100px;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray"><div style="margin-bottom:8px"><div>MAFFT</div><div>suggested: (MAFFT, RRID:SCR_011811)</div></div></td></tr><tr><td style="min-width:100px;vertical-align:top;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">The aligned sequences were visualized in AliView v1.26(24).</td><td style="min-width:100px;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray"><div style="margin-bottom:8px"><div>AliView</div><div>suggested: (AliView, RRID:SCR_002780)</div></div></td></tr><tr><td style="min-width:100px;vertical-align:top;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">The phylogenetic tree was visualized using Figtree.</td><td style="min-width:100px;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray"><div style="margin-bottom:8px"><div>Figtree</div><div>suggested: (FigTree, RRID:SCR_008515)</div></div></td></tr></table>

      Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your data.


      Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
      The viral RNA in samples may indirectly denote SARS-CoV-2 viral excretion and can serve, with limitations, as a proxy for active viral replication. Indeed, SARS- CoV-2 antibodies detected by ELISA confirmed the infection in cat 2. Our household study thus provides preliminary guidance for managing the care and quarantine of cats in households in which SARS-CoV-2 is present. The results, particularly the similarity of genome sequences depicted in the phylogenetic analysis, strongly support the idea that SARS-CoV-2 can be transmitted between humans and cats living in the same household. It is suspected that the humans were infected following exposure to SARS-CoV-2-positive neighbors days before. We think it likely that cat 1 was the first infected of the three cats because this animal had closer contact than the other two cats with human 1 (male), sharing his bed. This is supported by our observation that viral RNA from human 1 and the cats had identical sequences whereas the female human’s viral RNA differed by two polymorphisms. Transmission between humans and cats in the same household accords with the literature on viral infections in animals. Several animal species are permissive for virus infection and replication in the upper respiratory tract(1) and it has been suggested that the species barrier of SARS-CoV-2 might be weak since the ACE2 host receptor may allow virus attachment even after some amino acid changes(28). SARS-CoV-2 can be transmitted to animals by direct or...

      Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.


      Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.


      Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.


      Results from rtransparent:
      • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
      • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
      • No protocol registration statement was detected.

      <footer>

      About SciScore

      SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

      </footer>

    1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.28.20083154: (What is this?)

      Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

      Table 1: Rigor

      NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

      Table 2: Resources

      No key resources detected.


      Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).


      Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
      Using this approach, we could: There are a number of limitations to our approach. The smaller the hospital, the less predictable the outcome will be. With time, the characteristics of the population of patients who show up to the ER may change and the pandemic management by the governing organizations would evolve. One can think, for example, that systematic testing would provide early diagnostics and impact the performance of the health system as shown by the statistics of countries who were early adopters of that strategy. Due to the heterogeneity of the patient population and disease patterns that depend heavily on patient characteristics, our next step in improving this model would be to include patients’ medical history listed in the electronic medical record. Above all, any model of workflow especially during a pandemic should be aware of the Human Factor. Staff can get sick or burnout during a pandemic and there should be a number of strategies to compute that risk and enter this into the constraints imposed on the health care system [4, 11, 12, 21]. Further, human behavior and decision process changes under stress: it can be for economical or psychological reasons. The future of computational models in digital health during a pandemic crisis should extensively include sociological and economical modeling components in the matter.

      Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.


      Results from Barzooka: We found bar graphs of continuous data. We recommend replacing bar graphs with more informative graphics, as many different datasets can lead to the same bar graph. The actual data may suggest different conclusions from the summary statistics. For more information, please see Weissgerber et al (2015).


      Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.


      Results from rtransparent:
      • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
      • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
      • No protocol registration statement was detected.

      <footer>

      About SciScore

      SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

      </footer>

    1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.08.29.20184242: (What is this?)

      Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

      Table 1: Rigor

      <table><tr><td style="min-width:100px;margin-right:1em; border-right:1px solid lightgray; border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">Institutional Review Board Statement</td><td style="min-width:100px;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">IRB: The study was reviewed and approved by the CoviDOMINGO core group and approved by the Ethic Committee of the coordinating center and by each participating center (Mexico: COMINVETICA-30072020-CEI0100120160207; Colombia: PE-CEI-FT-06; Perù: N° 42-IETSI-ESSALUD-2020; Costa Rica: CEC-HNN-243-2020).</td></tr><tr><td style="min-width:100px;margin-right:1em; border-right:1px solid lightgray; border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">Randomization</td><td style="min-width:100px;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">not detected.</td></tr><tr><td style="min-width:100px;margin-right:1em; border-right:1px solid lightgray; border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">Blinding</td><td style="min-width:100px;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">not detected.</td></tr><tr><td style="min-width:100px;margin-right:1em; border-right:1px solid lightgray; border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">Power Analysis</td><td style="min-width:100px;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">not detected.</td></tr><tr><td style="min-width:100px;margin-right:1em; border-right:1px solid lightgray; border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">Sex as a biological variable</td><td style="min-width:100px;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">not detected.</td></tr></table>

      Table 2: Resources

      <table><tr><th style="min-width:100px;text-align:center; padding-top:4px;" colspan="2">Software and Algorithms</th></tr><tr><td style="min-width:100px;text=align:center">Sentences</td><td style="min-width:100px;text-align:center">Resources</td></tr><tr><td style="min-width:100px;vertical-align:top;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">Data were collected on Excel spreadsheets completed by each collaborator and sent to two study core group members via email (DB and OYAM), without including personal or identifiable data.</td><td style="min-width:100px;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray"><div style="margin-bottom:8px"><div>Excel</div><div>suggested: None</div></div></td></tr><tr><td style="min-width:100px;vertical-align:top;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">Statistical analyses: Data were analyzed using SPSS (SPSS, Chicago, IL).</td><td style="min-width:100px;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray"><div style="margin-bottom:8px"><div>SPSS</div><div>suggested: (SPSS, RRID:SCR_002865)</div></div></td></tr></table>

      Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).


      Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
      Our study has some limitations to address. The main limitation of this study relates to the variables collected. As happened during a multinational European study, this one was performed during the Latin American peak with clinicians struggling in the front-line, usually with limited human resources to dedicate extra time for clinical research. For example, detailed blood tests were not collected. However, at this time of the pandemic enough laboratory data on pediatric COVID-19 have been published and we think that a first, large, multinational picture of SARS-CoV-2 infection in Latin American children was more important than smaller, more detailed studies. Also, the different centers may have used different decision rules to perform SARS-CoV-2 test in children. Another limitation concerns MIS-C cases. Since MIS-C is a clinical diagnosis with no confirmatory test, and that the CDC case definition is broad, some cases may have been misdiagnosed and, therefore, the real MIS-C cases being lower or higher. For example, some severe cases of acute COVID-19 may overlap with MIS-C. Also, some details about MIS-C were not included in our data collection, including the possible skin, renal and neurological involvement during MIS-C. Despite these limitations, this study provides the most comprehensive overview on COVID-19 in South American children to date. In conclusion, our study adds new data about the Latin American face of the pediatric SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, describing a generally ...

      Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.


      Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.


      Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.


      Results from rtransparent:
      • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
      • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
      • No protocol registration statement was detected.

      <footer>

      About SciScore

      SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

      </footer>

    1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.03.02.20030007: (What is this?)

      Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

      Table 1: Rigor

      NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

      Table 2: Resources

      No key resources detected.


      Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).


      Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
      4.1 Limitations: Our results are somewhat limited by the assumptions we have made to produce a tractable problem. We assume that behavior responds immediately to changes in interventions. In reality, behavior may change prior to an intervention being implemented. Additionally adherence may drop as the intervention continues, and some adherence to the intervention may remain even once the intervention is removed. The assumption that the individuals are largely homogeneous may lead to pessimistic predictions of when the herd immunity threshold is reached. In the presence of significant population heterogeneity, there is evidence suggesting that the herd immunity threshold would be reached earlier, and the epidemic could proceed significantly faster [16, 7]. Our qualitative predictions remain robust, but the timings would need to move sooner. We must think critically about what constitutes a one-shot intervention. Whether an intervention can be maintained may depend on context. Early estimates of case fatality rate (not to be confused with infection fatality rate) of COVID-19 ranged from 0.7% in China outside of Hubei province to around 2% in much of the world, to around 5.8% in Wuhan [35]. These estimates were affected by the proportion of cases identified (leading to uncertainty in the denominator), and whether the health system was over capacity (which would increase the death rate leading to uncertainty in the numerator). True infection fatality rates appear to lie between 0...

      Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.


      Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.


      Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.


      Results from rtransparent:
      • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
      • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
      • No protocol registration statement was detected.

      <footer>

      About SciScore

      SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

      </footer>

    1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.03.13.20035485: (What is this?)

      Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

      Table 1: Rigor

      NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

      Table 2: Resources

      No key resources detected.


      Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).


      Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
      Additionally, keeping the coefficient β at such low level requires stringent limitation of personal contacts, while the time to the peak of the epidemic would be about 7 months. One of potential consequences of exceeding the healthcare system capacity is the increase of case fatality rate due to the lack of necessary medical equipment. We think that the more realistic scenarios are these in which the contact rate varies over time. In early phase of the epidemic, the contact rate may be reduced only by forcing people to stay at home; in the latter phase, when the number of daily cases exceeds a threshold, people isolate themselves to reduce the risk. In such scenario the number of daily new cases reaches peak proportional to an assumed “fear” threshold and then slowly decreases due to the decreasing fraction of susceptible individuals. Such scenario seems more realistic and, although devastating for both the economy and social life, grants time to develop and administer vaccine. Historical data on 1918–1919 H1N1 influenza pandemic suggest also that this “fear” threshold may not be constant in time, because people suffering from prolonged quarantine may tend to accept higher risk. When this “negligence” effect is included, one may obtain trajectories for which fast growth is followed by a plateau and then relatively fast decrease of daily cases. A bit surprisingly, this scenario, although not resulting from centrally imposed preventive policies, may be the most plausible non-co...

      Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.


      Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.


      Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.


      Results from rtransparent:
      • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
      • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
      • No protocol registration statement was detected.

      <footer>

      About SciScore

      SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

      </footer>

    1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.08.26.20181644: (What is this?)

      Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

      Table 1: Rigor

      NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

      Table 2: Resources

      <table><tr><th style="min-width:100px;text-align:center; padding-top:4px;" colspan="2">Software and Algorithms</th></tr><tr><td style="min-width:100px;text=align:center">Sentences</td><td style="min-width:100px;text-align:center">Resources</td></tr><tr><td style="min-width:100px;vertical-align:top;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">We collected eleven county level Census variables from the 2000 Census (https://www.census.gov) and the 2010 5-year American Community Surveys (https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/): proportion of residents older than 65, proportion of residents aged 15-44, proportion of residents aged 45-64, proportion of Hispanic residents, proportion of Black residents, median household income, median home value, proportion of residents in poverty, proportion of residents with a high school diploma, population density, and proportion of residents that own their house.</td><td style="min-width:100px;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray"><div style="margin-bottom:8px"><div>https://www.census.gov</div><div>suggested: (U.S. Census Bureau, RRID:SCR_011587)</div></div></td></tr></table>

      Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).


      Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
      We acknowledge that this study has several limitations. This is an ecological study with aggregated data on county level. Ecological designs should not be used to make inferences about individual risks even though they are valid for hypothesis-generating purposes. Publicly available COVID-19 outcome data was only available at county level, while COVID-19 incidence and mortality, and sociodemographic characteristics likely vary at a smaller spatial scale. (Villeneuve and Goldberg 2020) COVID-19 events are not independent and likely cluster over time and space which may have resulted in biased effect estimates. (Villeneuve and Goldberg 2020) Although we adjusted for several important confounders, such as days since first COVID-19 case reported and days since stay-at-home order, it is possible that there is residual confounding by these factors. Days since stay-at-home order is based on the start date of the issuance of the order. However, in several states the stay-at-home order was ended/relaxed in (the end of) April or May (earlier than June 7). Further, there are other state-level physical distance closures (e.g. day cares, K-12 schools, gyms) that we did not take into account. As additional adjustment for days since non-essential business closure and days since nursing home visitor ban did not affect our associations, we do not think that adjustments for additional closures would greatly impact our findings. We also note that physical distance closures and face coverings re...

      Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.


      Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.


      Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.


      Results from rtransparent:
      • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
      • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
      • No protocol registration statement was detected.

      <footer>

      About SciScore

      SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

      </footer>

    1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.26.20112946: (What is this?)

      Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

      Table 1: Rigor

      <table><tr><td style="min-width:100px;margin-right:1em; border-right:1px solid lightgray; border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">Institutional Review Board Statement</td><td style="min-width:100px;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">not detected.</td></tr><tr><td style="min-width:100px;margin-right:1em; border-right:1px solid lightgray; border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">Randomization</td><td style="min-width:100px;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">not detected.</td></tr><tr><td style="min-width:100px;margin-right:1em; border-right:1px solid lightgray; border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">Blinding</td><td style="min-width:100px;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">not detected.</td></tr><tr><td style="min-width:100px;margin-right:1em; border-right:1px solid lightgray; border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">Power Analysis</td><td style="min-width:100px;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">not detected.</td></tr><tr><td style="min-width:100px;margin-right:1em; border-right:1px solid lightgray; border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">Sex as a biological variable</td><td style="min-width:100px;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">not detected.</td></tr></table>

      Table 2: Resources

      No key resources detected.


      Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).


      Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
      The limitation of our approach, on which we are working, concerns three main areas: i) our model is essentially deterministic, and as such it does not consider sudden stochastic perturbations affecting political decisions (e.g. announcement by EU); ii) our model is at single country scale, which we think it is an accurate modeling for this phase of the Covid-19 pandemics, but for a longer period of time a multi-state version of our models could be important; iii) we did not explore possible interplays between the epidemics time-scale and the disease time-scale It is worth to note that in the increasingly growing field of behavioural epidemiology of infectious diseases (BEID) (Funk et al 2011, d’Onofrio et al 2012, Manfredi and d’Onofrio 2013, Wang et al 2016) the government actions modulating the citizen behaviour during an epidemics are considered in an elementary way. Indeed, in BEID the emphasis was up to know given to the modeling of the citizens’s behaviour. Here, at the best of our knowledge, we introduce an explicit and ’disease dynamics-dependent’ modelling of the government behaviour via a game-theoretic approach. Under this light, we may say that our work uses theoretical arguments of BEID to suggest the harmful health impact that has potentially been caused by mean political behaviour during the pre-lockdown phase. This mean behaviour is apparent from the public political debate occurred in many European before epidemic events forced the lockdown. All this, despite...

      Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.


      Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.


      Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.


      Results from rtransparent:
      • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
      • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
      • No protocol registration statement was detected.

      <footer>

      About SciScore

      SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

      </footer>

    1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.06.29.20142307: (What is this?)

      Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

      Table 1: Rigor

      NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

      Table 2: Resources

      No key resources detected.


      Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.


      Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
      Our study has few limitations, it’s difficult to compute the exposure when it comes to weather conditions as many people are inside their houses due to lockdown and would avoid outdoor exposure. We also think that we have a very short period of observational data and with more data, findings may fluctuate to other sides. Overall we tried to put forth an exhaustive search for causal relationships between weather conditions and new cases of covid19 based on the available literature on causal time-series analysis and these findings asserts that we didn’t have causal association between temperature and humidity with new cases of covid19.

      Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.


      Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.


      Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.


      Results from rtransparent:
      • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
      • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
      • No protocol registration statement was detected.

      <footer>

      About SciScore

      SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

      </footer>

    1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.07.21.20158014: (What is this?)

      Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

      Table 1: Rigor

      NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

      Table 2: Resources

      No key resources detected.


      Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.


      Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
      Our study comes with a number of limitations. First, we did not have access to line lists of patients and used aggregated data of SARS-CoV-2 cases. Compared to the numbers communicated by the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH), cantons typically report somewhat higher numbers of hospitalized and deceased patients. For example, FOPH communicated only 1,640 deaths [1], while the cantonal data reported 1,860 deaths by 10 May 2020. The discrepancies may result from missing or delayed patient records that cannot be linked in the line lists at FOPH. Second, we opted for a maximum likelihood framework and fixed a number of model parameters, such as hospitalization periods, to values that were informed by the literature. While our model can accurately describe the changes in hospitalized patients and ICU occupancy, the calculated CIs can be overly narrow for some parameters. Third, we described the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in Switzerland overall and did not consider cantonal differences in the transmission dynamics as in Lemaitre et al. [11]. We think that this simplification is justified for the purpose of our study but acknowledge that cantonal differences in the epidemic trajectories were arguably important for the timing of the implementation of NPIs at the federal level. Fourth, we did not stratify the population by sex and age and cannot provide age-specific infection attack rates [24]. Fifth, we assumed a fixed IFR of 0.75% [11], which is in the range of estimates for Swi...

      Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.


      Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.


      Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.


      Results from rtransparent:
      • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
      • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
      • No protocol registration statement was detected.

      <footer>

      About SciScore

      SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

      </footer>

    1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.10.04.20206680: (What is this?)

      Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

      Table 1: Rigor

      NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

      Table 2: Resources

      <table><tr><th style="min-width:100px;text-align:center; padding-top:4px;" colspan="2">Software and Algorithms</th></tr><tr><td style="min-width:100px;text=align:center">Sentences</td><td style="min-width:100px;text-align:center">Resources</td></tr><tr><td style="min-width:100px;vertical-align:top;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray">We developed a model in Microsoft Excel to calculate the total number of PCR tests required, by university community size, for an effective testing-based campus opening strategy over a 32-week (two semesters) time horizon (September 2020-May 2021).</td><td style="min-width:100px;border-bottom:1px solid lightgray"><div style="margin-bottom:8px"><div>Microsoft Excel</div><div>suggested: (Microsoft Excel, RRID:SCR_016137)</div></div></td></tr></table>

      Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).


      Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
      Our study has several limitations. First, we did not include the additional costs (including tests and personnel) related to contact tracing. While this may affect the point estimates of annual testing costs, it is unlikely to vary by testing strategy. Second, we assumed low PCR and serological test result misclassification, and did not consider potential cost or epidemic implications of PCR false negatives18 (owing either to sampling collection, specimen handling, storage condition problems or low viral load) or antibody false positive19 (such that people think they are immune when they are not) especially for larger size universities under the condition of high SARS-CoV-2 prevalence/incidence 20, which may incorrectly inflate the estimated prevalence and cumulative incidence. On the other hand, as we consider frequent screening for PCR (e.g at least once a week for majority students in campus regardless of symptoms), this may result in a number of false positive cases (and associated costs for contact tracing) for larger universities under the condition of low SARS-CoV-2 prevalence/incidence 21. The overall utility of screening strategies may differ, however, by prevalence of disease among the population and the potential associated costs of false positives and negatives.22 Third, we assumed that the immune response remains throughout the entire school year (32 weeks). If duration of immune response is shorter than the whole school year (e.g. 16-20 weeks)23 and antibodies c...

      Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.


      Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.


      Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.


      Results from rtransparent:
      • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
      • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
      • No protocol registration statement was detected.

      <footer>

      About SciScore

      SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

      </footer>

    1. Which Sounds Are the Most Annoying to Humans?{"@type":"NewsArticle","@context":"http://schema.org","url":"https://gizmodo.com/which-sounds-are-the-most-annoying-to-humans-1846098655","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Daniel Kolitz"}],"headline":"Which Sounds Are the Most Annoying to Humans?","description":"Earlier this month, a kind of chirping, rainforest-y sound sprung up in my apartment. It came from my roommate’s room. At first, I took it for a video game, but then realized the sound materialized even when my roommate was asleep. For days, I wondered about this. At any point I could’ve asked him what the deal was, but I kept on forgetting—the sound was just annoying enough to be notable but not annoying enough to do something about. When I did remember to ask him, during one of the sound’s occasional disappearances, he had no idea what I was talking about. ","dateline":"01/25/2021 at 08:00","datePublished":"2021-01-25T08:00:00-05:00","dateModified":"2021-01-25T08:00:01-05:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","url":"https://gizmodo.com/which-sounds-are-the-most-annoying-to-humans-1846098655"},"image":{"@type":"ImageObject","height":675,"width":1200,"url":"https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/c_fill,f_auto,fl_progressive,g_center,h_675,pg_1,q_80,w_1200/ysfrxb7ougwtr6l0v3ds.png","thumbnail":{"@type":"ImageObject","height":180,"width":320,"url":"https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/c_fill,f_auto,fl_progressive,g_center,h_180,pg_1,q_80,w_320/ysfrxb7ougwtr6l0v3ds.png"}},"articleBody":"Earlier this month, a kind of chirping, rainforest-y sound sprung up in my apartment. It came from my roommate’s room. At first, I took it for a video game, but then realized the sound materialized even when my roommate was asleep. For days, I wondered about this. At any point I could’ve asked him what the deal was, but I kept on forgetting—the sound was just annoying enough to be notable but not annoying enough to do something about. When I did remember to ask him, during one of the sound’s occasional disappearances, he had no idea what I was talking about. \n\nThe sound to that point had been a subconscious irritant—by the time I noticed it, I could never say how long it had been going for. But after that exchange, and the sanity-questioning it entailed, roughly half my brain was looking out for the sound’s return. When it did finally reemerge, I burst without knocking into my roommate’s room. “That,” I said. “Oh,” he replied. “The radiator?”\n\nIt was, in fact, the radiator. He hadn’t noticed it.\n\nThis is all to say that, when we are speaking about sounds, “annoying” is a subjective criteria. But there must be, one figures, some consensus on the subject. For this week’s Giz Asks we reached out to a number of sound-experts to find out what that might be.\n\nDr. Tjeerd Andringa\n\nAssociate professor Auditory Cognition, University of Groningen\n\nThe sound of vomiting: elicits a visceral response. The first steps of auditory processing are in the brainstem close to the “disgust” center that is activated when we swallow(ed) something toxic and which activates the muscles to expel it.\n\nIt’s actually pretty simple. In the evolution of vertebrates, the first vertebrate was basically a long tube with on one side the mouth and on the other side the anus. And the only thing that it really had to do was to open its mouth, accept something as food and then digest in that tube. The tube was basically a little garden with all kinds of bacteria. It should not make a real mistake because then it would poison the garden and poison itself. So it was very important for that early vertebrate to make the proper decisions — what to swallow, what not to swallow. That is the reason why all our senses are around the mouth. We taste, we smell, we hear, we see — all around the mouth — so we can make the best decisions of what to eat.\n\nAll the sensors came together at the top of the neural tube. That is our brain stem. That is the level where all the information is processed at the most basic level. That leads to a situation that if you have no time to process the signal in full or to use your higher mental faculties, then you fall back to the lowest form of processing that we have, which is that physiological, low-level form of processing. This is always active in the background, and it has to be overruled by higher levels of processing. But it is always the first response that we get because it’s the quickest. \n\nPretty much all the other sounds are sounds that are relevant to higher cognition. So the scraping of fingernails on the chalkboard probably also has a visceral component, but it’s much further away from our basic responses than vomiting. A baby crying does not make sense for all mammals; it only makes sense for mammals that have babies that actually cry. This is a higher level, more advanced type of processing. And it must be very strong, but it is not as deeply encoded in our body as the response to vomiting. \n\n“The sound of vomiting: elicits a visceral response. The first steps of auditory processing are in the brainstem close to the ‘disgust’ center that is activated when we swallow(ed) something toxic and which activates the muscles to expel it.”\n\nTrevor Cox\n\nProfessor, Acoustic Engineering, University of Salford\n\nPeople’s responses to sounds are learned; what’s most annoying to any given person can be highly individualized, and is intimately connected to circumstance. In general, though, the most annoying sounds are those that get in the way of whatever you’re trying to do. With everyone working at home right now, a neighbor’s DIY drilling might be the most annoying sound.\n\nWhat can heighten annoyance is a lack of control. When your neighbors are throwing a party, the noise is annoying not only because it prevents you from sleeping but because you have no idea when it’s going to end. If you knew in advance when the party might end, the sound would likely be less disruptive.\n\n“People’s responses to sounds are learned; what’s most annoying to any given person can be highly individualized, and is intimately connected to circumstance.”\n\nFlorian Hollerweger\n\nAssistant Professor, Audio Arts and Acoustics, Columbia College Chicago\n\nThe most annoying sound for a human, as we all know, is the sound of chalkboard scraping. It’s terrible! Precisely why that is so remains a bit of a mystery and—I kid you not—the subject of ongoing psychoacoustic research. Even thinking about it (the sound, not the research) makes me cringe. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that the Covid-19 pandemic has brought back to the forefront many traditional contenders for the title of “most annoying sound.” Depending on your living circumstances, the sounds of your otherwise respected neighbors or housemates, for example, may well be much more annoying to you now than they were nine months ago.\n\nThe “most annoying sound for a human” is a surprisingly evasive concept that depends not only on who the human in question is, but also on that person’s circumstances and emotional state. If you think about it, this is a trivial truth only in a superficial sense. Rather, I think of it as a beautiful testimony to the raw emotional power that sound commands over us—not only on the negative end of the spectrum, but also with regards to that most beautiful of sounds: music. Many of the above truisms apply just as well to music—its dependence on the listener’s personal preferences or aversions, stage in life, current emotions, etc. In other words, the same strong reliance on context explains both the “ugliest” as well as the “prettiest” sounds. In my mind this shows that these are really just two manifestations of a larger underlying natural beauty, which we humans can become a part of and nurture (through music, for example), but which ultimately exceeds the value judgements that we can’t quite seem to be able to do without.\n\nA large part of my creative practice and research unfolds in the realm of experimental music and sound art. From this experience I can assert that one human’s “most annoying sound” may well form the basis of another’s most precious music. Perhaps once a Covid-19 vaccine is widely available, you might want to attend an experimental music concert near you, to see which of these two groups you belong to... or whether there is room in between. British composer Trevor Wishart, for example, created a stunningly complex and highly recommended piece of music entitled “Imago” from a single clink of two glasses.\n\n“The ‘most annoying sound for a human’ is a surprisingly evasive concept that depends not only on who the human in question is, but also on that person’s circumstances and emotional state.”\n\nSteven J. Orfield\n\n\nFounder of Orfield Laboratories which provides multi-sensory design, research and testing in architecture, product development and forensics\n\nIn 1990, I moved my perceptual laboratory into the former Sound 80 Studios. Sound 80 was a client of mine for acoustic and lighting consulting, and in 1975, in collaboration with 3M who had just invented multi-track digital recording, they became the World’s First Digital Recording Studio, as recognized by Guinness World Records in 2006. During their time as a client of mine, I sat in that last American album recording of Cat Stevens, Izatso. \n\nI bought the studio to move my company but also to deal with a health issue.\n\nI had just gone through surgery to get an artificial valve, as I was born with a defective aortic valve. I had read the acoustic studies in the medical journals about the noise levels, but when I woke up from surgery, I found that the valve was much louder than claimed in the academic studies. So as I went back to my lab, I measured the sound with an accelerometer (vibration transducer), and with a 1” precision microphone, and I recorded each. Then I did a listening experiment to listen to my heart valve with one ear and the recordings with the other. I spent hours equalizing the sound so that the recording was a close facsimile of what I heard.\n\nThen I did a Stevens Threshold test to see how loud it was. This was done by playing a pink noise track until it was so loud that I couldn’t hear the valve, and then playing the pink noise again from loud to soft until I could hear it. Those two extremes established the threshold for my hearing of my valve.\n\nWhile it was claimed to be about 30 dBA, it was actually able to be perceived into the low 80 dBA range, about 16 times as loud as claimed, and it sounded like I had been implanted with an old mechanical clock.\n\nI went back and reviewed the journal literature again and found out that most of the measurement procedures used by the industry were incorrect, and most of the equipment used was not used correctly. It took me two years to learn to sleep after sleep hypnosis, sleep medicines and special pillows and fans. I was so frustrated that I invited all the American heart valve companies to join me in a conference at my Lab, so that I could show the levels of mistakes they all made, and so that they could start to work on the terribly annoying sound. In 1993, for the first and only time they ever met together the entire industry came to my lab and listened to what heart valve noise really sounded like. They were all shocked and concerned, and many were in violation of FDA requirements because they had been claiming quiet valves.\n\nThis meeting caused new research on porcine (pig) valved to extend the valve life from 5 years to 20 years, and now most implants get a bio-prosthetic valve, that can be implanted through an artery and can be repaired in the same way. I hope that my work with them was helpful in causing a reconsideration of heart valves across the entire industry. It also lead to a Medical article in the Wall Street Journal, where their editor explained to me that many ‘facts’ that he was told in interviews with doctors were false, as they were very defensive about discussing medical problems.\n\nDo you have a burning question for Giz Asks? Email us at tipbox@gizmodo.com. \n\nAdditional reporting by Marina Galperina.\n\n","articleSection":"Giz Asks","keywords":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","@context":"http://schema.org","name":"Gizmodo","url":"https://gizmodo.com","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://x.kinja-static.com/assets/images/logos/amp/logo-gizmodo-amp.png"},"sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/gizmodo","https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxFmw3IUMDUC1Hh7qDjtjZQ","https://twitter.com/gizmodo","https://instagram.com/gizmodo"]},"video":[]}

      人类最受不了哪些声音?

  2. Feb 2021
    1. I think both these answers are off the mark. The first focuses too narrowly on what we owe people based on legal rules and formal citizenship. The other answer focuses too broadly, on what we owe people qua human beings. We need a perspective that is in between, that adequately responds to the phenomenon of illegal immigration and adequately reflects the complexity of moral thought. There may be important ethical distinctions, for example, among the following groups: U.S. citizens who lack health insurance, undocumented workers who lack health insurance in spite of working full time, medical visitors who fly to the United States as tourists in order to obtain care at public hospitals, foreign citizens who work abroad for subcontractors of American firms, and foreign citizens who live in impoverished countries. I believe that we-U.S. citizens-have ethical duties in all of these situations, but I see important differences in what these duties demand and how they are to be explained.

      Some Americans believe that illegal immigrants don't qualify or should not be offered the same healthcare services as U.S. citizens; others might say it is our duty and it is morally right to take care of people no matter what their legal situation id.The writer is trying to dictate each aspect and to come up with a perspective that is somewhat pleasing to both parties.

    1. For branching out a separate path in an activity, use the Path() macro. It’s a convenient, simple way to declare alternative routes

      Seems like this would be a very common need: once you switch to a custom failure track, you want it to stay on that track until the end!!!

      The problem is that in a Railway, everything automatically has 2 outputs. But we really only need one (which is exactly what Path gives us). And you end up fighting the defaults when there are the automatic 2 outputs, because you have to remember to explicitly/verbosely redirect all of those outputs or they may end up going somewhere you don't want them to go.

      The default behavior of everything going to the next defined step is not helpful for doing that, and in fact is quite frustrating because you don't want unrelated steps to accidentally end up on one of the tasks in your custom failure track.

      And you can't use fail for custom-track steps becase that breaks magnetic_to for some reason.

      I was finding myself very in need of something like this, and was about to write my own DSL, but then I discovered this. I still think it needs a better DSL than this, but at least they provided a way to do this. Much needed.

      For this example, I might write something like this:

      step :decide_type, Output(Activity::Left, :credit_card) => Track(:with_credit_card)
      
      # Create the track, which would automatically create an implicit End with the same id.
      Track(:with_credit_card) do
          step :authorize
          step :charge
      end
      

      I guess that's not much different than theirs. Main improvement is it avoids ugly need to specify end_id/end_task.

      But that wouldn't actually be enough either in this example, because you would actually want to have a failure track there and a path doesn't have one ... so it sounds like Subprocess and a new self-contained ProcessCreditCard Railway would be the best solution for this particular example... Subprocess is the ultimate in flexibility and gives us all the flexibility we need)


      But what if you had a path that you needed to direct to from 2 different tasks' outputs?

      Example: I came up with this, but it takes a lot of effort to keep my custom path/track hidden/"isolated" and prevent other tasks from automatically/implicitly going into those steps:

      class Example::ValidationErrorTrack < Trailblazer::Activity::Railway
        step :validate_model, Output(:failure) => Track(:validation_error)
        step :save,           Output(:failure) => Track(:validation_error)
      
        # Can't use fail here or the magnetic_to won't work and  Track(:validation_error) won't work
        step :log_validation_error, magnetic_to: :validation_error,
          Output(:success) => End(:validation_error), 
          Output(:failure) => End(:validation_error) 
      end
      
      puts Trailblazer::Developer.render o
      Reloading...
      
      #<Start/:default>
       {Trailblazer::Activity::Right} => #<Trailblazer::Activity::TaskBuilder::Task user_proc=validate_model>
      #<Trailblazer::Activity::TaskBuilder::Task user_proc=validate_model>
       {Trailblazer::Activity::Left} => #<Trailblazer::Activity::TaskBuilder::Task user_proc=log_validation_error>
       {Trailblazer::Activity::Right} => #<Trailblazer::Activity::TaskBuilder::Task user_proc=save>
      #<Trailblazer::Activity::TaskBuilder::Task user_proc=save>
       {Trailblazer::Activity::Left} => #<Trailblazer::Activity::TaskBuilder::Task user_proc=log_validation_error>
       {Trailblazer::Activity::Right} => #<End/:success>
      #<Trailblazer::Activity::TaskBuilder::Task user_proc=log_validation_error>
       {Trailblazer::Activity::Left} => #<End/:validation_error>
       {Trailblazer::Activity::Right} => #<End/:validation_error>
      #<End/:success>
      
      #<End/:validation_error>
      
      #<End/:failure>
      

      Now attempt to do it with Path... Does the Path() have an ID we can reference? Or maybe we just keep a reference to the object and use it directly in 2 different places?

      class Example::ValidationErrorTrack::VPathHelper1 < Trailblazer::Activity::Railway
         validation_error_path = Path(end_id: "End.validation_error", end_task: End(:validation_error)) do
          step :log_validation_error
        end
        step :validate_model, Output(:failure) => validation_error_path
        step :save,           Output(:failure) => validation_error_path
      end
      
      o=Example::ValidationErrorTrack::VPathHelper1; puts Trailblazer::Developer.render o
      Reloading...
      
      #<Start/:default>
       {Trailblazer::Activity::Right} => #<Trailblazer::Activity::TaskBuilder::Task user_proc=validate_model>
      #<Trailblazer::Activity::TaskBuilder::Task user_proc=validate_model>
       {Trailblazer::Activity::Left} => #<Trailblazer::Activity::TaskBuilder::Task user_proc=log_validation_error>
       {Trailblazer::Activity::Right} => #<Trailblazer::Activity::TaskBuilder::Task user_proc=save>
      #<Trailblazer::Activity::TaskBuilder::Task user_proc=log_validation_error>
       {Trailblazer::Activity::Right} => #<End/:validation_error>
      #<Trailblazer::Activity::TaskBuilder::Task user_proc=save>
       {Trailblazer::Activity::Left} => #<Trailblazer::Activity::TaskBuilder::Task user_proc=log_validation_error>
       {Trailblazer::Activity::Right} => #<End/:success>
      #<End/:success>
      
      #<End/:validation_error>
      
      #<End/:failure>
      

      It's just too bad that:

      • there's not a Railway helper in case you want multiple outputs, though we could probably create one pretty easily using Path as our template
      • we can't "inline" a separate Railway acitivity (Subprocess "nests" it rather than "inlines")
    1. EM fungi known from indi-vidual ranges may be lost as these insular forests experience morefrequent and more intense wildfires

      There may be species loss due to specialization, which I don't think we can know the effects of. But it has been shown that species diversity actually supports plant health.

    Annotators

    1. Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city's white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action. We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good faith negotiation.Then, last September, came the opportunity to talk with leaders of Birmingham's economic community. In the course of the negotiations, certain promises were made by the merchants--for example, to remove the stores' humiliating racial signs. On the basis of these promises, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the leaders of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights agreed to a moratorium on all demonstrations. As the weeks and months went by, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. A few signs, briefly removed, returned; the others remained. As in so many past experiences, our hopes had been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community. Mindful of the difficulties involved, we decided to undertake a process of self purification. We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves: "Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?" "Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?" We decided to schedule our direct action program for the Easter season, realizing that except for Christmas, this is the main shopping period of the year. Knowing that a strong economic-withdrawal program would be the by product of direct action, we felt that this would be the best time to bring pressure to bear on the merchants for the needed change.Then it occurred to us that Birmingham's mayoral election was coming up in March, and we speedily decided to postpone action until after election day. When we discovered that the Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene "Bull" Connor, had piled up enough votes to be in the run off, we decided again to postpone action until the day after the run off so that the demonstrations could not be used to cloud the issues. Like many others, we waited to see Mr. Connor defeated, and to this end we endured postponement after postponement. Having aided in this community need, we felt that our direct action program could be delayed no longer.You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. Some have asked: "Why didn't you give the new city administration time to act?" The only answer that I can give to this query is that the new Birmingham administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing one, before it will act. We are sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Albert Boutwell as mayor will bring the millennium to Birmingham. While Mr. Boutwell is a much more gentle person than Mr. Connor, they are both segregationists, dedicated to maintenance of the status quo. I have hope that Mr. Boutwell will be reasonable enough to see the futility of massive resistance to desegregation. But he will not see this without pressure from devotees of civil rights. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I it" relationship for an "I thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal. Let me give another explanation. A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up that state's segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout Alabama all sorts of devious methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties in which, even though Negroes constitute a majority of the population, not a single Negro is registered. Can any law enacted under such circumstances be considered democratically structured?Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First-Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.I hope you are able to see the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was evidenced sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks rather than submit to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience.We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country's antireligious laws.I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn't this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn't this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn't this like condemning Jesus because his unique God consciousness and never ceasing devotion to God's will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber. I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: "All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth." Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I began thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency, made up in part of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, are so drained of self respect and a sense of "somebodiness" that they have adjusted to segregation; and in part of a few middle-class Negroes who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because in some ways they profit by segregation, have become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad's Muslim movement. Nourished by the Negro's frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible "devil."I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the "do nothingism" of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. For there is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest. I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle. If this philosophy had not emerged, by now many streets of the South would, I am convinced, be flowing with blood. And I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as "rabble rousers" and "outside agitators" those of us who employ nonviolent direct action, and if they refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black nationalist ideologies--a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare.Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciously or unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand why public demonstrations are taking place. The Negro has many pent up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides -and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people: "Get rid of your discontent." Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. And now this approach is being termed extremist. But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream." Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Was not Martin Luther an extremist: "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God." And John Bunyan: "I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience." And Abraham Lincoln: "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free." And Thomas Jefferson: "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal . . ." So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary's hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime--the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.I had hoped that the white moderate would see this need. Perhaps I was too optimistic; perhaps I expected too much. I suppose I should have realized that few members of the oppressor race can understand the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent and determined action. I am thankful, however, that some of our white brothers in the South have grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it. They are still all too few in quantity, but they are big in quality. Some -such as Ralph McGill, Lillian Smith, Harry Golden, James McBride Dabbs, Ann Braden and Sarah Patton Boyle--have written about our struggle in eloquent and prophetic terms. Others have marched with us down nameless streets of the South. They have languished in filthy, roach infested jails, suffering the abuse and brutality of policemen who view them as "dirty nigger-lovers." Unlike so many of their moderate brothers and sisters, they have recognized the urgency of the moment and sensed the need for powerful "action" antidotes to combat the disease of segregation. Let me take note of my other major disappointment. I have been so greatly disappointed with the white church and its leadership. Of course, there are some notable exceptions. I am not unmindful of the fact that each of you has taken some significant stands on this issue. I commend you, Reverend Stallings, for your Christian stand on this past Sunday, in welcoming Negroes to your worship service on a nonsegregated basis. I commend the Catholic leaders of this state for integrating Spring Hill College several years ago.But despite these notable exceptions, I must honestly reiterate that I have been disappointed with the church. I do not say this as one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong with the church. I say this as a minister of the gospel, who loves the church; who was nurtured in its bosom; who has been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen.When I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, a few years ago, I felt we would be supported by the white church. I felt that the white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders; all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.In spite of my shattered dreams, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern, would serve as the channel through which our just grievances could reach the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed.I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: "Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother." In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: "Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern." And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South's beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: "What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices when the lips of Governor Barnett dripped with words of interposition and nullification? Where were they when Governor Wallace gave a clarion call for defiance and hatred? Where were their voices of support when bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?"Yes, these questions are still in my mind. In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? I am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.There was a time when the church was very powerful--in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being "disturbers of the peace" and "outside agitators."' But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were "a colony of heaven," called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be "astronomically intimidated." By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests. Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent--and often even vocal--sanction of things as they are.But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.Perhaps I have once again been too optimistic. Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world? Perhaps I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual church, the church within the church, as the true ekklesia and the hope of the world. But again I am thankful to God that some noble souls from the ranks of organized religion have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners in the struggle for freedom. They have left their secure congregations and walked the streets of Albany, Georgia, with us. They have gone down the highways of the South on tortuous rides for freedom. Yes, they have gone to jail with us. Some have been dismissed from their churches, have lost the support of their bishops and fellow ministers. But they have acted in the faith that right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. Their witness has been the spiritual salt that has preserved the true meaning of the gospel in these troubled times. They have carved a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment. I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are at present misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America's destiny. Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here. For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation -and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands. Before closing I feel impelled to mention one other point in your statement that has troubled me profoundly. You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping "order" and "preventing violence." I doubt that you would have so warmly commended the police force if you had seen its dogs sinking their teeth into unarmed, nonviolent Negroes. I doubt that you would so quickly commend the policemen if you were to observe their ugly and inhumane treatment of Negroes here in the city jail; if you were to watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls; if you were to see them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys; if you were to observe them, as they did on two occasions, refuse to give us food because we wanted to sing our grace together. I cannot join you in your praise of the Birmingham police department.It is true that the police have exercised a degree of discipline in handling the demonstrators. In this sense they have conducted themselves rather "nonviolently" in public. But for what purpose? To preserve the evil system of segregation. Over the past few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends. Perhaps Mr. Connor and his policemen have been rather nonviolent in public, as was Chief Pritchett in Albany, Georgia, but they have used the moral means of nonviolence to maintain the immoral end of racial injustice. As T. S. Eliot has said: "The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason."I wish you had commended the Negro sit inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy two year old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: "My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest." They will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience' sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

      Content

    1. ‘Movies about the future tendto be about the future of movies’, and sf cinema‘often turns out tobe...thefictional orfictive science of the cinema itself, the future featsit may achieve scanned in line with the technical feat that conceivesthem right now and before our eyes’(159).

      This could be true not only for cinema, but I guess every other medium of entertainment. James Cameron truly popularized spectacle in its best form every decade that he decided to make films. Through this change, we were able to ogle at every bit of improvement and attention in detail thus proving to us that cinema has truly been innovated. I'd like to think the same for television (now that we are literally watching big budget shows on TV). It can be said for comic books as well. Many might disagree with me on this but I think comic books depicting futures are about the futures of how we perceive text and images on a page, it expands our visual bank in the the art of information.

    1. especially logging

      So for logging- my family owns a lot of land and we were required to log it by the town in order to manage the density of the forest in order to let new species of trees grow and develop.

      I know they are referencing large scale logging, but is it directly targeting the issue of clearing land? Just wondering as it always made me nervous that we had to log some of our land! (It is still very much dense and diverse, just less dense than before). Couldn't help but think of the little squirrels and birds and owls that may have been residing in the trees logged!! :(

    1. Finally, true dialogue cannot exist unless the dialoguers engage in critical thinking

      I chose to annotate this passage because I think it highlights the importance of the critical thinking we are all taking part in throughout this course, and as Santa Clara students. If explaining this to someone other than myself, I would emphasize the fact that in order to have a truly meaningful and engaging dialogue, participants need to be able to think critically, and consider viewpoints or possibilities that they may not personally identify with. To me, this connected to a section from chapter 4 of Are Prisons Obsolete, where Davis points out that for affluent white women, acts of "insanity" are pinpointed to mental or emotional disorders; whereas for poor or Black women, they are criminalized. In order to reach a conclusion or observation such as this, there is a good amount of critical thinking required.

    1. Most go through extensive therapy to cope with their newly-altered perspective on life. Some no longer feel welcome in the Deaf community or choose to leave it. Some have trouble relating to old friends. 

      After reading this article, I'm so surprised how people outside of the deaf community view them as a disability but in reality, deaf people don't look at themselves as people who are disabled. Instead, they appreciate that they are deaf and learn to live with it. Clinicians think that disabled people need solutions to their disabilities but why don't we understand that some people are happy with being disabled. "Fixing their disability" may be doing the individual a disservice than actually helping them.

    1. Think about focusing on objective facts, statements that can be made about the Constitution and the institutions, laws, and processes that it created.

      I think nowadays we tend to get caught up in so many different interpretations of what something, such as the Constitution, is supposed to mean or how things are supposed to be done. The problem being that many people can come up with their own ideas that may reflect differently from others, meaning that it isn't always so black and white because there can different scenarios where something might not apply because even though the law says one thing, context still matters.

    1. I think you will see them at all mass food production facilities and in novel settings first," he told TechRepublic. "Then you may start to see them in restaurants and grocery stores. The final destination is in your kitchen as a domestic appliance. The purpose of this technology is to make lives easier. To achieve that, we will need to advance the technology, make food delivery easy and simple, and reduce costs. That may take quite a while."

      Where will it start according to this person?

    1. We exceeded it. This year, global poverty is going to fall to 12 percent.

      This is such an incredibly encouraging statistic! I’m honestly a bit surprised I have never heard about this success before, although I think what surprises me even more is that the baseline in 1990 was a whopping 36%! Looking at some more recent statistics, it appears the rate dropped to 9.2% in 2017. According to a report from The World Bank, however, 2020 may have caused our first regression in several years. While this press release was written in October and the information shared is merely speculative, they believe that the pandemic may cause as may as 1.4% of the world population to sink backward into extreme poverty.

      Here is the press report: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2020/10/07/covid-19-to-add-as-many-as-150-million-extreme-poor-by-2021

    2. Do you think the world is going to be a better place next year? In the next decade? Can we end hunger, achieve gender equality, halt climate change, all in the next 15 years?

      It took 20 Presidencies, from Abraham Lincoln to Lydon B. Johnson, for civil equality within the United States to be substantive. Yet, to date, as a country we still find ourselves stuck in a continuous loop of domestic turmoil and racial disparities. Therefore, the United Nations goal of 15 years and tackling 17 various issues that plague every country is lofty at best. Unfortunately, irrespective of how democratic a country may be, the issue of political ideology arises in everything.

    3. Do you think the world is going to be a better place next year? In the next decade? Can we end hunger, achieve gender equality, halt climate change, all in the next 15 years?

      I do not believe that the world will be a better place any time soon. Although we can spend more money to feed more people, we can only spend so much money without hurting ourselves. When it comes to equality, I feel like people are so divided that we will prevent ourselves from progressing past a certain point because it is impossible to get every single person to agree and accept changes in society. I highly doubt that climate change will ever "Halt" since we have no control over countries like China and Russia that may not care about it as much as others, along with the fact that this requires every country involved to agree in making changes that will benefit the countries involved while still reaching the goal.

    4. Do you think the world is going to be a better place next year? In the next decade? Can we end hunger, achieve gender equality, halt climate change, all in the next 15 years?

      The world is constantly changing, sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse. Making the world a better place is definitely an attainable goal, but I seriously doubt that this goal will be achieved in the next year, decade, or even century. Our world today has a colossal amount of things that need to be changed in order to improve it. Some goals are a little easier, like ending world hunger, but completely halting climate change or attaining world peace are tasks that sound much easier than they really are. In addition, I believe that as soon as one of the problems are solved, like stopping world hunger, then a new problem will arise, like food shortages or wars over which countries need food more. I may be a pessimist, but there are too many problems that need to be fixed and not enough time to do so.

    5. Also, while some of the goals are pretty specific — end hunger — others are a lot vaguer — promote peaceful and tolerant societies.

      Would focusing more on the specific goals rather than the vaguer goals be easier? Would the specific goals have more of a set plan to follow than of a vague goal? I would think a more specific goal would be less time consuming to set a plan than if it was a vague goal. This would be because perhaps there are less elements and questions to be asked when determining how to promote peaceful and tolerant societies than to end world hunger (specific). When promoting peaceful and tolerant societies becomes a goal to achieve, a lot of questions need to be answered or evaluated to structure this peaceful and tolerant society within the existing society/community. In answering the question "what will make a peaceful and tolerant society?" Your answer may be different from your fellow classmates or even family members, as customs and beliefs vary. So what about specific goals? In this case, ending world hunger. I would take a guess that maybe these goals are less complicated to evaluate because of research and numbers we can utilize to support our claims when trying to figure out a solution. In the end, I would ask which goals are easier or should be prioritized in order to sufficiently create this better world for everyone?

    6. And that, then, I think, is to provide a point of focus for people to start demanding action and start demanding progress

      I agree with msewilam about the global reports not motivating many citizens to take action, instead they are more interested in the events that affect them. That is why I believe stricter environment laws will make people take this matter more seriously. If we create environmental laws that affect us individually, we may be more inclined to do the right thing in order to not have to suffer the consequences, such as large fines and imprisonment. Clearly as msewilam stated, we do not take other countries reports (that we have today) seriously, so how would the report cards be any different? These report cards do not affect us individually, so I cannot see an improvement this will cause on our planet.

    7. underperforming on social progress, relative to their wealth. Russia has lots of natural resource wealth, but lots of social problems. China has boomed economically, but hasn’t made much headway on human rights or environmental issues. India has a space program and millions of people without toilets. Now, on the other hand, we have countries that are over-performing on social progress relative to their GDP. Costa Rica has prioritized education, health and environmental sustainability, and as a result, it’s achieving a very high level of social progress, despite only having a rather modest GDP. And Costa Rica’s not alone. From poor countries like Rwanda to richer countries like New Zealand, we see that it’s possible to get lots of social progress, even if your GDP is not so great.

      It is very hard to measure the success of a country and this quote proves such.There are countries that seem to do well economically but have a huge divide in social class, there are countries where there is little divide among social class but also little freedom. I think that a good balance among these factors measures success. I think we are spending money in ways that may make us look good but cause harm to the public, a country may appear to be wonderful to an elitist which causes them to make misinformed decisions.

    8. What do we have to get to achieve the Global Goals?

      We need to start looking at it as "us" not "you" or "them" we are all in this together. Some people may think just a simple bottle being thrown out the window may do no harm. What is the problem? It's little. Okay well, there are so many people around the world thinking the exact same thing. One simple bottle turns into millions of bottles that are slowly destroying the earth. If one person doesn't like where they live don't take everyone down with you.

    9. three fundamental questions

      These 3 questions really make me reflect on the world and where we are as a whole. It is often forgotten that we aren't the only ones in the world. We go to school and/or work, coming home to see many of the smallest luxuries we may not even think are that special. Every time I drink water or eat food I don't think about the kids in India who are starving. When I go to school I don't think about the women in societies who have been kept away from education. When I go to the doctors I don't think about the families who don't have enough money leaving them sick and ill, knowing there is a medication that can help them. While thinking about these things, I want to see changes in the world, but how can I when I see food, water, education, and healthcare as nothing while people around the world see it as their only means of survival.

    1. Note: This rebuttal was posted by the corresponding author to Review Commons. Content has not been altered except for formatting.

      Learn more at Review Commons


      Reply to the reviewers

      Reviewer response

      We thank the reviews for the careful reviews, and were delighted to see that they assessed both the quality and significance of the work so highlty.

      Reviewer #1 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)):

      The authors investigated the cross-neutralization capacity of serum antibodies to past and future 229E coronaviruses using 229E spikes isolated from five time points and sera from two different periods (1985-1995 and 2020). They demonstrated a general pattern of asymmetric cross-neutralization, with sera cross-reactive to historical but not future strains. Using chimeras, the authors showed this pattern was mostly driven by antibodies to the evolving RBD. The rate of change in the neutralization titer, a possible measure of antigenic evolution, was estimated to be on par with that of flu B viruses. Interesting differences in individuals' cross-neutralization capacity were observed. The main take-away is that reinfection with 229E is enabled by antigenic escape, not "weak" immunity after infection (as proposed by others).

      Thanks for the excellent summary of the paper. We agree with it, although we would note that our work does not exclude “weak immunity” as a possible compounding explanation for re-infection in addition to the antigenic evolution we demonstrate.

      **Major comments:**

      The key conclusions are convincing and justified by the data. The work is clearly presented and presented with sufficient detail for reproducibility. Characteristically and laudably, the authors have made all the code and data publicly available on GitHub.

      Thanks for the favorable summary.

      **Minor comments:**

      p 3: Perhaps it is clearer to write that 229E has been identified/isolated in humans for >50 y? Or do you really mean to imply (by contrast with "circulated") that NL63 emerged very recently?

      This is a good suggestion. We really do not know how long either CoV-229E or CoV-NL63 have been circulating humans, only that CoV-229E was first isolated >50 years ago whereas CoV-NL63 was first identified only in 2003. It is possible both viruses have been circulating for longer than that. We have made the suggested change to clarify.

      p 3: An important citation for the antigenic implications of the ladder-like phylogeny AND phylogenetic clustering by date is the classic paper introducing phylodynamics by Grenfell et al. (2004, Science).

      Thanks for pointing out this citation; we have added it.

      p 4: I might not be like all readers, but I prefer to see a bit in the main text about the source of sera for this kind of study. (I wonder about age, if donors are healthy, etc.)

      This is a good question, and we have expanded on it in both the main text and the methods. Briefly, the sera were all from apparently healthy individuals, and no information about recent respiratory virus infections were available. We have provided the age of the serum donor (at the time of serum collection) above the title of each plot showing person-specific neutralization data.

      p 4: "Our reason for focusing..." stops short. Is the idea that these are probably people who were recently infected?

      This is a good question, and we have elaborated in the revised text. We don’t have any direct information on whether the individuals had recent infections, although that seems plausible. More pragmatically, we reasoned that sera that had reasonably high initial titers would provide better dynamic range to see how titers changed as the virus evolved given our assay has a lower limit of detection.

      p 5: Probably my biggest suggestion for the paper is that it mention another relevant study. In 1980, Anne Underwood demonstrated similar asymmetric cross-immunity among early strains of H3N2 (but using rabbits, not human sera), finding that antibodies raised to one strain reacted more strongly by HAI to past strains than to later strains (doi: 10.1128/IAI.27.2.397-404.1980). This relates to the significance of the paper (next section).

      Thanks, this is a good and relevant citation, and we have added it when we discuss the possible asymmetry of antigenic change with respect to time.

      Obviously, there are citations to update throughout due to the booming SARS-CoV-2 literature.

      We have updated the other citations to keep pace with the fast-changing literature!

      Reviewer #1 (Significance (Required)):

      This study, if anything, undersells itself. Obviously it is a huge contribution to our understanding of how a seasonal coronavirus that bears important phenotypic resemblance to SARS-CoV-2 evolves, but I think it is also providing a foundational piece of evidence--a mechanism--of how rapid viral turnover (by antigenic evolution) occurs. There is no reason to think this should be limited to the coronaviruses, and I suspect the evidence here will go a long way to unifying the evolutionary and epidemiological dynamics of fast-evolving viruses.

      Thanks for the praise of the manuscript. Indeed, we were surprised to find that no similarly designed studies have been done even for influenza virus, and so are now interested in expanding our future work to do that as we fully agree it could provide insight more broadly.

      Asymmetric competition is nearly an ecological requirement for one strain to successfully invade and displace another. It is thought (unsure how widely?) that flu evolves antigenically, with new strains eventually displacing old ones, by mutating at key epitopes in ways that the immune system does not immediately pick up. That is, immune memory is biased to recall responses to conserved epitopes, which on average are probably less neutralizing. This will induce competition between mutant and resident viruses, but it would be symmetric, since infection with either would induce responses to conserved epitopes on the other. But if on infection with the mutant, immune memory sometimes reuses (boosts) antibody responses to target the mutated epitopes, those recycled antibodies might be less effective against the mutant, making the competition asymmetric.

      What this paper and Underwood (1980) suggest is that we can get this asymmetric, antibody-mediated competition fairly easily and without extensive memory. Underwood showed this more powerfully in rabbits, but in this paper too we see an indirect suggestion of asymmetry in relatively inexperienced children (Fig. 3). Mutants (future strains) successfully invade when they can trigger presumably recalled antibodies that are more harmful to the resident (soon historical) strain than the mutant. If this is so easy to do, as judged by the extensive data here, then it could be common.

      I've gone off on a theoretical limb here, but the paper is still important without these considerations. This work will be of interest to evolutionary biologists, epidemiologists, vaccinologists, and everyone else wondering what SARS-CoV-2 will do next and how immunity to antigenically variable pathogens works.

      We completely agree with the ideas mentioned above, and appreciate having it put in this nice context, particularly alongside the Underwood paper (with which we were not previously familiar). That said, we believe that the small number of recent children sera samples in the current study preclude us from drawing strong conclusions about the asymmetry--as the reviewer says, our data provides an indirect suggestion too. So overall we have not tried to expand this angle here because as the reviewer says, the paper is still important without these considerations. However, we are actively working to see if we can design a similar study with more children sera in the future to separately address the questions about asymmetry.

      Reviewer #2 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)):

      An important question in coronavirology is what governs their ability to seemingly reinfect people regularly (within 2 or 3 years). While waning protective immunity has been proposed and is of current concern for SARS CoV-2, the role of antigenic drift driven by escape from neutralizing antibodies has not been well characterized. The authors have attempted to look at this through examining historical Spike proteins from HCoV-229E over a period of 30-odd years. The authors show that 229E evolves along a linear trajectory consistent with yearly selection by pre-existing immunity. Taking representative spike proteins from different time points into pseudovirus neut assays, they find that older spike proteins are less sensitive to neut by more recent sera. Conversely, spike proteins from prior to the birth of an individual display markedly less sensitivity to neut that those prevalent during the persons lifetime. Sequence analysis of the spike shows variation accruing in both N-termina regions and the RBD, parts of spike predominantly targeted by nABs. Lastly producing early spikes with chimeric RBDs from late viruses enhances the sensitivity to more recent sera.

      This is a potentially important MS that addresses a pertinent question that is of wide interest for the CoV2 pandemic. While it is limited in addressing the relative contribution of antigenic escape vs waning Ab titers because of the nature of the sample, the MS makes a strong case for Spike evolution being driven by antigenic escape.

      Thanks for the summary. We agree that our paper does not really address waning immunity because we don’t have sequential serum samples from the same individual. However, it does clearly show that antigenic evolution is important independent of waning immunity, because all of the experiments (e.g., Figure 2 and 3) show the same serum sample tested against newer spikes, and neutralization titers definitely decrease as the spike evolves. The reviewer is correct that this doesn’t rule out the possibility of waning immunity as a separate phenomenon, and we have been sure to emphasize that in the revised text.

      Reviewer #2 (Significance (Required)):

      While the Figs 1-3 are clear, the data in Fig 4 is somewhat preliminary. In all likelihood many people are making neutralizing antibodies both against RBD and the N-terminal region and the relative proportion probably underlies the variability in the data in Fig 4B. I think the MS would benefit from the following:

      A comparison of NTD vs RBD vs NTD/RBD chimeras in Fig 4B to give a fuller picture of antigenic escape with statistical support.

      The reviewer is correct that our manuscript does not provide a decisive answer on the relative role of NTD versus RBD targeting antibodies, although the data in Fig. 4B clearly show that RBD antibodies are important for many individuals as simply changing the RBD to that of newer viruses recapitulates the full spike antigenic evolution without any changes in the NTD or elsewhere (e.g., subject SD87_2 or SD85_3 in Fig 4B). However, for some other individuals NTD antibodies may play a role.

      In general, full dissection of the role of RBD versus NTD antibodies is beyond the scope of our study (and in some cases not even possible with the available volumes of the older serum). In any case, the major point of our study—the first experimental demonstration that seasonal coronaviruses undergo antigenic evolution—does not depend on dissecting the relative roles of RBD and NTD antibodies. We have therefore added new text explaining that we cannot fully parse the relative role of antibodies to these domains beyond knowing that RBD antibodies play n important role. We have added text to emphasize that antibodies to other regions including the NTD could also be important.

      A figure to map the polymorphic residues in Fig 4A onto the 229E spike structure to visualise their position and special relatedness, with perhaps a comparison with the latest knowledge of SASR CoV-2 epitopes.

      We agree that visualizing the variable sites on the structure is useful and have added such a visualization as a new panel in Figure 4. This allows us to more clearly show the clustering of variability in the RBD and NTD. This clustering of mutations in those regions is consistent with what is currently being seen with the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants with mutations in those regions of spike. However, given the divergence between SARS-CoV-2 and CoV-229E, we are not able to do a more fine-grained comparison of epitope sites as many important sites in the RBD and NTD do not have a clear one-to-one alignment (for instance, the RBD’s don’t even bind the same receptor).

      Additional discussion to reflect the new SARS CoV-2 variants and their potential selection by escape in the light of the authors data.

      We have updated the manuscript to describe the new SARS-CoV-2 variants (which mostly emerged after submission of our original manuscript) and how this emerging antigenic evolution of SARS-CoV-2 is consistent with what we saw in CoV-229E.

    1. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass.

      This is not exactly true, and I believe it was not true at the time, of how libraries arrange information, Dewey

    2. Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing.

      I wonder if these remarks are previous to the standard library arrangement that we use today.

    3. It is readily possible to construct a machine which will manipulate premises in accordance with formal logic, simply by the clever use of relay circuits. Put a set of premises into such a device and turn the crank, and it will readily pass out conclusion after conclusion, all in accordance with logical law, and with no more slips than would be expected of a keyboard adding machine.

      And yet, this is what most programmers fail to do.

    4. One can now picture a future investigator in his laboratory. His hands are free, and he is not anchored. As he moves about and observes, he photographs and comments. Time is automatically recorded to tie the two records together. If he goes into the field, he may be connected by radio to his recorder. As he ponders over his notes in the evening, he again talks his comments into the record. His typed record, as well as his photographs, may both be in miniature, so that he projects them for examination.

      This is one of the most important aspects of the essay. Noting that he is continuously talking about the work of a scientist, he stresses the act of recording, of looking at reality. This is radically different from what Ahrens claims in his book "How to take Smart Notes", in which there is not a single hint to the fact that you must look through the window and not just into previous works.

    5. the users of advanced methods of manipulating data are a very small part of the population. There are, however, machines for solving differential equations—and functional and integral equations, for that matter. There are many special machines, such as the harmonic synthesizer which predicts the tides. There will be many more, appearing certainly first in the hands of the scientist and in small numbers.

      This is a very valid argument in the context of the essay. He is not only exploring validity of technical developments, but the commercial viability. Mass production lower costs, but if not many people care about something, it will not be mass produced. However, machines to perform operations few people care about exist. Therefore...

      This is the inverse of the story of the GPU, but very relatable to the space industry.

    1. He took a deep breath. And sinking back into his chair he placed an ankle over a knee and began to light a cheap cigar. I almost asked him where the rolled cigarette was. I couldn't even laugh; it was too chilling. 'Nothing lasts long enough to make any sense,' I said. I said it without conviction.

      76 After his "speech", Phillip lays back in his chair and leaves the narrator in a state where he can't even laugh, even though we have seen him to do so in situations that have much less comedy than this one. This shows that Phillip's words really affected him, because his words represent the narrator's point of view to some extent. Here, he doesn't seem as disinterested as usual since the topic actually meant something to him. Than, he answers with the words:"Nothing lasts long enough to make any sense". This show his view of the world as a whole. Especially in his home country, nothing lasts forever and he has grown accustomed to that. I assume that's why he usually tries to seem to disinterested in everything - because he doesn't think that it will last long enough to be worth a while analyzing it. However, is that really true or just a way of thinking that the narrator has created by which he doesn't pay attention to things that may even be important simply because "nothing lasts long enough to make any sense"?

    2. He took off his coat slowly. He unbuttoned his shirtsleeves and folded them back up to his upper arms. As I watched him come for me, in the instant his fist swung, Julia'S face, transfixed by the spikes of a blinding white light, flared inside my mind. Inside the bench. Inside the room. Anaesthetising my soul. An eternity later, when he could no longer find any spot on my body to hurt and I was still conscious but dead to every blow he could think of, the door opened and the white officers came in. They took one look at me and dragged him off.

      73 The beginning of this segment of the story(right after the "..." on the previous page left me a little bit puzzled on what actually is going on and why the narrator is getting beaten. I assume that he is being interrogated so that he can call out names that are part of something I am not certain of. During a mere moment he sees Julia's face, therefore she may be what they are looking for. Why does he picture her? Is there something unspoken between them that he remembers in such a moment or is it simply because he feels affection towards her. Either way, he doesn't say a single thing and gets beaten to the point where there isn't a single spot on his body that isn't hurt. That makes me question what his actual motives are. Throughout the story, we have seen that he isn't exactly sticking to the culture of his home country, and strays further away in his ambition to gain more knowledge. Having that in mind, what makes him take such a beating for it? Maybe it is because of certain people, like Julia, or the narrator may simply be more attached to his homeland than what he makes it seem. Still, I believe I am unaware of his actual motives.

    3. I woke up in some bed

      Something I think we forget is the particularity of Immaculate’s situation. She got kicked out of her father’s house (a pastor who does not accept her), she has a kid which she has to take care of, she has no special education or well-paid occupation (or at least they are not mentioned) and she is basically stuck with her baby daddy Peter who is sexually, verbally, and physically abusive. Her need for intimacy and gentleness may have been why she got on with the protagonist in the first place, but they can sleep only outside in “some bed” because there isn’t any other option. Immaculate is as close as being homeless at that point, all lies on Peter’s rage and decision whether he is satisfied with his abuse and wishes to kick her out or if he would like to keep her and his child, “she was just a red stain…” (p.14) .

    4. fat

      This may seem like a silly observation, but Marechera mentions the word "fat" twice in this passage. There's an obvious connection to the title "House of Hunger", which we still don't know whether it should be interpreted as a physical place or a state of mind. In this context, there is an obvious negative connotation to the word "fat" and is connected to the white people in the region as well. I think this is done in order to juxtapose the lifestyle of the white and black people, but also to give the reader a better understanding of the hatred between the two groups. This is starting to form as a theme of the novella. (p.81)

    5. I sat beneath the tall msasa tree whose branches scrape the corrugated iron roofs. I was trying not to think about where I was going. I didn't feel bitter. I was glad things had happened the way they had; I couldn't have stayed on in that House of Hunger where every morsel of sanity was snatched from you the way some kinds of bird snatch food from the very mouths of babes.

      The author may have been using monotonous sentense structure in order to build up suspence before introducing a central concept, in that case the title of the novel - The House of Hunger. As it can be seen, the sentence where this happens is preceeded by several relatively short ones: I sat..., I was..., I didn't..., I was... and immediately after we get the one begining with I couldn't... where the phrase House of Hunger is used for the first time in the novel (apart from the title) (11). The next sentence is also the first in the sequence to not begin with an I.

    1. In this sense Bloom is right: one cannot be against luxury. I would only add that one also can’t be for it. To choose and enjoy excess is something all humans, given the opportunity, will try to do.

      I don't think someone should even be against luxuries, if we are speaking of luxuries by how Khan defines it. Even though certain luxuries may be unnecessary, such as a 23,000 dollar hermes bag, it is after all bringing a positive feeling to a human, whether it be satisfaction or gratitude.

    1. In the highest class, I replied,—among those goods which he who would be happy desires both for their own sake and for the sake of their results. Then the many are of another mind; they think that justice is to be reckoned in the troublesome class, among goods which are to be pursued for the sake of rewards and of reputation, but in themselves are disagreeable and rather to be avoided.

      This goes back to our discussion in class about how we all interpret justice in different ways. One may see justice as something good and happy while another person may see it as a punishment because they did something wrong. An example would be how many Black Lives Mater protests are used seek protest for a victim against police brutality. That justice that that victim receives is good, however it's not good for the police or the person who committed the crime because they are getting punished for it.

    1. All the examples that Bloom discusses involve what we might call positive contagion—an object gains value because of its link to a beloved individual, history, or brand. This positive glow rescues a seemingly offensive behavior: contrary to what we might at first think, spending exorbitant amounts on a watch is not selfish or self-absorbed but rather can be understood as benign and even virtuous. Those who spend on luxuries are not “irrational, wasteful, . . . evil”—rather, they appropriately take pleasure by rationally considering the joy that we all find in a cherished object’s history

      In this paragraph, it is apparent that Gelman to some extent heavily believes in Paul Bloom's perspective and importance on history as the desired reason for luxury goods, inferring the value of story linked to objects. However, I would not go as far as Gelman, suggesting that spending enormous amounts of money on these goods are some how virtues. That being said, with the right circumstances, such as purchasing a luxury item so that it may be accessible for others to view (i.e. a museum), then the idea of being virtuous might be more accurately used to describe. This does on the other hand bring into question to what extent do we consider this act as a personal desire as the buyer themselves might be purchasing an item believing it is their responsibility and contribution to the world, however this creates a grey area as it does not allow us to fully evaluate what purchasing an item for personal use and desire to said individual means for them or what persuades them into making that decision, whether it being to give off a wealthy persona or truly for their own love of the history.

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      Reply to the reviewers

      We thank all three reviewers for their very useful and constructive comments. Below is our point-by-point response.

      Reviewer #1 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)):

      The manuscript by Viais R et al describes a novel role for augmin complex in apoptosis prevention during brain development. Augmin complex recruits g TuRC to microtubule lattices to nucleate microtubule branches. The authors show how -in its absence- neural progenitors have elevated p53 activity and apoptotic rate, with severe consequences on overall brain development. In particular, augmin-deleted neural progenitors display spindle abnormalities and mitotic delay, which induce DNA damage accountable for p53-induced apoptosis.

      One point that I personally found very interesting is the role of augmin-dependent MT nucleation depletion in interphase. The authors mention (line 152) that at stage E13.5, besides the number of neurons being reduced, a few neurons were misplaced in the apical region, indicating a role for augmin-driven MT nucleation in cell migration. Moreover, the authors showed that p53 genetic deletion in the Haus6 cKO rescues the apoptosis phenotype but not the tissue disorganisation, suggesting that augmin-dependent microtubule might play a role in tissue polarity. While this is well presented in the discussion, the title in line 268 narrowly refers to mitotic augmin roles. I would like here to see the authors referring to putative roles for augmin-mediated MT nucleation in interphase, by toning down the title in line 268.

      We note that severe loss of tissue integrity is evident in the p53 KO background. In this background cells are allowed to repeatedly undergo defective cell divisions with aberrant chromosome segregation, producing increasingly abnormal daughter cells that may eventually fail to support epithelial integrity. Regarding possible neuronal migration defects, this has been previously observed in a study by the Hoogenraad group (Cunha-Ferreira et al., Cell Reports, 2018, 24, 791–800) and this is mentioned in our discussion. To account for the possibility that augmin may have roles beyond mitosis, we have changed the heading to a more neutral statement, not specifically referring to proliferation/mitosis:Loss of augmin in p53 KO brains disrupts neuroepithelium integrity”.

      Overall, the text is well written and flows easily. Figures are clear and legends provide sufficient information on experimental conditions, number of replicates and scale bars. I noticed that, although the number of repeats is specified, the number of cells scored per experiment is not always included. In my comments below I highlight cases where this missing information should be added.

      **Specific points:**

      1. In the Cep63 KO (Marjanovic et al, 2015) and the CenpJ KO mice (Insolera et al, 2014), as well as other recently published papers (e.g. Phan TP et al, EMBO Journal, 2020) part of the phenotypical characterisation of the KO mice displays pictures of the overall brain dissected from the mice. Could the author show these images?

      The main difference between the cited studies (including our own on the role of CEP63 in brain development) and our current study is that in the previous studies brains are microcephalic but essentially intact, whereas in our current study brain development was aborted and accompanied by cell death and severe tissue disruption. As a result, these brains are very fragile and difficult/impossible to isolate. An additional challenge is the fact that brain disruption occurs at a very early developmental stage (before E13.5), where dissection is more difficult than at later stages. Indeed, we note that all the brains presented in the above cited studies were from later embryonic stages or newborn/adult mice. Therefore, instead of dissecting brains, we decided to present encephalic coronal and sagittal sections as shown in Fig. 1c, d, e, Fig. S1c, and Fig. 3b, e to show the overall impact of Haus6 cKO and Haus6 cKO p53 KO on embryonic brain morphology at E13.5 and E17.5.

      Fig2d: do the insets correspond to higher magnification images? What is the zoom factor? I could not find it in the legend.

      The zoom factor is 1.4 - we have added this information to the figure legend.

      Fig2E,I and K graphs: how many cells were quantified here over how many experiments? I could not find information in the figure legend.

      We have added the information regarding the number of embryos and counted cells to the figure legends.

      The impact of Haus6 on mitotic spindle needs further clarification:

      o Fig2F: here, the authors show quantification for abnormal and multipolar spindle together. Later on, the abnormal spindle phenotype is no longer discussed (Fig4). I was wondering what is the individual contribution of abnormal and multipolar spindle, separately. Which one of the two is more frequent? Could the authors explain in the text how they define an abnormal spindle? Is it the lack of MT with the condensed chromosome area?

      We agree that our previous classification was somewhat confusing. The spindle defects in Haus6 cKO cells are directly linked to the spindle pole fragmentation phenotype shown in Fig. 2d, e. Association of spindle microtubules with these scattered PCM fragments causes spindles to appear overall disorganized. In some cases, multiple smaller asters are present, which is what we had termed “multipolar”. However, this does not always involve multipolar DNA configurations, which we separately quantify in Fig. 4. To avoid confusion, we now classify spindle morphologies based on tubulin staining simply as “normal” (bipolar configuration, two robust and focused asters) or “disorganized” (lack of bipolar configuration, in some cases multiple smaller asters). We have included a better description of this classification (lines 202-205).

      o Could it be that augmin deletion induce an instability in MTs within the mitotic spindle, leading to the "empty" or with very few MTs spindles? Or could it be that more cold-sensitive MTs are affected by fixation? What is the percentage of the spindle with no MT in control?

      It is possible that augmin-deficient spindles are less well-preserved during fixation due to compromised spindle microtubule stability. Indeed, in tissue culture cells augmin deficient spindle microtubules are more cold-sensitive than controls (Zhu et al., 2008, JCB, 183, 835-848). To address this we will determine the percentage of mitotic control and Haus6 cKO cells lacking microtubule staining.

      o Did the authors quantify anaphase/telophase phenotypes as they did in Fig4f?

      Yes, this quantification was already included in Fig. 4j, where we compared abnormal chromosome configurations between Haus6 cKO and Haus6 cKO p53 KO.

      o How do authors explain PCM fragmentation here? Could this phenotype be due to an initial cytokinesis defect which led the cells to accumulate extra centrosomes? Or could this maybe be a product of aberrant PCM maturation/centrosome duplication? Could the authors add here a line to discuss the possible origin of pole fragmentation?

      The PCM fragmentation phenotype has previously been described after augmin RNAi in cultured cells (Lawo et al., 2009, Curr Biol, 19, 816-826). We refer to this result in the discussion and we have added the above reference, to emphasize this point. The authors showed that this phenotype does not involve amplification of centriole number, but is caused by an imbalance in microtubule-dependent forces acting on the PCM and leading to its fragmentation. Thus, the extra poles were formed by acentriolar PCM fragments. We will clarify this issue by quantifying centriole numbers in mitotic cells (when centriole duplication is complete) in control and Haus6 cKO brains. We expect that this will confirm the data previously obtained in cell lines showing that in most cells the fragmented poles are not due to extra centrioles (see also below).

      Apart from the PCM fragmentation phenotype that does not alter centriole number, previous work in cultured cells also described cytokinesis defects. Failed cytokinesis would indeed lead to increased centriole number. However, it would also increase DNA content, which would be visible by an increase in the size of interphase nuclei (which we observed in Haus6 cKO p53 KO cells and quantified in Fig. 4J) and a larger size of mitotic figures. We now refer to the possibility of cytokinesis defects and cite previous work in lines 272-274. In case we observe cells with increased centriole number, which we will quantify for the revised version of the manuscript (see above), we will also determine if this corelates with an increased size of the corresponding mitotic figures. If so, this would be consistent with failed cytokinesis as cause of extra centrosomes.

      Fig 4 Did the authors quantify centrosome fragmentation and abnormal spindle here? As they characterised them for the Haus6 cKO mouse, it would be preferable to maintain the same characterisation for the Haus6 cKO p53KO.

      We will quantify pole fragmentation and spindle defects also in Haus6 cKO p53 KO as shown for Haus6 cKO in Fig. 2.

      Fig4c and d: how many replicates were done to obtain these graphs? I think the authors forgot to add this information in the figure legend.

      This information has been included in the figure legend.

      Fig4f,g, I and J: how many cells were counted per experiment? I appreciate the authors writing the n of experiments performed.

      We have added this information to the figure legend.

      Fig5d: how many cells were counted per experiment?

      We have added this information to the figure legend.

      Reviewer #1 (Significance (Required)):

      While it was already known that mitotic delay affects the neuronal progenitor pool through activation of p53-dependent apoptosis (Pilaz L-J, Neuron 2016; Mitchell-Dick A, Dev Neurosci 2020), and that this can be triggered by depletion of centrosomal proteins as Cenpj and Cep63, the role of surface-dependent microtubule nucleation was not identified so far. Some insights come from a Haus6-KO mouse model which dies during blastocyst stage after several aberrant mitosis (Watanabe S, Cell Reports, 2016). In parallel, McKinley KL et al showed that Haus8 depletion in human cells (RPE1cells) triggered p53-dependent G1 arrest following mitotic defects (McKinley KL, Developmental Cell, 2017). Building on the Hause6 KO mouse and human cell line data, here Viais R et al discover a novel role for the augmin-mediated MT nucleation in neural progenitor growth and brain development in vivo, through prevention of p53-induced apoptosis.

      Specifically, Viais R et al show that:

      1. Surface-dependent microtubule nucleation depletion severely impacts brain development, disrupting partly or completely forebrain domains and cerebellum;
      2. Surface-dependent microtubule nucleation depletion induce spindle abnormalities, resulting in mitotic delay in apical progenitors;
      3. Mitotic delay results in DNA breaks, p53 activation and p53-induced apoptosis.

        This is a tidy, well-executed study with good quality data. These findings propose a novel mechanism that results essential for neural progenitor and overall brain development.

        In my opinion, a large audience will benefit from these discoveries: from developmental biologists to cell biologists focused on microtubule dynamics, cell cycle, differentiation, stem cells and cell polarity.

      Key works describing my area of expertise: microtubule dynamics, centrosome function, cell cycle regulation and cell polarity.

      Reviewer #2 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)):

      Viais, Lüders and colleagues here present an analysis of augmin's roles in neural stem cell development. They describe a dramatic impact of the conditional ablation of Haus6 on embryonic brain development in the mouse, with mitotic problems that lead to greatly-increased levels of apoptosis. The rescue of this apoptosis by mutation of the gene that encodes p53 did not restore brain development, which was still aberrant, due to mitotic errors.

      The paper is clearly written, with well-designed and controlled experiments. Its conclusions are well supported by the data presented. I have few comments on the technical aspects of the work- it appears very solid to me.

      **Specific comments**

      1. Clearer explanation of the mouse strains used should be provided. The section describing the generation of the Haus6 conditional on p.5 should specify that this is the same as was already published in the 2016 Watanabe paper (this is in the Materials and Methods, but this should be more clearly specified. More specific details of the p53 knockout mice from Jackson should be included in the Materials and Methods.

      We have included additional information describing the generation of the Haus6 cKO mice in the main text (line 137-140). It is not exactly the same as described in the Watanabe et al. paper. The previously published strain (Watanabe et al., 2016, Cell Reports, 15, 54-60) contained a floxed Haus6 cKO allele with a flanking neomycin cassette. For the current study the neomycin cassette was removed. Details are described in the method section and also shown in Fig. S1a. Specific information regarding the p53 KO strain has been added to the method section.

      Figure 1a contains minimal information on the Haus6 locus. More detail should be included for information, if this Figure is to remain (although reference to the targeting details in the original description would be sufficient). It is unclear what the timeline diagram is to convey and it should be improved or deleted. A similar comment applies for the details in Figure 3a, although the colour scheme for the different genotypes is useful.

      More detailed information on the Haus6 locus is shown in the schematic of Fig. S1a and in the referenced study (Watanabe et al., 2016, Cell Reports, 15, 54-60). Since the targeting of Haus6 exon1 was previously described, we feel that including this information as a supplementary figure and referring to the previous study is appropriate.

      Regarding the schematics in Fig. 1a and Fig. 3a, we have improved these. The timeline shows the time points of Cre expression and of obtaining embryos for analysis.

      The important PCR controls in Figure S1b have an unexplained 1000 bp band that appears only in the floxed heterozygote. It would be helpful if the authors explained this in the relevant Figure legend.

      This band is an artifact and represents heteroduplexes of floxed (1080 bp) and wild type (530 bp) DNA strands due to extended regions of complementary. We have explained this in the figure legend.

      Assuming the putative centrosome 'clusters' in Figure 6c are similar to the fragmented structures seen in thalamus in Figure 2d, a different description should be used to avoid confusion with multiple centrosomes, which is not a phenotype here. It is not clear how the loss of centrosomes from the ventricular surface was scored, whether it was based on total gamma-tubulin signal or individual centrosomes; how fragmented poles would affect that is unclear, so the legend and relevant details should clarify this point.

      The fragmented spindle poles shown in Fig. 2d are different from the centrosome clusters in Fig. 6c. The fragmented poles are fragments of PCM rather than extra centrosomes. Fragmentation is specific to mitosis, involving forces exerted by spindle microtubules (Lawo et al., 2009, Curr Biol, 19, 816-826). In contrast, the centrosome clusters that we observed in Haus6 cKO p53 KO apical progenitors represent centrosomes from multiple cells in interphase, most likely as part of apical membrane patches that have delaminated form the ventricular surface. In the intact epithelium of controls these centrosomes line the ventricular surface. To avoid confusion, we now indicate in the text and legend that these centrosome clusters involve interphase cells.

      Phospho-histone H2AX should be referred to as a marker of activation of the DNA damage response, rather than DNA repair.

      We have changed the text accordingly.

      **Minor points**

      i. Figure 1b should include a scale bar.

      We have added the scale bar.

      ii. The labelling of Figure 1f should be revised.

      The labels have been fixed.

      iii. Figure 2k is not labelled in this Figure.

      This has been fixed.

      iv. Scale bars should be included in the blow-ups in Figure 6c.

      We have added the scale bars.

      Reviewer #2 (Significance (Required)):

      While it is striking that they see complete disruption of brain development, rather than microcephaly, arguably the mechanistic novelty of the findings is moderate, in that the impacts of Haus6 deficiency on mitotic spindle assembly are well established. The authors only allude to potential additional and novel activities of augmin (in neural progenitors, potentially) that might explain this possibly-unexpected outcome of this study. The topic is likely to be of interest to people in the field of mitosis, genome stability and brain development.

      My expertise is cell biology/ mitosis, less so on murine brain development.

      Reviewer #3 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)):

      Jens Lüders &Co demonstrates the essential role of Augmin-mediated MT is critical for proper brain development in mice. The most striking point is that even p53 is eliminated, the microcephaly phenotypes of Haus6 KOs were not rescued. This could mean that the Augmin-mediated MT process is critical to cellular functions that are independent of p53. The authors claim that there are increased DNA damage and excessive mitotic errors. In these aspects, the current work is fascinating. Nevertheless, what causes massive damage to the neural epithelial tissues in the double mutant is not well explained or examined. Few questions appear in mind before I go into the detail. Are these animals still harbor functional centrosomes and their numerical status?

      This is an important point that was also raised by the other reviewers. Based on previous work in cells lines (Lawo et al., 2009, Curr Biol, 19, 816-826), we do not expect that loss of augmin directly impairs centrosomes. Indeed, the authors showed that centriole number was unaffected. The only centrosome defect that the authors observed was fragmentation of the PCM during mitosis, but this was shown to be due to imbalanced forces exerted by spindle microtubules: fragmentation could be rescued by microtubule depolymerization or depletion of the cortical microtubule tethering factor NUMA (Lawo et al., 2009, Curr Biol, 19, 816-826). That being said, we will examine this issue also in our mouse model by staining and counting of centrioles in mitotic apical progenitors of control and Haus6 cKO embryos.

      The microcephaly part of the introduction needs some more work. In particular, the authors need to explain apical progenitors' depletion, possibly the correct mechanisms in causing microcephaly. By saying cortical progenitors, it becomes vague. Indeed, there would also be cortical progenitors depleted. But, the fundamental mechanisms are the depletion of apical progenitors lined up at VZ's lumen. Two works in this connection generated brain tissues from microcephaly patients carrying mutations in CenpJ and CDK5RAP2 (Gabriel and Lancaster et al). Authors should cite their work and relate their findings to mouse brain data.

      We have introduced text changes in the introduction to indicate the specific role of apical progenitor depletion in microcephaly and the differences in the underlying mechanism between mouse and human organoid models (line 63; lines 86-92). In this context we also cite the Gabriel et al. and Lancaster et al. studies.

      -What makes me worry is, looking at figure 1E, there is pretty much no brain, and of course, authors have analyzed what is left over. How could one distinguish reduced PAX6 area and TUJ1 area is due to the gross defects in brain development. Clearly, Haus6 KO causes a severe defect in brain development. Thus, deriving a conclusion from the damaged brain can be misleading. One way to circumvent this problem is to perform 2D experiments with isolated cell types (let us say NPCs and testing if they can spontaneous differentiate).

      We note that overall brain structures are only lost by E17.5, but brain structures (albeit defective) are still present at E13.5. Indeed, all of our quantifications were done at E13.5 or earlier stages. That being said, we understand the concern that quantifications in defective brain structures may be misleading. However, 2D cultures, for which cells are removed from their tissue context, may have similar issues. For this reason, we plan to provide two different type of analyses. We will measure PAX6 and TUJ1 layers in brains from embryos at E.11.5, since the relevant tissues will be less damaged at this earlier stage. In addition, we will use BrdU injection prior to fixation of embryos. Proliferating apical progenitors will incorporate the label during S phase and subsequently we will determine the relative amounts of BrdU-positive cell types (apical progenitors vs neurons) in control and Haus6 cKO brains. Tissue damage will have less impact in this short-term labelling experiment.

      Figure 2: A nice illustration that Hau6 KO animals harbor many mitotic figures. The quantifications lack how many slices and how many cells were analyzed. Simply n=4 does not say much. 4 animals were considered but how many cells/slices would help identify mitotic cells/animals' distribution. A simple bar diagram does not tell a lot.

      We have added this information to the figure legend.

      As a minor point, how did the authors unambiguously scored prometaphase cells and other mitotic figures? Representative figures will help. Besides, what is the meaning of many prometaphase cells? At least a discussion would help.

      This is a good suggestion and we will provide examples of the mitotic figures that we scored. We now explain the meaning of the increase in prometaphase cells in the description of this result (lines 178-180).

      Can the authors probe centrosomes (not by using gamma-tubulin) and relate their presence or absence to p53 upregulation? This is an important point because a complete loss of centrosome is known to trigger p53 upregulation. This may be different in Haus6 KO. This could mean (i.e, centrosomes are normal in numbers or increase in numbers), p53 upregulation is regardless of centrosomes loss.

      Indeed, we believe that p53 upregulation in Haus6-deficient brains is not caused by loss of centrosomes. Instead, our data suggest, as explained in the discussion, that mitotic delay caused by augmin deficiency is sufficient for p53 upregulation. We will further support this conclusion by counting centrioles in mitotic cells. At this point of the cell cycle centriole duplication is complete and we expect to observe largely normal centriole numbers. In some cells we may observe increased numbers due to cytokinesis failure (see response to reviewer #1).

      I have a hard time to ascertain how the authors scored interphase cells that enriched with p53. Some representative images with identity markers will help.

      Scoring p53-positive interphase cells is relatively straightforward since the p53 signal is nuclear and not observed in mitotic apical progenitors. We have included a magnified region of the tissue shown in Fig. 2j, displaying PAX6/p53-positive nuclei of individual cells.

      Looking at the p53 status in Haus6 KO animals, it is intriguing that p53 upregulation is not unique to centrosome loss. At this point, it becomes essential to thoroughly analyze the centrosome status to cross-check if Haus6 loss abrogates centrosomes; if so, how much.

      Since centrosome number is linked to centriole number, we will address this point by quantifying centriole numbers in mitotic apical progenitors (see above).

      Double KO could subside the cell death, but not tissue growth is impressive. So what is going on there? Is there a premature differentiation that leads to NPCs depletion? I believe the authors should generate 2D experiments with cells derived from these double KO animals compared to Haus6 KO and test if there is a premature differentiation that can lead to malformation of the forebrain. Here staining for the forebrain progenitor markers will additionally help (Perhaps FOXG1).

      As explained in response to reviewer #1, we prefer to analyse this issue in vivo rather than in cells that are removed from their native tissue context, which may affect cell fate decisions. To address whether cells prematurely differentiate, we will use injection of BrdU (incorporated by proliferating apical progenitors) prior to fixation, followed by staining for cell type-specific markers. If there is premature differentiation, this should be visible as an increase in BrdU-positive post-mitotic cells.

      Looking at Figure 6, it becomes clear that the double KOs have severe issues in maintaining the apical progenitors suggesting that they undergo premature differentiation before attaining a sufficient pool of NPCs. Testing this will bridge the paper between descriptive findings to mechanisms.

      This point relates to the reviewer’s previous point: do Haus6 cKO p53 KO apical progenitors prematurely differentiate? We believe that cell loss, tissue disruption, and aborted development may also be explained without premature differentiation. In the absence of p53, repeated abnormal mitoses and the resulting increasingly severe chromosomal aberrations including DNA damage (Fig. 5) may produce cells that eventually won’t be able to proliferate and function properly. However, we will test premature differentiation by BrdU injection and staining with appropriate markers as explained above.

      The discussion section is excellent, but it should add some human relevance. In particular, are there p53 dependent cell deaths that have been described in human tissues. In my opinion, it seems specific in the mouse brain. The discussion can also have statements about why the human brain is so sensitive even for mild mutations. I am not sure if those human mutations can cause similar defects in the mouse brain. Most of the mice based studies have been focusing on eliminating complete genes of interest.

      We have included a section in the discussion to relate our findings to human brain development and the differences with results obtained in mouse models regarding the role of apoptosis (lines 386-391).

      Reviewer #3 (Significance (Required)):

      Overall, this is a very well done work but requires some more experiments for mechanisms understanding. Addressing those will make the paper fit to get published.

    1. All of this is a great forest. Inside the forest is thechild. The forest is beautiful, fascinating, green, andfull of hopes; there are no paths. Although it isn’teasy, we have to make our own paths, as teachersand children and families, in the forest. Sometimeswe find ourselves together within the forest, some-times we may get lost from each other, sometimeswe’ll greet each other from far away across the forest;but it’s living together in this forest that is important.And this living together is not easy

      I LOVE this quote. It's such a beautiful way to think about the ecosystem of our schools. Thinking about the idea that it's OK to not always understand, to feel alone, to let children go and explore, as it is also true for us to move through classrooms and the school society with grace and curiosity.

    1. . Species may actlike the rivets in an airplane wing, the loss of eachunnoticed until a catastrophic threshold is passed

      I really like this metaphor. I also found the paragraph before it breaking down the nuances of the keystone species concept to be interesting. I think it is important not to put too much emphasis on one species being keystone, because every organism does its part in a functioning ecosystem.

      If there are species that are not "typical" keystone species but actually turn out to be, how can scientists more accurately measure what a keystone species is? In any event, I think this is a great case for biodiversity: since there is so much we don't know, it is best to preserve as much as possible, even those organisms with seemingly "weak" effects.

    1. If pleasure is triggered by the physical properties of what we are looking at or touching, then it shouldn’t matter what we think it is. But it does matter.

      Although this argument is valid, I think it only applies to limited items such as clothing. With clothing, you can really tel with the feel of a material whether it's high brand or not. However, if it was an expensive watch vs. a normal watch, though there may be differences such as weight, how big is the difference between their physical properties such as feel?

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      Reply to the reviewers

      We would like to thank the editors and the four reviewers for their careful consideration of our manuscript. We are very grateful for their positive appreciation of our work and we believe that their suggestions, which have been included in the preliminary revised version of the manuscript whenever possible, have greatly improved the quality of the paper and have helped us deepen our understanding of the results.

      We were happy to note that all the reviewers found value in our work, as stated in their general comments: “This is certainly a useful contribution to our understanding of neuronal V-ATPase functions in vivo” (…)” (Reviewer 1) – “Dulac et al report the very interesting discovery of a previously uncharacterized neuronal specific regulator of the V-ATPase. (…) The experiments are very well performed, the data presented very convincing and the paper is well written.” (Reviewer 2) – “The discovery of a neuronal specific regulator of the V-ATPase is very interesting (…) The work is therefore of great interest to researchers working on synaptic function in general and on synaptic vesicle biology in particular.” (Reviewer 3) – “The authors have used well-designed experiments to convince the localization and function of VhaAC45L in synaptic vesicle acidification.” (Reviewer 4).

      In their remarks, the reviewers suggested additional experiments that could be done to improve our understanding of the role of this new V-ATPase regulator, as well as several minor issues. We have addressed all their comments in our answers below, in which the full text of the reviews is included in blue type, and the responses in black. The line numbers refer to the revised version of the manuscript.

      Reviewer #1

      Dulac et al. present a first in vivo characterization of the 'accessory' v-ATPase subunit vhaAC45L in Drosophila. The key findings are localization and association of the protein with v-ATPase complexes at synapses and a functional requirement based on lethality and reduced synaptic function. This is certainly a useful contribution to our understanding of neuronal v-ATPase functions in vivo. The main weakness of the study is a lack of depth. The study focuses on localization, co-IP of associated proteins, an analysis of acidification and reduced synaptic function in fly larvae, thus providing a baseline for mechanistic study. However, the mechanism of vhaAC45L is not addressed in this short report. How does is vhaAC45L function different from its homolog vhaAC45? Is it required for v-ATPase assembly? Is it required to localize the full v-ATPase complex (or just V0) to the synapse? Is the defect really due to partial loading of synaptic vesicles or does loss of vhaAC45L also affect endosomal and lysosomal function at synapses? The work as is certainly represents a publishable contribution without answering any of these questions - more as an invite for the community to study the role of vhaAC45L; however, I feel this is a bit of a missed opportunity to put the function of a new potential regulator of specific synaptic v-ATPase functions in the context of the most basic functions obvious in this field.

      My main concerns are:

      1. clearly, vhaAC45L is required for SOME function of v-ATPase in neurons - but it remains entirely unclear which one. It is not even clear what compartments are affected. Reduced quantal size of single vesicle exocytosis events can be a direct or indirect consequence of problems in SV biogenesis and recycling.

      Is exo- /endocytosis unaffected? (FM1-43 uptake!).

      We agree that alterations in the synaptic vesicle release/recycling cycle could indeed contribute to the locomotion defect, in addition to the acidification impairment observed in VhaAC45L knockdown larvae. As suggested by the reviewer, we plan to carry out FM-dye assays to measure endocytosis and exocytosis at the neuromuscular junction of control versus VhaAC45L-KD animals. If successful, a new figure will be added to the final version of the paper.

      What compartments are affected? (markers for synaptic vesicles versus lysosomal compartments!).

      Finding out whether VhaAC45L is specifically involved in the acidification of synaptic vesicles, or if it also plays a similar role in other synaptic organelles, in particular lysosomes, would be very interesting indeed. However, we found that it was technically difficult to address this issue in the Drosophila nervous system. A good way would be to check whether the lysosomal pH is affected by VhaAC45L knockdown, as it is the case for synaptic vesicles.

      Unfortunately, because lysosomes are not abundant in neurons, lysosome-specific pH-sensitive probes such as Lysotracker do not yield detectable signals at Drosophila larval synapses. So, whether VhaAC45L is specific for synaptic vesicles or involved in the regulation of V-ATPase activity in all neuronal compartments reminas an open question for now.

      1. molecular function: is vhaAC45L required for v-ATPase assembly? (IP/Pull-downs of v- ATPase complexes in the presence or absence of vhaAC45L with other subunits!).

      In accordance with the reviewer, we are also very much eager to learn more about the precise molecular function of VhaAC45L, and in particular whether it is required or not for assembly of the V-ATPase complex. Pull-downs of V-ATPase proteins in controls versus VhaAC45L-KD could be used to address this question, but this would require a large quantity of antibodies directed against subunits of the V0 and V1 domains, respectively. Unfortunately, there are no such antibodies commercially available against Drosophila V-ATPase proteins. We have tried several antibodies that recognize V-ATPase subunits from other species and were predicted to react against Drosophila homologs, but with no success. The only V-ATPase antibodies currently at our disposal were samples generously sent to us by other laboratories in insufficient quantities for carrying out such experiments. To our regret, therefore, we were not able to answer this question until now because of the lack of appropriate tools.

      1. vha100 was proposed in Drosophila to function on synaptic vesicles and the lysosomal pathway, but, if I remember correctly, here quantal size was normal. I am missing a comparison between the two.

      We thank the reviewer for this comment. A comparison with previously published results on subunit Vha100-1 has now been added (lines 458-469) in the discussion related to this topic in the revised manuscript.

      1. The V5 knock-in is used both as a mutant as well as a tool to analyze protein localization. This is likely okay, but a little concern of course has to be that by creating a mutant protein through stop codon deletion its subcellular localization, turnover, etc. are not normal. Similarly, anti-V5 co-IPs will isolate proteins bound to the mutant variant of vhaAC45L. Minimally, IPs or pull- downs using other members of the V0 complex should be done to understand the role of vhaAC45L in direct comparison with vhaAC45 on complex assembly and possibly targeting to the synapse (or ideally targeting to specific compartments).

      It is indeed a legitimate concern to question the physiological relevance of results obtained by studying V5-tagged VhaAC45L. However, the V5 tag is very small (14 amino acids) and we fused it in place of the stop codon to keep intact the whole sequence of the protein. In addition, we found that the V5 knock-in flies are viable and fertile as homozygous. Given that the null mutants, as well as strong RNAi knockdowns, are lethal at early developmental stage, this suggests that the V5 knock-in has limited negative effects, if any, on VhaAC45L function. This led us to believe that at least a good portion of the V5-tagged protein might be targeted to the right subcellular compartment, and associate to its physiological partners.

      Significance:

      There is significance to the reporting of an accessory v-ATPase subunit required for SOME function of the v-ATPase in neurons. There is some lack of significance in the absence of basic mechanistic insight as to what vhaAC45L does to the v-ATPase in neurons.

      We agree that we did not elucidate here the precise molecular mechanisms by which VhaAC45L contributes to synaptic vesicle acidification. It is rather an initial description of a novel neuronal protein that appears to be essential for proper synaptic functioning, and we provide consistent evidence that its function requires specific interaction with the V-ATPase complex, and in particular with three subunits that reproducibly co-immunoprecipitated with VhaAC45L (namely Vha1C39-1, Vha100-1 and ATP6AP2). Please note that it took many years and many papers before the molecular mechanisms of action of comparable accessory subunits, such as ATP6AP1/AC45 or ATP6AP2, was better understood, and it is still nowadays a matter of investigation. It is therefore very demanding to expect that we describe the exact function of the previously uncharacterized VhaAC45L at all levels in a single first paper.

      Reviewer #2

      In this study and using Drosophila melanogaster as a model system, Dulac et al report the very interesting discovery of a previously uncharacterized neuronal specific regulator of the V-ATPase called VhaAC45L. They combine genetics, IHC, Mass spec and ephys to unravel the expression pattern and function of this protein. They find that it is required to acidify synaptic vesicles in glutamatergic neurons of the Drosophila larval neuromuscular junction, for appropriate synaptic transmission and for larval locomotion. The experiments are very well performed, the data presented very convincing and the paper is well written. Nonetheless, a few additional pieces of evidence and some level of expanded analysis would strengthen the conclusions and increase the depth of the work.

      Major comments:

      1. Figure 1F: the while the localization to the presynaptic terminal is convincing, where exactly the protein is localized to is not studied. The imaging in these experiments could use increased resolution and concomitantly colocalization studies with more specific synaptic vesicle markers.

      We agree that it would be very good to show this additional result. However, confocal microscopy does not provide sufficient resolution to localize the protein at the membrane of individual synaptic vesicles. Another way would be to see if VhaAC45L immunostaining co- localizes with domains enriched in synaptic vesicle markers, but these organelles are rather ubiquitously distributed in the synaptic boutons at the Drosophila neuromuscular junction. To correctly perform this experiment, we would have to do immuno-electron microscopy, a technique we do not master in our laboratory and that we did not plan to implement for the present work.

      1. Figure 3B-G: these experiments should be complemented by a rescue experiment, ideally of the null mutant using a UAS construct and a pan neuronal driver, or - if such animals are viable to the third larval instar stage - a glutamatergic driver. If possible, it would also be good to study the NMJ phenotype of the null mutant rescued to viability using a neuronal driver that does not express in motor neurons (e.g. Chat-G4).

      Although a rescue experiment could potentially add a further evidence that Vha45ACL deficiency is responsible for the synaptic vesicle acidification defect described in Figure 3, we don’t think that it is a requisite here because we obtained similar results by knocking down the gene using two different RNAis. As described in the manuscript, the pan-neuronal expression of Vha45ACL could rescue the embryonic lethality of the null mutant, so it would be theoretically possible to check the acidity level of synaptic vesicles at the neuromuscular junction of the recued larvae. However, this would involve making rather complex genetic constructions to express VMAT-pHluorin in motor neurons in rescued mutant background. In addition, the conclusions we could draw from such experiment would be limited by the lack of comparison. Indeed, in Figure 3 the defect was observed in knockdown context, and the same experiment could not be performed in knockout larvae due to the early lethality. If we could measure the acidity level of rescued null mutants, we would not have any comparison point besides the knockdown experiments. As knockout and knockdown are not likely to produce identical phenotype (especially in terms of magnitude of effect), the ideal would be to compare the rescued phenotype to the null mutant expressing VhaAC45L in all neurons except motoneurons, as suggested by the reviewer. However, such genotype would certainly not be viable, since we observed that expression of VhaAC45L RNAis with a stronger motoneurons driver (D42-Gal4) was sufficient to induce lethality at early developmental stage.

      1. Figure 5: the authors focus on quantal size which measures the postsynaptic response to spontaneous release from the presynaptic terminal. However, it is unclear how this directly relates to the locomotor deficit beyond signaling potential deficits in vesicle loading or fusion. It would be more convincing to also study evoked release, and expand the analysis of presynaptic properties (number of events, amplitude, frequency).

      We fully agree with this comment shared by Reviewers 2 and 3 related to the electrophysiology experiments. Note that these experiments have been carried out in collaboration with another laboratory located in another city. The Covid-19 situation during the past year has prevented, and is still complicating, movements between labs, preventing us from going further with the electrophysiology analyses of VhaAC45L KD. If the situation in the near future allows it, we would very much like to add a more extensive electrophysiological analysis, including in particular the study of evoked release. In the revised manuscript, we have nevertheless completed Figure 5 by adding representative distributions of spontaneous mEPSP amplitudes in control and VhaAC45L knockdown larvae, as well as the results of new analyses showing lack of effects the KD on the mean EPSP frequency.

      1. General: showing some level of genetic interaction with V-ATPase subunits in at least some of the assays would be welcome.

      We are definitely in accordance with the reviewer on that point, but we think that this would involve a lot of work and be beyond the scope of the present initial description. Here we show by proteomic analyses that at least 12 proteins co-precipitate and so potentially interact with VhaAC45L, three of them being previously identified constitutive or accessory V-ATPase subunits. In our opinion, studying the interactions between VhaAC45L and these proteins through genetic and molecular studies will be the subject of future works. As stated by Reviewer 2 in the Referees cross commenting below: “further biochemical analysis is interesting but probably beyond the scope of this initial description and would take too much time”. We fully agree with this statement.

      Minor comments:

      Some of the images, especially those in Figure 3, should be larger for ease of visualization.

      As requested, the images of Figure 3 have been enlarged.

      Significance

      The discovery of a neuronal specific regulator of the V-ATPase is very interesting. To my knowledge it is the first description of a neuronal specific V-ATPase related protein since the description of Vha100-1 by Hiesinger and colleagues in 2005. The work is therefore of great interest to researchers working on synaptic function in general and on synaptic vesicle biology in particular.

      We are grateful to the reviewer for his very positive assessment of our work.

      I note that I do not have in depth expertise in electrophysiology, although I am sufficiently familiar with basic NMJ physiology experiments to render the opinions stated above.

      Reviewer #3

      In this study, Dulac and colleagues investigated roles of VhaAC45-like gene, which codes one of the V-ATPase accessory proteins in Drosophila, in synaptic transmission. First, they demonstrated that VhaZC45L transcripts are expressed selectively in neurons and that the gene products are addressed to synaptic areas. Second, they showed that VhaAC45L is co- immunoprecipitated with some subunits of V-ATPases, which is consistent with bio-informatics predictions. They further demonstrated that VhaAC45L-knockdown (KD) resulted in defects in synaptic vesicle acidification as well as a reduction in quantal size of glutamate, indicating that VhaAC45L play a key role in regulating neurotransmitter release by modulating the driving force for transmitter uptake. Last, not least, they demonstrated that VhaAC45L-KD in motoneurons attenuated larvae locomotor performance, indicating its physiological relevance. Overall, this study is rigorously executed and nicely presented, and adds one more component of the V- ATPase that is responsible for neurotransmitter uptake into synaptic vesicles. However, since this study simply confirmed an established notion from other species such as yeast and mammals that AC45 is one of the accessory proteins of the V-ATPase complex, a conceptual novelty beyond the previous knowledge is relatively poor in its present form. Thus, this reviewer would suggest several issues as following to improve the comprehensiveness as well as novelty of the current manuscript.

      1. The reason why the authors focused on VhaAC45-'like' is somewhat obscure, and therefore should be explained. How different VhaAC45 and VhaAC45L are in terms of amino acid sequences, tissue distributions, and KO phenotypes. It seems more comprehensive if the authors provide some experimental evidence on VhaAC45; e.g. whether it is also expressed in neurons or not (Fig. 1), and, if VhaAC45 is neuronal, whether it can rescue the phenotypes of VhaAC45L- KD to certain degree (Figs 4 & 5).

      Following the reviewer’s request, we have added a sequence alignment of VhaAC45 and VhaAC45L, as well as a graph showing tissue distributions of both genes in Supplementary Figure 1 of the revised manuscript. To our knowledge, there is no published functional study of VhaAC45 in Drosophila, so we can only make assumptions derived from studies on predicted homologs in evolutionarily distant species. For that reason, it is difficult to compare VhaAC45 to VhaAC45L, as it would first require an entire new study of VhaAC45 function in flies. Since our interest is to study neuronal physiology, we focused on VhaAC45L because compelling evidence indicates that this subunit is specific to the nervous system, as described in our manuscript, rather than on VhaAC45 which seems to be expressed in all tissues. In addition, homologs of VhaAC45L have never been functionally characterized to date in any species, making it very interesting to study this new protein in a genetically tractable organism.

      1. What is the mechanism of Ac45 in regulating V-ATPase activity? In mammals, it has been suggested that Ac45 is essential for proper sorting of the V-ATPase to the destined organelles (e.g. Jansen et al., Mol. Biol. Cell., 2010; Jansen et al., BBA, 2008). In this context, it should be examined whether VhaAC45L-KD would affect the synaptic localization of other V-ATPase subunits.

      We thank the reviewer for pointing out these very interesting references. We have indeed tried to determine the relative abundance of two other V-ATPase subunits at the larval neuromuscular junction in control and VhaAC45L knockdown contexts. However, because the tested subunits are not specific to neurons, and are expressed at relatively low levels in synapses, it was not possible for us to properly separate the synaptic signal from the background immunostaining in surrounding muscles. This unfortunately prevented us from performing an accurate and reliable quantification.

      1. Given that a rodent brain SV contains a few copies of the V-ATPase on average (Takamori et al., 2006, and some newer papers by others), it is interesting that >80% reduction of Ac45 showed moderate effects on quantal size. If SVs under study also contains 1 or 2 V-ATPase per SV, there must be some SVs lacking VhAC45L upon KD. In this context, it is interesting to see how VhaAC-KD (RNAi1~3) affect the frequencies of minis.

      The reviewer’s valuable comment prompted us to undertake new analyses on our electrophysiological recordings. We have now added in Figure 5E graphs showing the mean EPSP frequency for larvae expressing VhAC45L RNAi1 and RNAi2, which are the ones that were used in the quantal analysis. Both of these RNAi apparently decreased the frequency compared to controls, but this difference was not statistically significant. As detailed in the Discussion (line 458-469), this may suggest that VhaAC45L does not influence the abundance of the V-ATPase complex at nerve terminals, but rather its efficiency.

      1. In general, decrease in mini amplitudes is accounted for by changes in postsynaptic sensitivity for neurotransmitters. Although acidification deficits would support that decrease in quantal size is due to the decrease in the driving force for glutamate uptake, it should be examined whether the postsynaptic receptor fields are not affected by VhaAC45L-KD by recording postsynaptic response upon application of non-saturable concentrations of glutamate.

      Testing for potential postsynaptic receptor field alteration by glutamate application would be an interesting experiment indeed, but, as we believe, not a critical control for the present manuscript. Because we expressed RNAis presynaptically, any modification in the postsynaptic receptor field would have to be an indirect consequence of VhaAC45L downregulation in motoneurons, and so, likely to be related to the synaptic vesicle acidification defect. It would not change, therefore, our conclusion that VhaAC45L deficiency in motoneurons induces a decrease in quantal size. Because electrophysiology experiments were carried out in collaboration with another laboratory located in another city, the current sanitary context has so far prevented us from performing this test (please refer to our answer to comment 3 of Reviewer 2 for more details).

      1. Related to 4, it is also interesting to see if evoked responses are also attenuated as a result of VhaAC45L-KD, which is more physiologically relevant for locomotor activity phenotype than minis.

      We also agree with this comment, shared by Reviewer 2, to which we already responded above in our answer to comment 3 of Reviewer 2.

      Minor points:

      1. Quantal size of glutamate is not affected by reduced expression of DVGLUT (Daniels et al., Neuron, 2006), which highly contrasts with VhaAC45L, expression of which defines quantal size. Distinct regulation of quantal size by the transporter and the V-ATPase subunit should be discussed.

      As suggested by the reviewer, a discussion of this point has been added (lines 458-469). and Daniels et al. 2006 is now cited in the revised manuscript.

      1. For electrophysiological experiments, respective sample traces should be shown in Figure 5.

      Quantal size is not directly visible in sample traces, so we added instead representative distributions of spontaneous mEPSP amplitudes in control and VhaAC45L knockdown larvae in the new Figure 5C.

      1. <![endif]>Only RNAi1 and RNAi2 lines were examined for SV pH estimation and mini analysis. The results from RNAi3 should be presented, or at least mentioned in the text.

      These experiments were performed using two different RNAi constructs to ensure that similar effects were observed and to exclude the possibility of potential off-targets. Knocking down VhaAC45L in neurons with RNAi1 and 2 was lethal at pupal stages, suggesting that they give similar levels of inactivation. RNAi3 systematically induced lighter phenotypes, producing viable adults, which led us to believe it had a lower efficiency. Because the results on synaptic vesicle acidification and electrophysiology were very consistent with RNAi1 and RNAi2, we considered that it was not necessary to repeat the experiment with RNAi3.

      Significance

      As mentioned above, as it stands, the authors merely confirmed the pre-existing bioinformatic knowledge on one of the AC45 homologues in Drosophila. The audience of The EMBO Journal might be interested in how different/similar VhaAC45 and VhaAC45-like are, and their functional relevance. In particular, is VhaAC45 also mandatory for the V-ATPase functioning in neurons? Adding some basic information of VhaAC45, e.g. tissue distribution, KO phenotypes, and ability to rescue the VhaAC45-like-KD phenotypes, will certainly improve the comprehensiveness of this study, and capture audience's attention.

      As mentioned in our response to point 1 of the reviewer above, we have added more data comparing the structure and distribution of VhaAC45 and VhaAC45L in the revised manuscript. VhaAC45 appears to be ubiquitously expressed whereas VhaAC45L is neuron-specific.

      Comparing VhaAC45 to VhaAC45L would require a completely new study of VhaAC45 function, because it has never been done before in Drosophila to our knowledge. This would require repeating all the experiments with this other gene, probably involving two more years of work, and would make for a much longer and very different manuscript. It is understandable that this cannot be envisaged. Because homologs of VhaAC45L have never been functionally characterized to date in any species, we considered that it was worth studying this new protein on its own.

      Reviewer #4

      We have reviewed "A specific regulator of neuronal V-ATPase in Drosophila melanogaster." by Dulac et al. The authors have identified VhaAC45L as a regulator of neuronal V-ATPase in Drosophila melanogaster. The authors have utilized multiple techniques to determine the localization of VhaAC45L in neurons and specifically in the synapse. The use of multiple approaches including determining RNA levels in different regions of the fly, and using CRISPR- Cas9 technique to insert V5 tag, makes a very convincing argument about the synapse-specific expression of VhaAC45L.

      The combined use of co-immunoprecipitation technique and LC/MS to show that VhaAC45L co- precipitated with V-ATPase complex subunits is convincing that VhaAC45L is a subunit of V- ATPase. To determine the role of VhaAC45L in acidification of synaptic vesicles the authors have utilized pHluorins in combination with multiple RNAi lines. The authors have used a well- designed experiment to prove that VhaAC45L regulates acidification of the synaptic vesicles.

      Further, larval locomotion and quantal size determination using VhaAC45LRNAi which is known to be altered due to pH gradient of synaptic vesicles shows the functional role of VhaAC45L in synaptic vesicle acidification.

      Minor comments:

      1. For all graphs, please remove gridlines to make data points more visible.

      We found that gridlines can be helpful for the readers to assess approximate values on the graphs. So, we have not removed them but rather changed the colour to a light grey so it does not affect any more visibility. We have also placed the points over the error bars in all the graphs, so they become more apparent.

      1. Line 120-123: Authors indicate the VhaAC45LRNAi induced lethal phenotype when expressed in glutamatergic and cholinergic drivers but the figure is missing. Please indicate as "data not shown" if not included in Figure.

      This mention has been added in the manuscript (line 125).

      1. A diagram summarizing the role of VhaAC45L in V-ATPase enzymatic complex and specific role is recommended.

      We believe that it is too early in this first report to draw an accurate diagram summarizing the role of this new protein in the V-ATPase complex.

      Significance

      V-ATPase play a crucial role at the synapse by being responsible for acidification of the synaptic vesicles and identification of a synaptic vesicle specific regulator of V-ATPase is important to understand the complex regulation of synapse function. The authors have used well-designed experiments to convince the localization and function of VhaAC45L in synaptic vesicle acidification.

      We thank the reviewer for his very positive appreciation of our work.

      Referees cross commenting

      (Written by Reviewer 2)

      There seems to be overall consensus among the reviewers on 3 issues:

      1. A somewhat more precise understanding of the role of vhaAC45L in the synaptic vesicle cycle through better localization studies and some classic assays (like FM dye uptake).

      —See our answers to comments 1 of Reviewer 1 and Reviewer 2.

      1. A little more characterization of the transmission defects (e.g. studying evoked responses) would be welcome.

      —See our answers comment 3 of Reviewer 2.

      1. Ascertaining the validity of the alleles with rescue experiments, perhaps in the V5 mutant background to allow localization analysis in a rescued background.

      —See our answers to comment 2 of Reviewer 2.

      I think further biochemical analysis is interesting but probably beyond the scope of this initial description and would take too much time.

      We fully agree with this statement.

      The minor issues are easy to address

      We have addressed all of them in the preliminary revised version of the manuscript.

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      Reply to the reviewers

      Reviewer 1

      We would like to thank you for the comments concerning our manuscript. We responded to each question, as described below. All the authors feel that our manuscript has been much improved by your comments.

      Minor comments:

      Q1. Fig 1 any male vs female mice differences in ATF6b expression?

      Response. We performed qPCR using several tissues from male and felame WT mice, and confirmed no significant differences in Atf6b mRNA levels between male and female mice. We put this result in Figure S1 C.

      Q2. Fig 2C. Please show molecular weight markers on blots

      Response. We put molecular weight markers in Fig.2C, as you suggested.

      Q3. Fig 2C. what are the doublet bands on calnexin?

      Response. Calnexin is sometimes shown as double bands in tissues such as kidney, liver and heart by western blotting (Zeng et al., PLoS One. 2009 Aug 26;4(8):e6787). Although the mechanism is unknown, it could be due to the post-translational modification such as phosphorylation (Wong et al, J Biol Chem. 1998 Jul 3;273(27):17227-35) or partial degradation although proteinase inhibitors are added in the lysis buffer. To my knowledge, alternative splicing is not likely to be the case.

      Q4. Fig 3. what are the ERSE sequences? several different binding sites are reported in literature.

      Response. We put the ERSE sequence in Materials and Methods and in the Figure legends for Figure 3 as “CCAATN9CCACG (Yoshida et al., 1998)”.,

      Q5. p8. What is meant by 5' Atf6b lacks 10 and 11?

      Response We corrected to “Atf6b transcript, which lacks exon 10 and 11, in these mice”.

      Discussion: Please clarify if anti-ATF6-beta antibodies were available for these studies.

      Response. We tried different anti-ATF6β antibodies to detect endogenous ATF6β in culture neurons by western blot. We successfully observed both full-length and N-terminal fragment (the active form) using the one from Biolegend (#853202) (Figure 1E in the new version). We replaced the result with FLAG antibody in HEK293T cells in the old version.

      Discussion: It is puzzling that ATF6a induces calreticulin more potently than ATF6b, but the calreticulin defect is selectively dependent on ATF6b. Could authors speculate on this paradox? It would be interesting to expand on differences between ATF6a and ATF6b function and phenotypes in Discussion in mouse and in people.

      Response. In Discussion, we added sentences regarding a bit puzzling role for ATF6β in CRT expression in the CNS, as below. “All the data from RNA-sequence to the promoter analysis suggested that CRT expression was ATF6β-dependent in primary hippocampal neurons. However, overexpression of ATF6α and ATF6β both enhanced CRT promoter activity…”

      And we proposed a new scenario as below,

      “These results may raise a scenario that, in the CNS, expression of molecular chaperones in the ER is generally governed by ATF6α as previously described (Yamamoto et al., 2007) and that ATF6β functions as a booster if their levels are too low. However, expression of CRT is somewhat governed by ATF6β, and ATF6α functions as a booster. The underlying mechanism for this scenario is not clear yet, but neurons may require a high level of CRT expression even under normal condition, as described in Table S2, which may lead to the development of a unique biological system to constitutively produce CRT in neurons. Further studies are required to clarify the molecular basis how this unique system is constructed and regulated.”

      Reviewer 2

      We would like to thank you for the comments concerning our manuscript. We responded to each question, as described below. All the authors feel that our manuscript has been much improved by your comments.

      Major comments:

      Q1. The post-translational processing of ATF6beta must be demonstrated in hippocampal neurons and not in HEK293T cells in Figure 1E. The authors conclude on Page 6, line 18 that "these results suggest that ATF6beta functions in neurons" but it is not obvious how expression in HEK293T cells contributes to this conclusion in any way.

      Response. We performed western blot with different anti-ATF6β antibodies to detect endogenous ATF6β in culture neurons. We successfully observed both full-length and N-terminal fragment (the active form) from the one from Biolegend (#853202). We therefore replaced the result in HEK293T cells with the one in the hippocampal neurons (Figure 1E in new version).

      Q2. The hippocampal neurons are affected by the loss of ATF6β, even though the mice are not exposed to tunicamycin. Could the authors present evidence that there is physiological ER stress in hippocampal neurons? If not, why is ATF6beta required.

      Response Evidence suggests that neuronal activities including excitatory signals can cause physiological ER stress and induce the UPR at the distal dendrites in the hippocampal neurons (Murakami et al., Neuroscience. 2007 Apr 25;146(1):1-8, Saito et al., J Neurochem. 2018 Jan;144(1):35-49). Among the UPR branches, Ire1-XBP1 pathway has been reported to play an important role in this dendritic UPR and expression of BDNF in cell soma (Saito et al., 2018). Although the present study focuses on the role of ATF6β in the pathological ER stress which causes neuronal death, we believe that it will be intriguing to analyze its role of ATF6β in the physiological ER stress and in the local UPR machinery in neurons.

      Q3. In Figure 3, is there a specific reason why the authors do not mutate the ERSEs in the mouse CRT reporter, pCC1 and instead opt to analyze the huCRT reporter? Given that all the other observations in the manuscript are in mouse calreticulin, it is important to show that the ERSEs in the mouse calreticulin promoter are also regulated in an ATF6beta-dependent manner. Similar to the huCRT reporter, it is also crucial to examine if ATF6beta can regulate the mouse CRT promoter. This would provide an explanation for why calreticulin expression is not completely abolished in ATF6beta mutants.

      Response We added the data of the deletion mutant of mouse CRT promoter, pCC3, which has only 415bp, but still keeps both ERSE1 and 2 in it. pCC3 showed similar promoter activity to pCC1 (Figure 3 B) and huCRT (wt) (Figure 3 C) in both of WT and Atf6b-/- neurons. Because pCC5, which has 260bp but does not have ERSEs in it, lost completely CRT promoter activity (Waser et al., 1997), it is most likely that mouse and human CRT promoters are regulated in a similar manner via ERSEs.

      Q4. In Figure 5A and B, the density of Tubulin staining varies from panel to panel, and is much lower in ATF6beta mutants treated with Tg/Tm. Presumably this is because of cell death but this should be clarified in the main text. Additionally, it is unclear if the EthD-1 staining is nuclear localized. It would help if single channel images for Hoechst and EthD-1 were provided to visualize this.

      Response In Figure 5A and B, we added the statement for the reduction of Calcein-AM (A) and βIII tubulin (B) in the main text. We also added single channel images for Hoechst and EthD-1 in Figure S4 to confirm the nuclear localization of EthD-1.

      Q5. The literature reports that BAPTA-AM treatment itself could cause ER stress (e.g. PMID: 12531184). Here, the authors report the opposite effect. How could the authors reconcile the difference? The effects of BAPTA-AM and 2-APB must individually be examined in Figure 6C and not just in combination with Tm.

      Response. We added the data that BAPTA-AM and 2-APB alone did not cause neuronal death at the concentrations used in this study in Figure S6 B and in the main text.

      Q6. The authors allude to "impairment of Ca2+ homeostasis in ATF6beta mutants" in Page 13 Line 2, but do not show any direct evidence in support of it. While treatment with BAPTA-AM and 2-APB is a start in that direction, it certainly does not demonstrate that under homeostatic conditions in vivo or in vitro there is any change in calcium flux in ATF6beta hippocampal neurons. To make the case that there is indeed perturbation of Ca2+ in ATF6beta mutant hippocampal neurons, the authors need to examine calcium flux and measure calcium indicators and how they are affected when ER stress is induced in these mutant cells.

      Response We added the data that the Ca2+ store in the ER was reduced and Ca2+ concentration in the cytosol increased in Atf6b-/- neurons both under normal and ER stress conditions in Figure 4C.

      Q7. The effect of 2-APB and salubrinal alone on hippocampal neurons need to be examined in Figure 9B-D to eliminate the possibility that these drugs are not enhancing cell survival under normal conditions in a parallel manner.

      Response We added the data that 2-APB and salubrinal alone did not cause neuronal death in the hippocampus in our model in Figure S8 C.

      Q8. The rationale for the examination of Fos, Fosb and Bdnf is poorly described (page 14, line 13) and the conclusions from this line of experimentation are rather weak. The results from Figure 9 to some extent serve to confirm in vivo the data seen in Figure 6C but by no means provide a mechanism for why ATF6beta mutants have perturbed calcium homeostasis (page 14, line 22).

      Response We agreed with your comments that the examination of Fos, Fosb and Bdnf is relatively weak. We, therefore, moved these data to supplementary information (Figure S8 A and B).

      Minor comments:

      Q1. Page 8, line 3: Their rationale for why ATF6beta 5'UTR sequences are seen in their RNA seq data is not clearly explained. This must be rewritten for clarity.

      Response In Atf6b-/- mice, exon 10 and 11 were deleted by homologous recombination. Therefore, 5’ part of Atf6b gene including exon 1-9 can be transcribed. We added the statement in Results, as below.

      “this may be due to the presence of the 5’ Atf6b transcript with exon 1-9 in these mice, in which exon 10 and 11 were deleted by homologous recombination.”

      Q2. Page 8, line 5, the authors write that besides Atf6β , CRT was the only UPR-regulated gene downregulated in Atf6β mutant mice. The authors need to state how they defined "UPR-regulated genes". There must be a list, which the authors do not cite.**

      Response. To avoid the possible confusion, we changed the term “UPR-regulated genes” to “ER stress-responsive genes”.

      Q3. Page 9, line 10: A reference is required for ERSEs.

      Response We added the reference for ERSEs, as you suggested.

      Q4. Page 10, line 6: The authors say "ATF6beta specifically induces CRT promoter activity". This is a confusing statement because "induction" is in response to stress, but the context here is homeostatic regulation since there is ostensibly no stress being induced. This distinction should be made and corrected here and throughout the manuscript.

      Response To avoid the confusion, we changed the sentence to “ATF6β specifically enhances CRT promoter activity”.

      Q5. Page 10, line 16: The use of "latter" here is confusing and it would help to restructure this sentence for clarity.

      Response To avoid the confusion, we changed the phrase to “under control condition and after stimulation with Tg (Figure 4A upper row) or Tm (Figure 4A lower row)

      Q6. Figure 9A is missing Y-axis labels.

      Response We changed Figure 9A (Figure S8 A in new version) and Figure Legends to clarify what each axis indicates.

      Reviewer 3

      We would like to thank you for the comments concerning our manuscript. We responded to each question, as described below. All the authors feel that our manuscript has been much improved by your comments.

      Major comments

      Comment #1. The authors show that overexpression of either Atf6a or Atf6b both increase Crt expression in Atf6b knockout cells. While it is clear that deletion of Atf6a does not basally reduce Crt levels, the overexpression experiment does lead to a question as to how Atf6b can specifically be involved in regulating Crt expression. In the discussion, the authors seem to propose that homo- and hetero-dimerization of ATf6a and Atf6b are required for the basal expression of Crt and that Atf6b serves as a 'booster' of ER chaperone expression. They explicitly state that "Atf6a and Atf6b are required to induce CRT expression". However, it remains unclear to me why in this case would Atf6a deletion not impair Crt expression? The authors address this by invoking a mechanism whereby hippocampal neurons are more reliant on Atf6b for Crt expression, but this doesn't really make sense to me. Ultimately, this point underscores the lack of clear mechanistic basis to explain how Atf6b selectively regulates Crt in the hippocampus. This needs to be better resolved through more experimentation. For example, a ChIP experiment monitoring the binding of ATF6b and ATF6a to the Crt promoter in hippocampal and control cells would go a long way towards addressing this issue.**

      Response. In Discussion, we first made the point clearer that CRT expression is ATF6β-dependent, while those of other molecular chaperones in the ER are ATF6α-dependent. Then, we raised a scenario that, in the CNS, expression of molecular chaperones in the ER is generally governed by ATF6α as previously described (Yamamoto et al., 2007) and ATF6β functions as a booster if their levels are too low. However, expression of CRT is somewhat governed by ATF6β, and ATF6α functions as a booster. We also wrote the limitation of the current study and requirement of the further study to clarify the molecular basis of the unique system to ensure CRT expression in neurons.

      Comment #2. The importance of ATF6b for protecting against insults needs to be better described. For example, the authors should show that overexpression of ATF6b protects against ER stress induced neuronal toxicity in cell culture and in vivo kainate induced neuronal toxicity. Similarly, the authors should evaluate how overexpression of ATF6a protects against these insults to better define the specific dependence of hippocampal neurons on ATF6b. The authors do show that overexpression of ATF6b can rescue the reduced Crt observed in Atf6b-deleted neurons, but the protection should similarly be demonstrated.**

      Response. We performed rescuing experiments to see both of ATF6β and ATF6α overexpression improve cell viability of Atf6b-/- neurons under ER stress. Interesting. ATF6β, but not ATF6α, rescued Atf6b-/- neurons. In Discussion, we raised the possible reasons as below.

      “The lack of rescuing effect of ATF6α may be due to the fact that this molecule enhances the expression of different genes including cell death-related molecule CHOP in addition to molecular chaperons in the ER (Yoshida et al., 2000).”

      Comment #3. Similar to #2, the authors should show that the potential for ATF6b (and ATF6a) overexpression to protect against different insults is impaired in Crt+/- neurons. The authors demonstrate that Crt-depletion increases sensitivity to toxic insults. This would go a long way to demonstrate the importance of the proposed ATF6b-CRT signaling axis in regulating neuronal survival in response to pathologic insults.**

      Response. Unfortunately, right now, the breeding of Calr+/- mice is not in good condition. Although we are increasing the number of mice used for breeding, we have to wait pregnancies to get embryos for isolating neurons from hippocampus. Once we get enough number of mice, we would try the rescuing experiment of Calr+/- hippocampal neurons with ATF6β and ATF6α. However, we also think rescuing experiments of Atf6b-/- neurons by ATF6β, ATF6α, and CRT may be enough in this paper.

      Comment #4. When reporting the RNAseq data, the authors should use the q-value (i.e., FDR) instead of the p-value. This will likely affect the number of genes reported in Table 1, but it is the appropriate statistical test for this type of data.**

      Response. As you suggested, we replace Table1 with a new list which was filtered with the q-value. However, some important and consistent information were obtained from the list filtered with the p-value, we keep it as Table S1 in the supplementary information.

    1. swirl around the issue of how the rapidly shifting, link-driven reading experience typical in online spaces may be shaping our abil-ity to think linearly, or to pay attention to long narratives, or to fol-low complex, multilevel logical arguments

      It's an interesting paradox, attempting to analyze our decreased faculties for qualitative analysis using our apparently decreased faculties for qualitative analysis. Our brains certainly adapt to the environment they're in. Perhaps if the deluge of information, and "the facts', as the author later notes, is causing us to lose compatibility with previous thought patterns such as multifaceted arguments, we need to find a way to leverage the new ways we make decisions. The cyber-ethnography he mentions is a good step to analyzing cultures that exist only in expressions of thought.

    1. UW faculty are committed to supporting students and upholding the University's non-discrimination policy. Under Title IX, discrimination based upon sex and gender is prohibited. If you experience an incident of sex- or gender-based discrimination, we encourage you to report it. While you may talk to a faculty member, understand that as a "Responsible Employee" of the University, the faculty member MUST report information you share about the incident to the university's Title IX Coordinator (you may choose whether you or anyone involved is identified by name). If you would like to speak with someone who may be able to afford you privacy or confidentiality, there are people who can meet with you. Faculty can help direct you or you may find info about UW policy and resources at http://www.uwyo.edu/reportit (Links to an external site.). You do not have to go through the experience alone. Assistance and resources are available, and you are not required to make a formal complaint or participate in an investigation to access them. However, please be aware that I have some reporting requirements that are part of my job requirements at UW. For example, if you inform me of an issue of sexual harassment, sexual assault, or discrimination I will keep the information as private as I can, but I am required to bring it to the attention of the institution's Title IX Coordinator. If you would like to talk to those offices directly, you can contact Equal Opportunity Report and Response (Bureau of Mines Room 319, 766-5200, report-it@uwyo.edu, www.uwyo.edu/reportit (Links to an external site.)). Additionally, you can also report incidents or complaints to the UW Police Department. You can also get support at the STOP Violence program (stopviolence@uwyo.edu, www.uwyo.edu/stop (Links to an external site.), 766-3296) or SAFE Project (www.safeproject.org (Links to an external site.), campus@safeproject.org, 766-3434, 24-Hour hotline: 745-3556). Another common example is if you are struggling with an issue that may be traumatic or unusual stress. I will likely inform the Dean of Students Office or Counseling Center. If you would like to reach out directly to them for assistance, you can contact them by going to www.uwyo.edu/dos/uwyocares (Links to an external site.). Finally, know that if, for some reason, our interaction involves a disruptive behavior or potential violation of policy, I inform the Dean of Students, even when you and I may have reached an informal resolution to the incident. The purpose of this is to keep the Dean apprised of any behaviors and what was done to resolve them.

      Including all of this may be unnecessary in this specific part of the syllabus. With solid headlines, bold, and links this part can be reduced and the focus can be on the course materials more! I think deleting this takes out some important information we all want students to know, but they are likely seeing these links in every syllabus. This is a tough topic because we all know when we see these links we do not go to them often times, and then we sometimes regret it later or after the fact. In this case, I would still recommend providing solid links and emphasizing in a short sentence that students should check them out.

    1. Giggling is sometimes better than answering.

      Even though people may giggle when they feel uncomfortable, we usually think of giggling as a positive reaction. Therefore, giggling may be better than speaking at times.

    1. Reviewer #3 (Public Review):

      The manuscript of Anchimiuk and colleagues investigates the mechanism of translocation of Bacillus subtilis SMC-ScpAB, a well characterized bacterial condensin. First, the authors use several SMC constructs where the coil-coiled region has been extended and /or the hinge exchanged and test what are the effects on growth and on the organization of the chromosome. They find highly altered conformations for most of the mutants. Particularly, these altered SMCs are unable to bridge two arms in the presence of the naturally-occurring parS sequences. Interestingly, they are partially able to restore arm pairing if a single parS sequence is provided.

      Next, the authors used Chipseq to compare the binding pattern of wildtype SMC and SMC-CC425 (a mutant with an extended coil coiled region and a different hinge). They observe that the binding of wt-SMC is only midly affected by removal of most parS sequences, whilst that of the mutant is highly affected. In time-lapse experiments where ParB is depleted and then re-expressed, the authors show that in a strain with a single parS wt-SMC loads in the origin region and then redistributes over the chromosome while the mutant can only partially achieve redistribution and to a large extent remains concentrated on the origin region.

      The authors then use wt-SMC and investigate how the conformation of the chromosome changes with two different parS sites located in different positions. They observe that each parS site is able to produce arm-pairing. They observe a decrease in the strength of arm pairing when both parS sites are present.

      Finally, the authors increase the expression level of wt-SMC, and observe decreased levels of arm-pairing in the presence of all the naturally-occurring parS sites. More normal levels of arm-pairing are observed when only one parS is present, despite the higher wt-SMC levels. When two parS sites are introduced, more complex structures appear in the contact map.

      These observations are new, interesting and intriguing. However, there are multiple possible interpretations, models and mechanism that are not discerned by the data presently presented in the manuscript.

      At times, there seem to be inconsistencies in their interpretation of results, and at times the models proposed do not seem well supported by data.

      Finally, the presentation of previous models and results from the literature could be improved.

      Major issues:

      In Fig. 1 the authors make several mutant SMC constructs with larger or shorter arms and different hinges and use Hi-C to explore the changes in 3D chromosome organization. Is it not clear to me why the arc is still visible in the mutants, nor what happens to the overall organization of the chromosome in the mutants? Is chromosome choreography normal?

      In Fig. 1C the authors show that strains with parS-359 only display a secondary diagonal and conclude "chromosome arm alignment was comparable to wild-type". A quantification of the degree of pairing for each mutant normalized by the wild-type is necessary to evaluate the degree of pairing and its dependence on genomic distance to the origin.

      In Fig. 2, the authors use HiC and chip-seq to quantify the effects of changes in SMC arm length on chromosome organization and SMC genomic distributions. It would be important to verify that the expression levels of these SMC mutants are the same as wt, as as they show in Fig. 4 changes in protein levels can change also 3D chromosome organization.

      In Fig. 2C, what is the distribution of SMC at t0? Showing this result would support their claim that SMC can load in absence of ParB.

      In Fig. 2C it is claimed that SMC-CC425 moves at a slower rate than WT. Can the authors provide a quantification?

      In Fig. 2, the authors focused on one of the mutants with longer SMC arms (CC425) and performed HiC and Chip-seq in time-lapse after induction of ParB in a ParB-depleted culture. These experiments clearly establish that SMC-CC425 can redistribute from the origin and can achieve arm pairing but to a lesser extent than the WT. The authors speculate that a slower translocation rate and/or a faster dissociation rate explain the experiments. However, other possibilities exist: for instance that the mutant SMC is defective at passing through road-blocks (highly expressed genomic regions, e.g rRNA sites) or at managing collisions with RNAP/ DNAP/ other SMCs, it makes different higher-order complexes than wt-SMC, etc. This could could be due to the change in the length of the SMC, or to the use of a hinge/coiled-coil region different from that of the wt-SMC. Thus, I am not convinced that the text explores all the possible models or that the data shown discerns between any of them.

      In Fig. 3B, the authors show that use of two parS-opt sites at -304kb and -9kb lead to the formation of two secondary diagonals. They argue that these can be rationalized in terms of the diagonals formed by the strains harboring single parS-opt (either -9kb or -304kb). However, I cannot see how these can happen at the same time! If a cells makes arm pairing from -9kb then it cannot make it from -304kb right? I do not understand either how the authors can conclude from these experiments that ParS may act as unloading sites for SMC. Again, the authors are speculating over mechanisms that are not really tested.

      If parS sites triggered the unloading of SMCs, then one would assume that ~5-6 natural parS sites in the origin region are unloading the SMC complexes loaded at other parS sites? This makes little sense to me, or there is something I clearly do not understand in their explanations.

      In their text, the authors explain that "A small but noticeable fraction of SMC complexes however managed to translocate towards and beyond other parS sites apparently mostly unhindered". I am confused as to where is the evidence supporting this statement. I do not think the ensemble Hi-C experiments provided in Fig. 3 can provide conclusive evidence for this.

      The authors often hypothesize on a mechanism, but then assume this mechanism is correct. For instance, the disruption in the secondary diagonals in Fig. 3B when experiments are performed with two parS sites are initially hypothesized to be due to roadblocks (e.g with highly transcribed regions) or to collisions between SMCs loaded at different parS sites. These possibilities cannot be discerned from their data. However, the authors then assume that collisions is what is going on (e.g. paragraph in lines 274-284). I think they should provide evidence on what is producing the changes in the secondary diagonals in mutants with two ParS sites.

      Why is the ChIP-seq profile for a strain with all the natural parS sites and for a strain with only parS-9kb the same? even with the same peaks at the same locations? Does this mean that SMC peaks do not require the presence of parS? But, then SMCs do not load equally well in all naturally occurring parS sites? This is then in contradiction to their assumption that parS cannot be selectively loaded?

      Do we really know that it is a single SMC ring that is responsible for translocation? The authors assume so in their models and interpretations, but if it were not the case it could drastically modify the mechanisms proposed. For instance, SMC may be able to load on a ParS site without pairing arms (i.e. only one dsDNA strand going through the SMC ring).

      In Fig. 2C-D it is shown that a large fraction of wildtype SMC and SMC-CC425 accumulate at the origin region at early time points (Fig. 2C) however this does not seem to lead to an increased Hi-C signal in the origin region (compare early time points to the final t60). Also, despite small amounts of wt-SMC in the chromosome at the latter time points, the intensity of the secondary diagonal is very strong. Why is this? These results would be consistent with many SMCs loading at the origin region but only a fraction of them being responsible for arm-pairing. Is this not in contradiction to their assumption that SMCs pair two dsDNA arms when they load?

      The authors state that: "If SMC-CC425 indeed fails to juxtapose chromosome arms due to over-enrichment in the replication origin region, collisions may be rare in wild-type cells because of a high chromosome residence time and a limited pool of soluble SMC complexes, resulting in a small flux of SMC onto the chromosome. If so, artificially increasing the flux of SMC should lead to defects in chromosome organization with multiple parS sites but not with a single parS site (assuming that most SMC is loaded at parS sites)". However, this assumption seems inconsistent with their results in Fig. 2 that show that the peaks of SMC do not change upon removal of most parS sites.

      I am a bit confused about the interpretation of the results in Fig. 4D. The authors talk about 'loop contacts' and point to the secondary diagonal (yellow ellipses). But these are not loop contacts, but rather contacts between arms that have surpassed the two parS sequences, right? Also, it is not clear what they mean by paired-loop contacts (red ellipse). Do they mean contacts between the two loops originating at parS-359 and parS-334? If this where the case, then it means SMCs are bridging more than two dsDNA segments? Or that there are multimers of SMC linking together? Or that and SMC can circle one arm from one loop and another from the other...? But in this case, how can it load? For me it is very unclear what these experiments really mean. The explanations provided by the authors seem again highly hypothetical.

    1. Reviewer #3 (Public Review):

      This is a well written and elegant study from a collaboration of groups carrying out models based on high resolution imaging. I think the study also serves as a prime example for where modeling and simulation bring added value in the sense that the insights revealed in the study would not likely be gained through other methods.

      1) As the authors point out, clinical studies have revealed that the fibrotic burden in ESUS patients is similar to those with aFib. The question is why then, do so few ESUS patients exhibit clinically detectable arrhythmias with long-term monitoring. The authors hypothesize and their data support the notion that while the substrate is prime for pro-arrhythmia in ESUS patients, a lack of triggering events may explain the differences between the two groups.

      2) I think the authors could go further in describing why this is surprising. Generally, severe fibrosis is thought to potentially serve as a means or mechanism for pro-arrhythmic triggers. This is because damage to cardiac tissue typically results in calcium dysregulation. When calcium overload occurs in isolated fibrotic tissue areas, or depolarization of the resting membrane potential due to localized ischemia allows for ectopic peacemaking, we might expect that the diseased/fibrotic tissue is itself the source of arrhythmia generation. I think the novel finding here is that this notion may be a simplification, and the sources of arrhythmia generation may be more complex and may need to come from outside the areas of fibrosis. I think this is a big deal.

    1. I believe this is what made MacPaint so exciting to 11 year-old me: it expanded the range of thoughts I could think. As a practical matter, this expressed itself as an expansion in the range of visual images I could create. In general, what makes an interface transformational is when it introduces new elements of cognition that enable new modes of thought. More concretely, such an interface makes it easy to have insights or make discoveries that were formerly difficult or impossible. At the highest level, it will enable discoveries (or other forms of creativity) that go beyond all previous human achievement. Alan Kay has asked*:* Alan Kay, What is a Dynabook? (2013). “what is the carrying capacity for ideas of the computer?” Similarly, we may ask: what is the carrying capacity for discovery of the computer?

      我相信这就是 MacPaint 令 11 岁的我大为兴奋的原因:它扩大了我的思考范围。在此,它扩大了我所能创造的视觉图像的范围。一般而言,界面拥有转变能力的原因在于它引入了新的认知元素,从而实现新的思维模式。具体而言,这样的界面使得从前难以获得的深刻洞见变得容易获得。甚至,它将使你的探索(或其他形式的创造力)超越所有前人。 艾伦凯曾问道“计算机承载创意的能力究竟如何?”同样地,我们可能会问:“计算机的承载发现的能力究竟如何?”

    1. innovative learning in situ provides a progressing basis for improvements in designer practices, which informs how they can relate to future work, and might, in that sense, contribute to shifts in professional identity and practical wisdom over time.

      This has me wondering, how often should IDs update their work? We have talked a lot about the process, but not about a time frame. Innovative learning makes me think of something that should be revisited and revised often, specially in the realm of education and technology. If I think of it outside of this realm, and it is something a company budgets for, it may not be revisited for many years. Is that effective?

    2. This means, for example, that while traditional approaches may sometimes be totally rejected in favor of innovations, they may also, at times, be seen as having potentials that allow them to be repurposed into new resources that facilitate new practices, even if in limited circumstances

      I think this is important to remember- just because something new comes up does not me we need to abandon everything else we have used and learned. We can reuse practices and ideas with a new spin.

    1. We, therefore, pledge to do all that we can, knowing we’ll fail on occasion, to restore compassion to the center of our lives (at least in this course and during this semester) and attempt to engage with our colleagues in this course with compassion. This means we will work to think first of others, their benefit, their well-being, and their learning, knowing that others are compassionately working for our benefit. We will strive to see our interdependence and interconnectedness, and labor for one another.

      By learning the importance of compassion, we have to start contributing it into our everyday lives in order to make it a habit. Trusting that others will show compassion and putting faith into them may let us not be afraid to connect and interact. By showing compassion you should listen to your peers and think of their feelings as you think of yours. Think before you contribute and how it can affect another’s feelings. After showing compassion, trust can form and the ability of being able to depend on each other, without the fear of being judged. Compassion can create a comfortable environment. With a comfortable environment, we can gain information from one another, create friendships and trust. This may promote knowledge for everyone and the ability of dependence for others.

    2. The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical, and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves.

      I do not believe that compassion has anything to do with religious aspects rather than the person themselves. Traditions may have something to do with them but I have first hand seen people who believe in nothing or do not have any religious beliefs have the most caring and kind hearts filled with compassion. It is very ethical to think that others would want to be treated the same way they treat others but alas we live in a society where that is very rare. Compassion depends on the person, the time, and the place.

    3. Take responsibility for the effects of your words and actions on others, even when your intentions were not to cause them harm

      I think this is something we forget a lot of times when talking or typing. That the message we want to relay may not be the one received. And it is better to understand that this sometimes happens and that it's okay. Because I feel like when people do understand that miscommunication can happen, they are less likely to recognize and/or apologize for a statement that may have been received as offensive.

    1. Note: This rebuttal was posted by the corresponding author to Review Commons. Content has not been altered except for formatting.

      Learn more at Review Commons


      Reply to the reviewers

      RESPONSE TO REVIEWERS

      We thank Review Commons and its three reviewers. Reviewers 2 and 3 provide detailed comments, which we address individually. Reviewer 1, however, gives a general critique of how we have approached asking how genome architecture affects the extent of evolution and the details of evolutionary trajectories. Our interpretation of their comments is that our approach and the one that they advocate represent two philosophically different, but complementary, views about how to study evolution in the laboratory. We begin by discussing this difference and then proceed to a point by point response to the three reviews.

      Reviewer 1

      Philosophical differences with Reviewer 1

      We interpret Reviewer 1’s comments as endorsing a formal, quantitative study of evolution that aims to explain the factors that control the rate at which fitness increases during experimental evolution. This approach derives from classical population genetics and aims to use a mixture of theory and experiment to uncover general principles that would allow rates of evolution and evolutionary trajectories, expressed as population fitness over time, to be predicted from quantitative parameters, such population sizes, mutation rates, distributions of the fitness effects of mutations (including their degree of dominance in diploids), and global descriptions of either general (e.g. diminishing returns) or allele-specific epistasis.

      This approach aims to predict how the average fitness trajectory should be affected by variations in these parameters and describe the variation, at the level of fitness, in the outcomes in a set of parallel experiments. This is an important approach and have previously used it to investigate how the strength of selection influences the advantage of mutators (Thompson, Desai, & Murray, 2006) and to produce and test theory that predicts how mutation rate and population size control the rate of evolution (Desai, Fisher, & Murray, 2007). Like every approach to evolution, this one has limitations: 1) if it doesn’t identify mutations or investigate phenotype other than fitness, it cannot reveal the biological and biochemical basis of adaptation or report on how variations in population genetic parameters (population size, haploids versus diploids, etc.) influence which genes acquire adaptive mutations, and 2) if the details of experiments (e.g. whether populations are clonal or contain standing variation, or which phenotypes are being selected for) have strong effects on the population genetic parameters, these must be measured before theoretical or empirical relationships could be used to predict the mean and variance of fitness trajectories produced by a given selection. A variety of evidence suggests that the second limitation is real. Examples include the absence of a universal finding that diploid populations evolve more slowly than haploids (discussed on Lines 437-442), even within the same experimental organism, and the finding that diminishing returns epistasis applies well to domesticated yeast evolving in a variety of laboratory environments (e. g. papers from the Desai lab, starting with (Kryazhimskiy, Rice, Jerison, & Desai, 2014) but not to the evolutionary repair experiments that we have conducted (Fumasoni & Murray, 2020; Hsieh, Makrantoni, Robertson, Marston, & Murray, 2020; Laan, Koschwanez, & Murray, 2015).

      The second approach to experimental evolution, which we, as molecular geneticists and cell biologists, predominantly take, is to follow the molecular and cell biological details of how organisms adapt to selective pressure. We subject organisms to defined selective forces, identify candidate causative mutations, test them by reconstructing the evolved mutations, individually and in combination, and perform additional experiments to ask how these mutations are increasing fitness. Because these experiments are performed on model organisms and often address phenotypes that have been studied by classical and molecular genetics, we can often say a good deal about the cell biological and biochemical mechanisms that increase fitness and this work can complement and extend what we know from classical and molecular genetics.

      The current manuscript and its predecessor are examples of finding causative mutations and asking how they improve fitness, with the first paper (Fumasoni & Murray, 2020) demonstrating how mutations in three functional modules could overcome most of the fitness cost of removing an important but non-essential protein and the current paper asking how alterations in genome architecture and dynamics (diploidy and eliminating double-strand break-dependent recombination) affect the extent to which populations increase in fitness and which genes and functional modules acquire mutations as they do so.

      By definition, such experiments are anecdotal: they report on how particular genotypes and genome architectures respond to particular selection pressures. Any individual set of experiments can produce conclusions about the effects of variables, such a population size, mutation rate, and genome architecture, on the mutations that increased fitness in response to the specific selection, but they can do more than lead to speculation and inference about what would happen in other experiments: speculation from the results of a single project and inferences from the combined results of multiple projects. Our interpretation is that the evolutionary repair experiments that we have performed, which have perturbed budding, DNA replication, and the linkage between sister chromatids do indeed lead to a common set of inferences: most of the selected mutations reduce or eliminate the function of genes, the interactions between the selected mutations are primarily additive, and the mutations cluster in a few functional modules.

      We believe that the population and molecular genetic approaches to experimental evolution are complementary and that a full understanding of evolution will require combining both of them. We think this will be especially true as we try to use the findings from laboratory studies to improve our understanding of evolution outside the lab, which takes place over longer periods, in more temporally and spatially variable environments, and is subject to variation in multiple population genetic and biological parameters.

      Reviewer #1 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)): In their previous work the authors examined adaptation in response to replication stress in haploid yeast, via experimental evolution of batch cultures followed by sequencing. Here they extend this approach to include diploid and recombination-deficient strains to explore the role of genome architecture in evolution under replication stress. On the whole, a common set of functional modules are found to evolve under all genetic architectures. The authors discuss the molecular details of adaptation and use their findings to speculate on the determinants of adaptation rate.

      **SECTION A - Evidence, reproducibility and clarity** Experimental evolution can reveal adaptive pathways, but there are some challenges when applying this approach to compare genetic backgrounds or environments. They key challenge is that adaptation potentially depends on both the rate of mutation and the nature of selection. Distinct adaptation patterns between groups could therefore reflect differential mutation, selection, or both. The authors allude to this dichotomy but have very limited data to address it. The closest effort is engineering putatively-adaptive variants into all genetic background including those where they did not arise; the fact that such variants remain beneficial suggests they did not arise in certain backgrounds because of a lower mutation rate, but this is a difficult issue to tackle quantitatively.

      We agree, wholeheartedly, that adaptation depends on the combination of mutation rates and the nature of selection and our goal was to ask how the molecular nature of adaptation depends on genome architecture when three different architectures are subjected to the same selection: constitutive replication stress caused by removing an important component of replisome. We used a haploid strain as a baseline and compared it to two other strains chosen to influence either the effect of mutations (a diploid, where fully recessive mutations that were beneficial in the haploid would become neutral) or the rate of mutations (a recombination-defective strain that would be unable to use ectopic recombination to amplify segments of the genome). In both cases, we expected to see effects that are closer to qualitative than quantitative: the absence of fully recessive mutations in evolved diploids and absence of segmental amplification in the recombination-deficient haploid. We see both effects and they then allow us to ask two other questions: 1) does influencing the effect of a class of mutation (diploids) or preventing a class of mutation (recombination defect) have a major effect on the rate of evolution, and 2) do these differences affect which modules adaptive mutations occur in. As far as we can tell, the answer is no to both questions. We use “as far as we can tell” because our experiments do have limitations. First, the recombination-defective strain has a higher point mutation rate making it impossible to tell how much this elevation, rather than any other factor, accounts for it showing a greater fitness increase than the recombination-proficient haploid. Unfortunately, to our knowledge, it’s impossible to abolish recombination without affecting mutation rates. Second, we only experimentally tested a subset of the inferred causative mutations meaning that for many genes, our assertion that they are adaptive is a statistical inference and their assignment to a particular functional module is based on prior literature rather than our own experiments. In response to this criticism, we have now rephrased some of our sentences (see below).

      From mutation accumulation experiments, where the influence of selection is minimized, there is evidence that genetic architecture affects the rate and spectrum of spontaneous mutations. In this experiment, the allele used to eliminate recombination, rad52, will also increase the mutation rate generally. The diploid strain is also likely to have a distinct mutational profile--as a null expectation diploids should have twice the mutation rate of haploids. Recent evidence indicates the mutation rate difference between haploid and diploid yeast might be less than two-fold, but that there are additional differences in the mutation spectrum, including rates of structural change. The context for this study is therefore three genetic architectures likely to differ in multiple dimensions of their mutation profiles, but mutation rates are not measured directly.

      The reviewer is correct that we did not explicitly measure mutation rates, although the frequency of synonymous mutations (Figure 3-S1B) is a proxy for the point mutation rate as long as the majority of these mutations are assumed to be neutral. By this measure, the mutation rates for ctf4∆ haploids and ct4∆/ctf4∆ diploids, expressed per haploid genome, are close to each other (1.94 for haploids and 1.37 for diploids) but different enough to return p = 0.044 by Welch’s test, whereas the mutation rate for the recombination-deficient, ctf4∆ rad52∆ haploid is 4 to 5-fold higher (7.03). In contrast, we can infer that the ctf4∆ rad52∆ strain has much lower rates of segmental aneuploidy produced by recombination: we see only one such event in this strain in contrast to 16 in the ctf4∆ haploid and 44 in the ctf4∆/ctf4∆ diploid (Supplementary table 4), even though the amplification of the cohesin loader gene, SCC2, confers similar benefits in all three strains.

      The nature of selection on haploids and diploids is expected to differ because of dominance, but ploidy-specific selection is also possible. The authors discuss how recessive beneficial alleles may be less available to diploids, though this can be offset by relatively rapid loss of heterozygosity. However, diploids should also incur more mutations, all else being equal. The rate of beneficial mutation, as opposed to the rate of mutation generally, will depend on the mutational "target size" of fitness, and the authors findings recapitulate other literature (particularly regarding "compensatory" adaptation) that points to faster adaptation in genotypes with lower starting fitness.

      We agree with the reviewer and tried to make the point that which mutations are fixed is primarily determined by the product of the rate at which they occur and the benefit which they confer (lines 193-196). Evidence in budding yeast suggests that in diploid cells, removing one copy of most genes fails to produce a measurable fitness benefit (Deutschbauer et al., 2005), suggesting that losing one copy of many genesis purely recessive. If this was always the case, it would be very hard for such heterozygous, loss-of-function mutations to contribute to evolution in diploids: a mutation that inactivates one copy of a gene would have to rise to high enough frequency by genetic drift that homozygosis of this mutation mitotic recombination would have a significant probability. Instead we find that heterozygous mutations in some genes (inactivation of RAD9, what are likely to be hypomorphic mutations in SLD5) but not others (inactivation of IXR1) confer benefits in diploids that allow their frequency to rise much more rapidly by selection than they would by drift, allowing them to reach frequencies at which mitotic recombination becomes probable.

      There is ample literature on the above topics, particularly discussions of the evolutionary advantages of haploidy versus diploidy. While adaptation to replication stress provides a novel starting point for this investigation, much of the manuscript is devoted to long-standing questions that are not specific to replication stress. Unfortunately, the data the authors collected is not sufficient to shed light on these questions, because mutation and selection cannot be effectively distinguished. The Discussion states that "We find that the genes that acquire adaptive mutations, the frequency at which they are mutated, and the frequency at which these mutations are selected all differ between architectures but that mutations that confer strong benefits always lie in the same three modules" (line 379), but it is not clear that these statements are all supported by the data.

      The reviewer makes two points: we fail to make a significant contribution to long-standing questions about the evolutionary genetics of adaptation and the we make statements that are not supported by our data. On the first we disagree: unlike much of the previous work which compares the effects of mutation rates and population sizes on the rates of evolution, we sequence genomes, identify putative causative mutations, verify that they increase fitness, and test, by reconstruction, how their contribution to fitness is affected by fully characterized genome architectures. We know of no comparable work and we believe that this is a useful contribution to understanding evolution. In addition, some of the literature, for example the discussion of haploidy versus diploidy, has failed to reach a universal conclusion. On the second point, we realized that the statement that the reviewer quotes is stronger than it should be since we do not show “that mutations that confer strong benefits always lie in the same three modules”. What we do show is that mutations in all three modules are found in all three genome architectures (Figure 5), and that combining one mutation from each module (using mutations in genes that are found in that architecture) can reproduce the observed fitness increase in each architecture (Figure 6 B), but the reviewer is correct that we have not demonstrated that every clone from every population has an adaptive mutation in all three modules. We have therefore modified the quoted sentence as follows (altered wording underlined)

      "We find that the genes that acquire adaptive mutations, the frequency at which they are mutated, and the frequency at which these mutations are selected all differ between architectures but that mutations conferring strong benefits can occur in all three modules in each architecture" (Lines 405-408)

      Focusing on the more novel aspect of their experiment-the presence of replication stress-would arguably be a better approach. On this topic the authors have some interesting observations and speculation, but clear predictions are lacking. The introduction section could be redesigned to explicitly state why genome architecture might affect adaptation in response to replication stress in particular, rather than (or in addition to) adaptation generally. If there were no differences in mutation, does the nature of Ctf4 lead to predictions that the molecular basis of compensatory adaptation should differ among genome architectures? Without such predictions it will be difficult for readers to know whether the observation that different genome architectures follow similar adaptive paths is surprising or not.

      We believe that following this suggestion would diminish the paper. We set out to ask how genome architecture affected adaptation to the strong fitness defect produced by removing an important component of an essential process, DNA replication. We chose replication stress as an example of cell biological damage that cells would have to repair with the hope that the results would give general clues about evolutionary repair, rather than hoping that the experiment would inform us about how replication stress altered the types of mutation (e. g. point mutations versus segmental amplification) that were selected As we point out at the beginning of our response, we recognize that the result of any one such experiment must be anecdotal and any attempt to generalize must be described as speculation if it refers only to this one experiment, or inference if it refers to this experiment and other published work. In those cases where we discuss the effect of genome architecture on evolutionary trajectories, we can draw conclusions that apply to our own experiments, but can only speculate on adaptation to different selections. In others, where we see commonalities between our experiments and previous work on evolutionary repair (cite Review), we can make inferences about evolution to adapt to removing important proteins and speculate about other forms of selection. We have revised the discussion to make it clear where we conclude, where we speculate, and where we infer. We suspect that our finding that genome architecture has a larger effect on which genes acquire adaptive mutations than it does on which modules these mutations alter will generalize to other evolutionary repair experiments and may be true even more broadly.

      We deliberately did not make predictions about the effect of genome architecture on the rate at which population fitness increased or the mechanism of adaptation to replication stress because we believed that our ignorance and the diverging results of previous experiments was sufficient to make both exercises worthless. After the fact, we interpret our results to suggest that mutations that reduce the activity of components, such as Sld5, that are stably associated with replication forks should be semi-dominant, but we were not nearly smart enough to make such a specific prediction before the experiment began!

      **Minor comments:** Shifts in ploidy from diploid to haploid are less common than the reverse change, so the observation of such a shift (Fig. 1) should be discussed in more detail.

      We now mention that haploids becoming diploids is more common than the reverse transformation and point out that genome sequencing reveals that these strains are true haploids rather than aneuploids.

      “One diploid population (EVO14) gave rise to a population with a haploid genome content, suggesting a possible haploidization event during evolution. Sequencing revealed no aneuploidies as a potential explanation of this phenomenon. While diploidization has been recurrently observed during experimental evolution with budding yeast (Aleeza C. Gerstein & Otto, 2011; Aleeza C Gerstein, Chun, Grant, & Otto, 2006; Harari, Ram, Rappoport, Hadany, & Kupiec, 2018; Venkataram et al., 2016), reports of spontaneous haploidization events have been instead scarce. Given the difficulties introduced by the change of ploidy over the 1000 generations, we have excluded EVO14 from all our analyses.” (Lines 122-128)

      We believe that the most likely mechanism is that the strain sporulated to produce haploids that were fitter than their diploid parent, but because this event occurred in only one out of eight populations and the proposed explanation is pure speculation we have not included in the revised manuscript.

      Line 88 typo 'stains'.

      Fixed. Thank you.

      Reviewer #1 (Significance (Required)): **SECTION B - Significance** The novel aspect of this study is the combination of replication stress and genome architecture, but here the significance is limited by a lack of clear predictions on how these factors might interact. On the other hand, much of the manuscript is devoted to why adaptation might vary among genome architectures in general, but this long-standing and important question is not particularly well resolved by this experimental approach, which can't disentangle mutation and selection.

      Our belief is that quantitatively predicting how selection will change fitness is nearly impossible because we lack the detailed knowledge of population genetic parameters that apply to our experiments. Prediction is even harder if the goal is to identify which genes will fix adaptive mutations and understand how these mutations alter cellular phenotypes to increase fitness. Thus our approach is almost entirely empirical: we do experiments that alter interesting variables, collect data, and do our best to interpret them and suggest how the conclusions of individual experiments might generalize.

      The authors highlight the dichotomy when discussing the evolution of ploidy: "We suggest that... genome architecture affects two aspects of the mutations that produce adaptation: the frequency at which they occur and the selective advantage they confer" (line 399), but presenting this as a novel inference does not appropriately acknowledge prior research and discussion of these ideas; several relevant papers are cited by the authors in other contexts. It may be possible to recast these findings as a test of the role of genome architecture in adaptation generally, but the authors should clarify the limitations of experimental evolution and more fully consider the theory and data outlined in previous research. In particular, few studies can claim to directly compare mutation rates between genome architectures, and it is not obvious that the present study is an example of such.

      We have the disadvantage that the reviewer doesn’t identify the literature we fail to cite. To us the argument the reviewer quotes is self-evident. As we mention above, our goal was not to test either general or detailed predictions and the level at which we analyzed our experiment, especially demonstrating that mutations were causal and reconstructing them individually and in combination, is missing from previous work. Finally measuring mutation rates is supremely difficult: you either need good ways of following all possible forms of mutation, quantitatively and without selection, or you resort to selecting mutations with a particular phenotype and molecularly characterizing them, knowing that these assays may well give different ratios of the rates of different types of mutation at different loci. We do make and report one measure of mutation rate, the rate of synonymous mutation in protein coding genes, which we discuss above.

      Reviewer expertise: Evoutionary genetics; experimental evolution; mutation.

      Reviewer #2 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)): **Summary** This manuscript investigates the effect of an organism's genotype (or, as the authors call it, an organism's 'genome architecture') on evolutionary trajectories. For this, the authors use Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains that experience some form of replication stress due to specific gene deletions, and that further differ in ploidy and/or the type of gene(s) deleted. They find the same three functional modules (DNA replication, DNA damage checkpoint, sister chromatid cohesion) are affected across the 3 different genotypes tested; although the specific genes that are mutated varies. **Major comments** This is a solid and exceptionally eloquent paper, comprising a large body of work that is in general well presented. That said, I do have some suggestions and questions. At several points in the manuscript, the authors should perhaps be more careful in their wording and avoid to overgeneralize data without providing additional evidence for these claims.

      We thank the reviewer for their constructive review and address their request for more careful wording below.

      • Some key points of the study are not entirely clear to me; possibly because the study builds upon a previous study that was recently published in eLife. Anyhow, I think it would be useful to clarify the following points a bit more:

        • Why exactly was ctf4∆ chosen as a model for replication stress? What is the evidence that ctf4∆ is a good model for replication stress? Without including some evidence for this, it is unclear how well the findings in this study really can be generalized to replication stress (which is what the authors do now).

      We described the reasons for choosing CTF4 deletion to mimic DNA replication stress in our previous eLife paper, to which we refer at. Nevertheless, the reviewer is right in asking us not to assume that the reader will have read our previous work. Briefly: DNA replication stress is a term that is loosely defined as the combination of the defects in DNA metabolism and the cellular response to these defects in cells whose replication has been substantially perturbed (Macheret & Halazonetis, 2015). Established methods in the field to induce DNA replication stress consist of either pharmacological treatments or genetic perturbation. Pharmacological treatments include hydroxyurea, which target the ribonucleotide reductase and hence stalls forks as a result of dNTP depletion (Crabbé et al., 2010), or aphidicolin, which directly inhibits polymerases α, ε and δ (Vesela, Chroma, Turi, & Mistrik, 2017b; Wilhelm et al., 2019). For genetic perturbation, the conditional depletion of replicative polymerases (Zheng, Zhang, Wu, Mieczkowski, & Petes, 2016) is frequently used. These methods are incompatible with experimental evolution, as cells can mutate the targets of replication inhibitors or alter the expression of genes that have been reduced in expression or activity. Removing an important but non-essential component of the replication machinery avoids these problems. We chose CTF4 deletion as a manipulation that affected the coordination of events at the replication fork: in the absence of Ctf4, the polα-primase complex is no longer physically bound to the replicative helicase, and thus the polymerase’s abundance at the replisome decreases (Tanaka et al., 2009). This manipulation achieves the same effects as polymerase depletion and replisome stalling, producing a constitutive DNA replication stress that can only be overcome by mutations in other genes. Multiple studies have shown that ctf4**D cells display replication intermediates commonly associated to DNA replication stress, such as the accumulation of ssDNA gaps and reversed forks (Abe et al., 2018; Fumasoni, Zwicky, Vanoli, Lopes, & Branzei, 2015), fork stalling (Fumasoni & Murray, 2020), checkpoint activation (Poli et al., 2012; Tanaka et al., 2009) and altered chromosome metabolism (Kouprina et al., 1992).

      We now justify our choice of deleting CTF4 at line 74:

      “DNA replication stress is often induced with drugs or by reducing the level of DNA polymerases (Crabbé et al., 2010; Vesela, Chroma, Turi, & Mistrik, 2017a; Wilhelm et al., 2019; Zheng et al., 2016). To avoid evolving drug resistance or increased polymerase expression, which would rapidly overcome DNA replication stress,** we deleted the CTF4 gene, which encodes a non-essential subunit of the DNA replication machinery (the replisome) (Kouprina NYu, Pashina, Nikolaishwili, Tsouladze, & Larionov, 1988). Ctf4 is a homo-trimer that functions as a structural hub within the replisome (Villa et al., 2016; Yuan et al., 2019) by binding to the replicative DNA helicase, primase (the enzyme that makes the RNA primers that initiate DNA replication), and other accessory factors (Gambus et al., 2009; Samora et al., 2016; Simon et al., 2014; Villa et al., 2016). In the absence of Ctf4, the Pol**a-primase and other lagging strand processing factors are poorly recruited to the replisome (Samora et al., 2016; Tanaka et al., 2009; Villa et al., 2016), causing several characteristic features of DNA replication stress, such as accumulation of single strand DNA (ssDNA) gaps (Abe et al., 2018; Fumasoni et al., 2015), reversed and stalled forks (Fumasoni & Murray, 2020; Fumasoni et al., 2015), cell cycle checkpoint activation (Poli et al., 2012; Tanaka et al., 2009) and altered chromosome metabolism (Hanna, Kroll, Lundblad, & Spencer, 2001; Kouprina et al., 1992). As a consequence of these defects, ctf4**D cells have substantially reduced reproductive fitness (Fumasoni & Murray, 2020).**”

      Would the authors expect to see similar routes of adaptation if a 'genomic architecture' with a less severe/other replication defect would have been used? I realize the last question is perhaps difficult to address without actually doing the experiment (which I am not suggesting the authors should do); I just want to point out that perhaps some data should not be over-generalized.

      We share the reviewer’s interest in asking whether different forms of DNA replication stress would lead to the same results described, and we plan to rigorously investigate this question in a separate paper. We note that the careful comparison between different forms of DNA replication stress has never been made and that authors studying this phenomenon often rely on a single perturbation to induce DNA replication stress (Crabbé et al., 2010; Wilhelm et al., 2019; Zheng et al., 2016). We agree that such a comparison will be useful, but we believe (as indicated by the reviewer) it will require an amount of work that goes beyond the scope of our study. To avoid over-generalization, we are using now using “a form of DNA replication stress” in lines 33, 244, 401, 414 and 461, to make it clear that our conclusions (as opposed to inferences and speculations) are restricted to the response to a single example of replication stress.

      Likewise, why was RAD52 selected as the gene to delete to affect homologous recombination? I understand that it is a key gene, but on the flipside, absence of RAD52 affects multiple cellular pathways and (as the authors also observe in their populations) also results in increased mutation rates which might confound some of the results.

      We aimed to observe the largest deficiency in DNA recombination possible and therefore chose to delete RAD52 because of its many roles in different forms of homologous recombination (Pâques & Haber, 1999) . The choice of other genes, such as RAD51, would have inhibited canonical double strand break (DSB) repair, but allowed other mechanisms that can rescue stalled replication forks (Ait Saada, Lambert, & Carr, 2018), such as break induced replication (BIR) or single strand annealing (SSA) (Ira & Haber, 2002).

      Our position regarding the inevitable increase in mutations rates obtained while working with genome maintenance process has been instead elaborated in response to reviewer #1 above.

      A sentence describing our choice to delete RAD52 has now been included at line 86:

      “…as well as from haploids impaired in homologous recombination due to the deletion of RAD52 (Figure 1A), which encodes a conserved enzyme required for pairing homologous DNA sequences during recombination (Pâques & Haber, 1999). Because Rad52 is involved in different forms of homologous recombination, it’s absence produces the most severe recombination defects and thus allows us to achieve the largest recombination defect achievable with a single gene deletion (Symington, 2002)..”

      Related to the first comment, it is also unclear to me how well the system chosen by the authors is representative of the replication stress experienced by tumor cells (as briefly touched upon in the final section of the discussion). Are some of the homologs key oncogenes that drive carcinogenesis?

      We should have been clearer. Our goal was to argue that the lesions and responses produced by replication stress in tumor cells, such as stalled replication forks and checkpoint activation, were similar to those seen in yeast cells lacking Ctf4. We did not mean to imply removing Ctf4 from yeast cells had the same effects on cell proliferation and survival as inactivating tumor suppressors and activating proto-oncogenes have in mammalian cells. Despite the difference between direct (removing Ctf4) and indirect effects on DNA replication (tumor cells), the replication intermediates (ssDNA, stalled and reversed forks), the cell cycle defects (G2/M delay), the genetic instability (increased mutagenesis and chromosome loss) and chromosome dynamics (late replication zones and chromosome bridges) generated by the absence of Ctf4 are similar to those observed in oncogene-induced DNA replication stress in mammalian cells (Kotsantis, Petermann, & Boulton, 2018). We therefore believe our experiments reveal evolutionary responses to a constitutive DNA replication stress that resembles the replication stress seen in cancer cells. Nevertheless, we agree that the comparison with cancer evolution remains speculative and we therefore avoided mentioning cancer in the title our paper or our conclusions, and only discuss it in a speculative section of the discussion.

      We have modified this section of the discussion as follows (line 554):

      “While generated through a different mechanism (unrestrained proliferation, rather than replisome perturbation), oncogene induced DNA replication stress produces cellular consequences (Kotsantis et al., 2018) which are remarkably similar to those seen in the absence of Ctf4, such as the accumulation of ssDNA, stalled and reversed forks (Abe et al., 2018; Fumasoni & Murray, 2020; Fumasoni et al., 2015), genetic instability (Fumasoni et al., 2015; Hanna et al., 2001; Kouprina et al., 1992) and DNA damage response activation (Poli et al., 2012; Tanaka et al., 2009). Based on these similarities we speculate that evolutionary adaptation to DNA replication stress could reduce its negative effects on cellular fitness and thus assist tumor evolution.”

      The authors should consider rephrasing some sentences regarding the occurrence of adaptive mutations. Sentences such as 'which genes are mutated depends on the selective advantage' (p1; lines 15-16); 'genome architecture controls the frequency at which mutations occur' (p15), "genome architecture controls which genes are mutated" (p1, line 20) makes it sound like the initial occurrence of mutations is not random, whereas in reality, the mutational landscape is the result of the combined effect of occurrence and fitness effect of the mutations, with the later rather than the former likely being the main driver behind the observed patterns.

      We thank the reviewer for asking for more precision in the above sentences, whose proposed changes we now list:

      “Mutations in individual genes are selected at different frequencies in different architectures, but the benefits these mutations confer are similar in all three architectures, and combinations of these mutations reproduce the fitness gains of evolved populations.” (Lines 13-15)

      “Genome architecture influences the distribution of adaptive mutants” (Line 277)

      "genome architecture influences the frequency at which mutations occur, the fitness benefit they confer, and the extent of overall adaptation." (Lines 462-463)

      Some important methodological information is missing or unclear in the manuscript:

      The authors should provide more details on how they decided which clones to select for sequencing. Did they select the biggest colonies; were colonies picked randomly, ...

      This following sentence is now reported in the materials and methods section (Line 603)

      “To capture the within-population genetic variability we selected the clones displaying the largest divergence of phenotypes in terms of resistance to genotoxic agents (methyl-methanesulfonate, hydroxyurea and camptothecin).”

      What is the population size during the evolution experiment?

      We now added the following sentence at line 599:

      “In this regime, the effective population size is calculated as N0 x g where N0 is the size of the population bottleneck at transfer and g is the number of generations achieved during a batch growth cycle and corresponds to approximately to 107 cells.”

      Sequencing of populations and clones: coverage should be mentioned

      The following sentence has now been added at line 616:

      “Clones and populations were sequenced at approximately the following depths: 25-30X for haploid clones, 50-60X for diploid clones, 50-60X for haploid populations and 120-130X for diploid populations.”

      Identification of mutations (p19, line 573): Is this really how the authors defined whether a variant is a mutation? Based on the definition given here, DNA mutations that lead to a synonymous mutation in the protein are not considered as mutations?

      We apologize for this typo. We do identify and consider synonymous mutations as evidenced by Figure 3-S1B. Now the sentence at line 626 correctly reports:

      “A variant that occurs between the ancestor and an evolved strain is labeled as a mutation if it either (1) causes a substitution in a coding sequence or (2) occurs in a regulatory region, defined as the 500 bp upstream and downstream of the coding sequence.”

      Perhaps the information can be found elsewhere, but the source data excel files for mutations is incomplete and should at the very least contain information on the type of mutation (eg. T->A), as well as the location of this mutation in the respective gene.

      Perhaps the reviewer is referring to Supplementary table 2, where we list the number of times a gene has been mutated in different populations (and thus summaries different types of mutations affecting the same gene). The information they request is reported in Supplementary table 1 for all the variants detected in populations and clones sequencing.

      **Minor comments** • While the author already cite several significant papers relevant for their manuscript, some other studies could also be included:

      We thank the reviewer for highlighting these references, which are now cited at line 28

      From the text in the abstract, it is unclear what the three genomic architectures (line 13) exactly are, the authors should consider spelling this out.

      In repose o the reviewer request for clarity we now propose the following change in line 13:

      “We asked how these trajectories depend on a population’s genome architecture by comparing the adaptation of haploids to that diploids and recombination deficient haploids.” (Lines 9-11)

      Can the authors speculate on why a homozygous ctf4D/ctf4D rad52D/rad52D would be lethal, and a haploid not?

      See below

      The authors note that a diploid ctf4D/ctf4D strain is less fit than its haploid counterpart. Why do the authors think this is the case?

      In response to the two previous questions, we now propose the following speculations that we include in the text (Line 97):

      “Diploid cells require twice as many forks as haploids and Ctf4-deficient diploids are thus more likely to have forks that cause severe cell-cycle delays or cell lethality. We speculate that this increased probability explains the more prominent fitness defect displayed by diploid cells. Interestingly, homologs of Ctf4 are absent in prokaryotes, where the primase is physically linked to the replicative helicase (Lu, Ratnakar, Mohanty, & Bastia, 1996) and Ctf4 is essential in the cells of eukaryotes with larger genomes such as chickens (Abe et al., 2018) and humans (Yoshizawa-Sugata & Masai, 2009). Rad52 is likely involved in rescuing stalled replication forks by recombination-dependent mechanisms (Fumasoni et al., 2015; Yeeles, Poli, Marians, & Pasero, 2013). We speculate that the absence of Rad52 increases the duration of these stalls and leads some of them to become double-stranded breaks resulting in cell lethality and explaining the decreased fitness of ctf4D rad52D haploid double mutants. In diploids ctf4D rad52D cells, which have twice as many chromosomes, the number of irreparably stalled fork may be sufficient to kill most of the cells in a population, thus explaining the unviability of the strain.”

      The authors passage their cells for 100 cycles and assume that this corresponds to around 1000 generations for each population. However, the fitness differences between the different starting strains (see also Figure 1B) are likely to cause considerable differences in number of generations between the different strains. Do the authors have more precise measurements of number of generations per population? If not, perhaps it should be noted that some lineages may have undergone more doublings than others, and perhaps also discuss if and how this could influence the results?

      In a batch culture regime, where populations are allowed to reach saturation after each dilution, the number of generations at each passage are dictated by the dilution factor (Van den Bergh, Swings, Fauvart, & Michiels, 2018). A dilution of 1:1000 from a saturated culture will allow for approximately 10 generations before populations reach a new saturated phase. As long as saturation is allowed to occur, this number is independent of the fitness of the cultured strains: Slower-dividing strains will simply employ more time to reach saturation after each dilution. At the beginning of the experiment, we had to dilute the ctf4D rad52**D strains being passaged every 48hrs instead of 24hrs. After generation 50, ctf4D rad52**D strains reached saturation within 24hrs and were then diluted daily. The total count considers the number of passages a culture has undergone, and not the number of days of culture, and thus should guarantee approximately the same number of generations in all three genome architectures.

      Panel A of figure 1A is somewhat confusing; as this seems to indicate that the ctf4∆ was introduced after strains were made, for example, haploid recombination deficient (which is not how these strains were constructed). Perhaps a better way of representing would be to have the indication of DNA replication stress pictured inside the yeast cells.

      We have modified Figure 1A to better represent the way the strains were constructed. For space reasons we have not represented a perturbed fork within each cell, but rather above all of them.

      Legend to Figure 1: is fitness expressed relative to haploid or diploid WT cells for the diploid strains?

      We apologize for having missed this detail in the figure legends. Throughout the figures, haploid and diploid cells were competed against reference strains with the same ploidy. We now add this sentence in Figure 1 and in the materials and methods (line 686).

      Figure 3: to improve readability of this figure, the authors could consider placing the legend of the different symbols (#, *,..) in the figure as well and not just in the figure legend.

      We now include the symbols legend in Figure 3.

      Figure 5 shows Indels, but if I am correct, these mutations are not discussed in the text; nor is it mentioned what the authors used as a cut-off to determine indels (the authors use the term 'small indels' without defining it)? For example, the data shown in Figure 3 and Figure 4 only includes SNPs and not indels (correct?) - but the indels should also be taken into account when investigating which modules are hit.

      Gapped alignments of the relatively long 150 paired-end reads in our data set permits the identification of small indels ranging in size from 1–55 bp using VarScan pileup2indels tool (Koboldt et al., 2012). All small indels (and the respective sequence affected) are listed together with SNPs in Supplementary table 1. Figure 3A, Figure 4 and Figure 5B are representation of ‘gene mutations’ which include both SNPs and small InDels. Large chromosomal Insertion and deletions, not detectable by short read gap alignment are instead identified using the VarScan pileup2copynumber tool (Koboldt et al., 2012), and are represented as amplifications or deletions in Figure 3B and 5C.

      The following sentence has been added to the material and methods at line 629:

      “Gapped alignments of the 150 paired-end reads in our data set permits the identification of small indels ranging in size from 1–55 bp using VarScan pileup2indels tool (Koboldt et al., 2012). All small indels (and the respective sequence affected) are listed together with SNPs in Supplementary table 1.”

      The following definition has been added in Figure legends 3A, 4 and 5A and B.

      “Gene mutations (SNPs and small InDels 1-55bp)”

      Figure 5 mentions: # gene mutations. So these are only the mutations in genes, and not in their up- or downstream regulatory regions?

      We use a broader definition of a gene, not restricted to the open reading frame, and including its regulatory regions. The following definition has been added to figure 5’s legend.

      “Frequency of SNPs and small InDels (1-55bp) affecting genes (Open reading frames and associated regulatory regions).”

      Figure 3-S1: labels of C panels are missing.

      Labels are now included in Figure 3-S1

      Figure 3-S1, panel B: why did the authors focus on synonymous mutations?

      The panel B is commented upon in line 186 and contrasted with panel A to argue that the increased number of mutations detected in ctf4∆ rad52∆ strains is due to a higher mutation rate(which is expected to increase synonymous mutations) instead of an higher number of adaptive mutations (which are less likely to be synonymous) being selected.

      Reviewer #2 (Significance (Required)): This is a solid and clearly written study, comprising a large body of work that is generally well presented and that will be of interest to scientists active in the field of (experimental) evolution and replication. However, many aspects studied in this manuscript have already been studied and reported before; including the recent eLife paper by the same group, as well as studies by other labs that have investigated how genome architecture / genotype affects evolutionary trajectories, the effect of ploidy on evolution, .... Because of this, I do feel that the authors should put their findings more in the context of existing literature context, including a general description of which results are truly novel, which confirm previous findings and which results seem to go against previous reports. This is already so at some points in the text, but I feel this could be done even more.

      We now rephrase the following paragraphs in our discussion to better highlight the main conclusions in contrast to the existing literature:

      “Engineering one mutation in each module into an ancestral strain lacking Ctf4 is enough to produce the evolved fitness increase in all three genomic architectures. Furthermore, engineering mutations in individual genes confer benefits in all three architectures (Fig. 6A) ,even in those where the mutations in these genes was rare, and combining these mutations recapitulated the evolved fitness increase in all three architectures (Fig. 6B). Altogether our results demonstrate the existence of a common pathway for yeast cells to adapt to a form of constitutive DNA replication stress.” (Lines 409-414)

      “Our results thus go against the trend of slower adaptation in diploids as compared to haploids reported by the majority other studies (A. C. Gerstein, Cleathero, Mandegar, & Otto, 2011; Marad, Buskirk, & Lang, 2018; Zeyl, Vanderford, & Carter, 2003). This effect is not limited to populations experiencing DNA replication stress (Figure 2A) but is also present in control wild-type populations (Figure 2B). Our results support the idea that the details of genotypes, selections, and experimental protocols can determine the effect of ploidy on adaptation.” (Lines 437-442)

      “Our results therefore agree with previous reports observing declining adaptability across strains with different initial fitness but largely fail to observe diminishing return epistasis as a potential justification of this phenomenon. Our experiments and two previous evolutionary repair experiments (Hsieh et al., 2020; Laan et al., 2015) both show interactions that are approximately additive between different selected mutations. The reasons for this difference are currently unknown.” (Lines 450-455)

      Additionally, I think the authors should be more careful not to over-generalize their findings, which come from only a few specific genetic manipulations that might not be representative for general replication stress. For example (p15), can the authors really claim that they have unraveled general principles of adaptation to constitutive DNA replication stress? Perhaps a better motivation of the choice of ctf4 as a model mutation for DNA replication stress could also help (see also my earlier comments). A similar comment applies to the molecular mechanisms affecting adaptation in diploid cells - what evidence do the authors have that their findings are not specific to the one specific type of diploid strain they used in their study? Adding a bit more background information or nuance for some of the claims would help tackle this issue.

      We now followed the suggestions made previously by the reviewer to justify our experimental choices better and to use a language that avoids over-generalizations.

      Field of expertise of this reviewer: genetics, evolution, genomics

      Reviewer #3 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)): **Summary:** Here the authors carry out an evolution experiment, propagating replicate populations of the budding yeast with the CTF 4 gene deleted in three different genetic backgrounds: haploid , diploid and recombination deficient (RAD52 deletion). The authors find that the rate of evolution depends on the initial fitness of the different genetic backgrounds which is consistent with a repeated finding of evolution experiments: that beneficial mutations tend to have a smaller fitness effect in high fitness genetic backgrounds. Curiously even though the targets of selection tended to be specific to each of the three different genetic backgrounds, genetic reconstruction experiments showed beneficial mutations convert a fitness increase in all genetics backgrounds. The authors go on to provide a plausible explanation for why each of the three genetic backgrounds are predisposed to certain types of beneficial mutations. Overall, these results provide important context and caveats for an emerging consensus that genetic background determines the rate of evolution, a comprehensive molecular breakdown of adaptation to DNA replication stress and a mechanistic explanation for why different beneficial mutations are favoured in diploids, haploids and recombination deficient strains. This is a well-executed study that is beautifully presented and easy to follow. This will be of great interest to those in the experimental evolution community and the data an excellent resource.

      We thank reviewer #3 for emphasizing that reconstructed mutations are beneficial even in architectures where they were not ultimately detected at the end of the experiment. We have now highlighted this point in our conclusions as a response to the reviewer’s #1 and #2 request for more clarity regarding our novel findings.

      “We find that the genes that acquire adaptive mutations, the frequency at which they are mutated, and the frequency at which these mutations are selected all differ between architectures but that mutations that confer strong benefits can occur in all three modules in each architecture. Engineering one mutation in each module into an ancestral strain lacking Ctf4 is enough to produce the evolved fitness increase in all three genomic architectures. Furthermore, reconstruction of a panel of mutations into all three architectures proved they are adaptive even in architectures where the affected genes were not found significantly mutated by the end of the experiment. Altogether our results demonstrate the existence of a common pathway for yeast cells to adapt to a form of constitutive DNA replication stress.” (Lines 405-414)

      **Major comments:**

      • Are the key conclusions convincing? Yes, the convergent evolution analysis, fitness assays, and genetic reconstructions are sufficient to characterise the genetic causes of adaptation in this experiment, and are of the highest standard. The authors do particularly well to fully recover the fitness increases that evolved with their genetic reconstructions, which imparts a completeness to their understanding of what happened in their evolution experiment.
      • Should the authors qualify some of their claims as preliminary or speculative, or remove them altogether? No, in nearly all cases the authors make reasonable claims. One exception is on L419 in the discussion, where the authors speculate why some mutations do not follow diminishing returns epistasis, but this idea does not really have any basis (no citation or reasons to suggest that DNA repair genes are less connected with other genes in the genome). If the authors cannot support this statement, it should be removed, and instead write that is currently unknown why some individual mutations do not follow the pattern of diminishing returns.

      On reflection, we agree with the reviewer and now state,

      “Our results confirm previous reports observing declining adaptability across strains with different initial fitness but largely fail to observe diminishing return epistasis as a potential justification of this phenomenon. Our experiments and two previous evolutionary repair experiments (Hsieh et al., 2020; Laan et al., 2015) both show interactions that are approximately additive between different selected mutations. The reasons for this difference are currently unknown.

      A hypothesis, which would need experimental validation, could be that the different mutations have different degrees of epistatic interactions with the rest of the genome. Ixr1, whose mutation follows diminishing return epistasis, is a transcription factor that could in principle affect the expression of many other genes implicated in different cellular modules. Sld5, Scc2 and Rad9 instead, whose mutations have the same effect across different genome architectures, having more mechanistic roles in genome maintenance may have strong epistatic interactions only with a restricted number of cellular modules implicated with DNA metabolism.

      • Would additional experiments be essential to support the claims of the paper? No.
        • Are the data and the methods presented in such a way that they can be reproduced? Yes, but some more details are needed for the convergent evolution analysis, see minor comments.
        • Are the experiments adequately replicated and statistical analysis adequate? Yes, but some more statistic reporting in the main text or figure legends would be helpful, for example. L159: Please report the statistical test, test statistic and p value in the text or in the figure legend. Currently significance is indicated, but the methods do not specify the test.

      We apologize for the lack of clarity in the main text. The test used for all fitness analysis was only reported in the materials and methods as follow:

      “The P-values reported in figures are the result of t-tests assuming unequal variances (Welch’s test)”

      We now include the test and the associated p-value in line 184, and write the above sentence in all the relevant figures.

      This should also be done for the GO analysis shown in figure 3A.

      We thank reviewer #3 pointing out this omission. We now include the following section:

      “Gene ontology (GO) enrichment analysis:

      The list of genes with putatively selected mutations (Figure 3A) or homozygous mutations in diploids (Figure 4) were input as ‘multiple proteins’ in the STRING database, which reports on the network of interactions between the input genes (https://string-db.org). The GO term enrichment analysis provided by STRING are reported in Supplementary Table 3 and Supplementary Table 6 respectively. Briefly, the strength of the enrichment is calculated as Log10(O/E), where O is the number of ‘observed’ genes in the provided list (of length N) which belong to the GO-term, and E is the number of ‘expected’ genes we would expect to find matching the GO-term providing a list of the same length N made of randomly picked genes. P-values are computed using a Hypergeometric test and corrected for multiple testing using the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure. The resulting P-values are represented as ‘False discovery rate’ in the supplementary tables and describe the significance of the GO terms enrichment (Franceschini et al., 2013).”

      **Minor comments:**

      • Specific experimental issues that are easily addressable. Not a new experiment, but extra details are required. The authors carried out both clone and whole population sequencing. For their convergent evolution analysis, what is the criteria for a mutation to be included- ie, does it need to be fixed, have attained a certain frequency? This is important- if the criteria were low (say 5%), it would be important to know whether gene A had fixed in 4 populations, while gene B had attained a frequency of 10% in 5 populations. As it stands both would be described as examples of convergent evolution. This can be handled by providing these details in the methods.

      For the population sequencing we disregarded variants found at less than 25% and 35% of the reads in haploid and diploid populations respectively as we observed they were largely the product of alignment errors. All the variants found at frequencies higher than the thresholds indicated were used for the parallel evolution analysis. The frequency at which each individual variant was detected in each population is reported in Supplementary table 1, while the average frequency at which a gene has been found mutated across different populations is reported in Supplementary table 2. The reason why we didn’t solely focus on fixed mutations for our convergent evolution analysis was that from previous work we knew of the existence of clonal interference which kept the frequency of verified adaptive mutations that coexisted in the same population (e.g. ixr1 and sld5) well below 90% (Fumasoni & Murray, 2020).

      For clarity we now add the following sentence in the material and methods:

      “Variants found in less than 25% and 35% of the reads in haploid and diploid populations respectively were discarded, since many of these corresponded to misalignment of repeated regions. For clone sequencing, only variants found in more than 75% of the reads in haploids and 35% of the reads in diploids (to account for heterozygosity) were considered mutations. The frequency of the reads associated with all the variants detected are reported in Supplementary table 1”

      • Are prior studies referenced appropriately? I note that the authors use the term declining adaptability where as other papers use the term diminishing returns epistasis- I am sure the authors have good reasons for their choice of nomenclature but I think it would be helpful for their readers to connect this work to other work by mentioning that declining adaptability is also referred to as diminishing returns.

      We use both terms (for instance in line 446 and line 448) with a different meaning : By ‘declining adaptability’ we refer the phenomenon where more fit strains display lower adaptation rates than less fit ones. By ‘diminishing returns epistasis’ we refer to a possible explanation of such a phenomenon, where adaptive mutations have different fitness effects due to their ‘global’ epistatic interactions with other alleles. It has to be noted that ‘diminishing returns epistasis’ is not the only proposed explanation of the phenomenon of declining adaptability (Couce & Tenaillon, 2015). In our case, we do find evidence of declining adaptability but very limited evidence for diminishing return epistasis (only 1 mutation in 5 has a different fitness effect in different architectures).

      A reference the authors have missed: L419, as well as citing the Desai Lab bioxive paper, they should cite another theory paper that obtained similar conclusions. Lyons, D.M., et al. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-020-01286-y.

      We thank the reviewer for the suggested reference, which is now cited at line 450.

      • Are the text and figures clear and accurate? This paper is beautifully written and easy to follow, a lot of thought has gone into the figures which are aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate.

        • Do you have suggestions that would help the authors improve the presentation of their data and conclusions? No.

        **Typos**

        L32 "do" should be "to" L95 analyzed L219 are the authors referring to ref 15 here? I think so, but please specify

      We thank the reviewer for carefully finding the typos, which are now all corrected.

      Reviewer #3 (Significance (Required)):

      • Describe the nature and significance of the advance (e.g. conceptual, technical, clinical) for the field. This paper is an important conceptual result and an immediate advance for basic research. The authors have done an outstanding job of showing the potential for the clinical translation of this research, especially regarding cancer biology.
      • Place the work in the context of the existing literature (provide references, where appropriate). This study follows up on and builds upon an earlier paper by these same authors published in E-life in 2020. Conceptually this work is most closely related to work in Michael Desai's, Sergey Kryazhimskiy's, Tim Coopers and Chris Marx's labs work looking at diminishing returns epistasis in yeast, and studies contrasting evolution of haploids and diploids led by Greg Lang's and Sarah Otto's labs.
      • State what audience might be interested in and influenced by the reported findings. This work will be of great interest to the Experimental evolution and molecular evolution communities and also of interest to those who study cancer genomics and DNA replication and repair.
      • Define your field of expertise with a few keywords to help the authors contextualize your point of view. Indicate if there are any parts of the paper that you do not have sufficient expertise to evaluate. Microbial experimental evolution.

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    1. Are the visitors learning anything?’ we asked. He still didn’t understand. Attendance at the museum was high. It looked attractive. It had probably won a prize. Why were we wasting his time?” Are designers also wasting the time of the critics?

      What an interesting story to come full circle on the topic. You would think that museums would be centered around learner growth, the elevation of society and the expansion of understanding. However, just as soon as you make it a potential tourist destination, much of the noble ideas may go right out the window. However, it does seem like an oxymoron to have displays and information that is difficult to read and too complex for the average learner. Maybe this is why many Americans are becoming disinterested with museums?

    2. “What the customer wants, the customer gets”

      I think we have to be careful with the customer is always right mentality as we are trying to raise the bar for learners who may often be seeking entertaining education as seen through various media outlets. If we are to compete on a global stage, we must seek to push people somewhat out of their comfort zones in some situations.

    3. “real world ” it is the client who sets the parameters for what will be characterized as an acceptable product. Our client may place a premium on creative instruction, just as our critics insist, or they may be much more into other aspects of the instruction, such as effectiveness and efficiency

      I don't think I fully realized the role the client plays in exactly the type of ID. I knew they gave parameters but seeing it laid out like this really clarifies that some want engagement while others was effectiveness at the cost of interest sometimes and that is what we are dealing with.

    1. With much angry gesturing, an Italian manager referred to the idea of his Dutch counterpart as “crazy.” The Dutch manager replied. “What do you mean, crazy? I’ve considered all the factors, and I think this is a viable approach. And calm down! We need to analyze this, not get sidetracked by emotional theatrics.” At that point, the Italian walked out of the meeting. In international business dealings, reason and emotion both play a role. Which of these dominates depends upon whether we are affective (readily showing emotions) or emotionally neutral in our approach. Members of neutral cultures do not telegraph their feelings, but keep them carefully controlled and subdued. In cultures with high affect, people show their feelings plainly by laughing, smiling, grimacing, scowling – and sometimes crying, shouting, or walking out of the room. This doesn’t mean that people in neutral cultures are cold or unfeeling. But in the course of normal business activities, neutral cultures are more careful to monitor the amount of emotion they display. Research conducted with people who were upset about something at work, noted that only some cultures supported expressing those feelings openly. Emotional reactions were found to be least acceptable in Japan, Indonesia, the U.K., Norway and the Netherlands – and most accepted in Italy, France, the U.S. and Singapore. It’s easy for people from neutral cultures to sympathize with the Dutch manager and his frustration over trying to reason with “that excitable Italian.” After all, an idea either works or it doesn’t work – and the way to test the validity of an idea is through trial and observation. That just makes sense – doesn’t it? Well, not necessarily to the Italian who felt the issue was deeply personal, and who viewed any “rational argument” as totally irrelevant!

      Our text doesn't give opposing terms for the emotion display rules, but these examples may help you understand the concept better.

    1. Outside some departments of philosophy, however, it is generally not scholars in the humanitieswho overvalue rationality. After all, the idea of reason has not had a very good press among writers, critics, and theorists for some time now—one may think of the doubts about it raised (as E. O. Wilson is aware) by the Roman-tics or of its treatment by Nietzsche or psychoanalytic theory. Nor is it humanists who need to recognize the existence of what Hayles calls “systemic human blind-nesses.” On the contrary, if we have a concept like hubris and a chastened sense of human capacities more generally, it has come largely from poets, humanistic philosophers, and those who study and transmit their views. Humanities scholars these days generally acknowledge—and many of them stress—the continuities between humans and other animals; and, although a strong suspicion of a not well-understood Darwinism remains widespread, most of them, I believe, would acknowledge that our capacities, impulses, and responses reflect, among other things, the evolutionary history of the species.

      Nicely said -- the humanities are not the ones failing in this regard.

    2. A good part of the interest of the actions and productions of other humans may have to do with our experiencing the world, fairly uniquely among machines and animals, as subjects—experiencing it, that is, with what we call consciousness or a sense of self. Hayles, having no doubt heard such observations from digital-resistant humanists, goes to some trouble to expose subjectivity, consciousness, and a sense of self as “illusions.” But the effort is, again I think, misplaced. Recognizing that subjective experiences—one’s own and other peoples’—are, as she terms them, “epiphenomena of underlying material processes” does not make them any less interesting as experiences.17 Nor does it erase the differ-ence that we generally register—perceptually, conceptually, and emotionally— between experiencing beings as such and material processes as such

      This is a nice rejoinder to the effort (and Hayles isn't alone here) to deconstruct human selfhood as singular and singularizing.

    1. Author Response:

      Summary:

      While the work addresses an interesting research question, several shortcomings have been raised by three independent reviewers. A first issue is the lack of theoretical clarity and linkage with prior work, as discussed by Reviewer 1 and Reviewer 2. A second critical set of concerns is raised by all reviewers with the need for several additional analyses to nail down the interpretations proposed by the authors. Reviewer 2 specifically raised concerns regarding the interpretability of activation in auditory cortices, while Reviewer 3 provides insights on the MVPA analysis and suggests the possible use of RSA to clarify the main findings.

      While we respect the editor’s decision, we think that all points raised by Reviewer 1 and Reviewer 3 can be easily addressed through editing of the text and additional analyses. As we describe below, these revisions do not undermine the findings reported in our study – instead, they improve the clarity of the manuscript and further demonstrate that our results are genuine and robust. Furthermore, we believe that points raised by Reviewer 2 are based on misunderstanding. Differences in auditory properties across sound categories in our experiment cannot explain the pattern of results reported. Thus, additional analyses in the auditory cortex, proposed by Reviewer 2, can neither support nor undermine the claims made in our study. Nevertheless, we performed all the analyses suggested by the Reviewer 2.

      We also want to stress that all reviewers find our study timely and interesting for broad readership. Furthermore, Reviewer 1 and Reviewer 3 made a number of positive comments on study methodology. Overall, we believe that there are no doubts regarding the novelty and importance of our study, and that we are able to address all additional methodological concerns raised by the reviewers.

      Reviewer #1:

      Bola and colleagues asked whether the coupling in perception-action systems may be reflected in early representations of the face. The authors used fMRI to assess the responses of the human occipital temporal cortex (FFA in particular) to the presentation of emotional (laughing/crying), non-emotional (yawning/sneezing), speech (Chinese), object and animal sounds of congenitally blind and sighted participants. The authors present a detailed set of independent and direct univariate and multivariate contrasts, which highlight a striking difference of engagement to facial expressions in the OTC of the congenitally blind compared to the sighted participants. The specificity of facial expression sounds in OTC for the congenitally blind is well captured in the final MVPA analysis presented in Fig.5.

      We would like to thank the reviewer for an overall positive assessment of our work.

      -The use of "transparency of mapping" is rather metaphorical and hand-wavy for a non-expert audience. If the issue relates to the notion of compatibility of representational formats, then it should be expressed formally.

      Following the reviewer’s suggestion, we revised the introduction and clarified what we mean by “transparency of mapping”, and how this concept might be related to the compatibility of representations computed in different areas of the brain. As is now extensively explained, we propose that shape features of inanimate objects are directly relevant to our actions. In contrast, a relationship between shape and relevant actions is much less clear in the case of most animate objects. We hypothesized that this inherent difference between the inanimate and the animate domain, combined with evolutionary pressures for quick, accurate, and efficient object-directed responses, resulted in the inanimate vOTC areas being more strongly coupled with the action system, both in terms of manipulability and navigation, than the animate vOTC areas. The stronger coupling is likely to be reflected in the format of vOTC shape representation of inanimate objects being more compatible with the format of representations computed in the action system.

      -The theoretical stance of the authors does not clearly predict why blind individuals should show more precise emotional expressions in FFA as compared to sighted - as the authors start addressing in their Discussion. In the context of the action-perception loop, it is even more surprising considering that the sighted have direct training and visual access to the facial gestures of interlocutors, which they can internalize. Can the authors entertain alternative scenarios such as the need to rely on mental imagery for congenitally blind for instance?

      We agree that our approach does not predict the difference between the blind and the sighted subjects, and we openly discuss this in the discussion: “An unexpected finding in our study is the clear difference in vOTC univariate response to facial expression sounds across the congenitally blind and the sighted group”. We also propose an explanation of this unexpected difference. Specifically, we suggest that the interactions between the action system and the animate areas in the vOTC are relatively weak, even in the case of facial expressions – thus, they can be captured mostly in blind individuals, whose visual areas are known to increase their sensitivity to non-visual stimulation. This explanation can account for this unexpected between-group difference and is consistent with our theoretical proposal.

      The “mental imagery account” can be, in our opinion, divided into two distinct hypotheses. One version of this account would be to assume that the representation of animate entities typically computed in the vOTC (i.e., also in sighted people) can be activated through visual mental imagery (as suggested by several previous studies), and that this would affect our between-group comparisons. In that case, however, we should observe an effect opposite to that obtained in our study – namely, the activation in the vOTC animate areas should be stronger in the sighted subjects, since they, but not the congenitally blind participants, can create visual mental images (as the reviewer pointed out). This is clearly not what we observed. A second version of the mental imagery account would be to assume representational plasticity in the vOTC of blind individuals – that is, to assume that vOTC animate areas in this population switch from representing visually, face-related information to representing motor mental imagery, which presumably they can generate just like sighted individuals. However, such an account does not, on its own, explain why the animate vOTC areas in the congenitally blind participants are more strongly activated than they are in the sighted subjects, who can generate both visual and motor mental imagery. Based on these considerations, we do not think that the mental imagery account provides a sufficient explanation. Nonetheless, it is certainly a factor worth considering, which we add in a revised discussion of the reported results. Similar reasoning can be applied to other accounts which assume that the observed difference between the blind and the sighted group is a result of representational plasticity in this region in the blind group. Such accounts would need to propose a plausible dimension, different than face shape and its relation to the action system, that is captured by the animate vOTC areas in blind individuals. Since the effect we report is independent of auditory, emotional, social or linguistic dimensions present in our stimuli, it is hard to say what this dimension might be.

      We now elaborate on these important points in the Discussion section.

      Reviewer #2:

      The study by Bola and colleagues tested the specific hypothesis that visual shape representations can be reliably activated through different sensory modalities only when they systematically map onto action system computations. To this aim, the authors scanned a group of congenitally blind individuals and a group of sighted controls while subjects listened to multiple sound categories.

      While I find the study of general interest, I think that there are main methodological limitations, which do not allow to support the general claim.

      We would like to thank the reviewer for this assessment. Below, we argue that the results presented in the paper support our claim, and that they cannot be explained by alternative accounts described by the reviewer.

      Main concerns

      1) Auditory stimuli have been equalized to have the same RMS (-20 dB). In my opinion, this is not a sufficient control. As shown in Figure 3 - figure supplement 1, the different sound categories elicited extremely different patterns of response in A1. This is clearly linked to intrinsic sound properties. In my opinion without a precise characterization of sound properties across categories, it is not possible to conclude that the observed effects in face responsive regions (incidentally, as assessed using an atlas and not a localizer) are explained by the different category types. On the stimulus side, authors should at least provide (a) spectrograms and (b) envelope dynamics; in case sound properties would differ across categories all results might have a confound associated to stimuli selection.

      We now present spectrograms and waveforms for sounds used in the study in the Methods section. We did not present this information in the original version of the paper because, in our opinion, it is quite obvious that sounds from different categories will differ in terms of their auditory properties – after all, this is why we can distinguish among human speech, animal sounds or object sounds. Thus, differences in sound properties across conditions are an inherent characteristic of every study comparing sounds from several domains or semantic categories (e.g., human vs. non-human), including our own study. We now clarify this issue in the Methods section of the manuscript.

      Having said that, we believe that differences in acoustic properties across sound categories cannot explain the results in the vOTC, reported in our work. We report that, in blind subjects, the vOTC face areas respond more strongly to sounds of emotional facial expressions and non-emotional facial expressions than to speech sounds, animal sounds and object sounds. These brain areas did not show differential responses to two expression categories or to three other sound categories. To explain this pattern of results, the “acoustic confound account” would need to assume that there is some special auditory property that differentiate both types of expression sounds, but does not differentiate sound categories in any other comparison. Moreover, this account would need to further assume that this is precisely the auditory dimension to which the vOTC face areas are sensitive, while being insensitive to other auditory characteristics, different across the other sound categories (e.g., across object sounds and animal sounds, or expression sounds and speech sounds - as the reviewer pointed out, all categories are acoustically very different, as indicated by the activation of A1). We find this account extremely unlikely. We now comment on these points in the Methods and the Results section.

      2) More on the same point: the authors use the activation of A1 as a further validation of the results in face selective areas. Page 16 line 304 "We observed activation pattern that was the same for the blind and the sighted subjects, and markedly different from the pattern that was observed in the fusiform gyrus in the blind group (see Fig. 1D). This suggests that the effects detected in this region in the blind subjects were not driven by the differences in acoustic characteristics of sounds, as such characteristics are likely to be captured by activation patterns of the primary auditory cortex." It is the opinion of this reader that this control, despite being important, does not support the claim. A1 is certainly a good region to show how basic sound properties are mapped. However, the same type of analysis should be performed in higher auditory areas, as STS. If result patterns would be similar to the FFA region, I guess that the current interpretation of results would not hold.

      As we discuss above, we believe that the explanation of the results observed in the vOTC in terms of “acoustic confound” does not hold, even without any empirical analysis in the auditory cortex. The analysis in A1 was planned to clearly illustrate this point and to support interpretation of potential unexpected pattern of results across sound categories (such an unexpected pattern was not observed).

      However, per reviewer’s request, we performed an ROI analysis also in the STS. Specifically, we chose two ROIs – a broad and bilateral ROI covering the whole STS, and a more constrained ROI covering the right posterior STS (rpSTS), known to be a part of the face processing network and to respond primarily to dynamic aspects of the face shape. As can be seen in Supplementary Materials, the broad STS ROI pattern of responses is markedly different from the one observed in the FFA. Particularly, the magnitude of the STS activation is clearly different for speech sounds, animal sounds, and objects sounds, in both the blind and the sighted group. In the case of the FFA, the activation magnitudes for these three sound categories were indistinguishable. Furthermore, in the blind group, the STS showed stronger activation for emotional facial expression sounds than for non-emotional expression sounds. Again, such a difference was not observed in the FFA (if anything, the FFA showed slightly stronger activation for non-emotional expression sounds in the blind group). The pattern of the rpSTS responses is more similar to the responses observed in the FFA. This is exactly what can be expected based on our hypothesis that the FFA in the blind group is sensitive primarily to dynamic facial reconfigurations, with transparent link between the motoric and visual shape representations. Overall, we think that the pattern of results observed in the auditory cortex is fully in line with our hypothesis – the auditory regions (A1 and STS, defined broadly) show responses that are different than the responses observed in the FFA (one may hypothesize that responses in the auditory regions are driven by low-level auditory features of stimuli to a larger extent); the rpSTS, which is specialized in the processing of dynamic aspects of the face shape, shows the pattern of responses that is more similar to the pattern of responses observed in the FFA. Importantly, the responses in the rpSTS were not different across subject groups. As we describe below, this is the pattern of results that was observed also in MVPA. We now report all the above-described results in the paper.

      3) Linked to the previous point. Given that the authors implemented a MPVA pipeline at the ROI level, it is important to perform the same analysis in both groups, but especially in the blind, in areas such as STS as well as in a control region, engaged by the task (with signal) to check the specificity of the FFA activation.

      Per reviewer’s request, we additionally performed the MVPA in three control regions. Firstly, we performed the analysis in the auditory cortex, defined as A1 and the STS combined. We treated this area as a positive control – particularly, given the acoustic differences between sound categories, we expected to successfully decode all sound categories from the activity of this ROI. Secondly, we performed the analysis in the parahippocampal place area (PPA). We treated the PPA as a negative control – given that this area does not seem to contain much information about animate entities, we did not expect to find effects there for most of our comparisons. Furthermore, as the PPA is the vOTC area bordering the FFA, the negative results in this area would be a proof of spatial specificity of our results. Thirdly, we performed the analysis in the rpSTS – here, we expected to observe the results similar to the ones observed in the FFA, for the reasons provided above. We now present the results of these analyses as supplementary figures.

      We were able to successfully distinguish all sound categories, in both groups, based on the activation of the auditory cortex (all p = 0.001; the lowest value that can be achieved in our permutation analysis). Furthermore, based on the activation of this area, we were able to classify specific facial expressions, specific speech sounds, and the gender of the actor, in contrast to the result from the FFA, where the decoding of facial expressions was the only positive result.

      As expected, the decoding of animate sound categories was generally not successful in the PPA. However, as one might expect, activation of this area allowed us, to some extent, to distinguish object sounds from animate sounds – especially in the blind group. Furthermore, based on the PPA activation, we were not able to classify specific facial expressions, speech sounds, or the gender of the actor. These results confirm that the results reported for the FFA are specific to only certain parts of the brain and even certain parts of the vOTC.

      As can be expected, the results in the rpSTS were the most similar to the results observed in the FFA – while the activation of this region was diagnostic of all categorical distinctions, the more detailed analysis showed that this region represented differences between specific facial expressions, but not between the speech sounds or the gender of actors acting the expressions (the similar pattern of results was observed in both groups). This is the same specificity that the FFA in blind people show.

      Finally, we would like to stress that the difference between results observed in the FFA and the PPA is yet another argument against interpreting the results in the FFA as being driven by auditory properties of stimuli – the issue that we discussed in details above. We do not see the reason why putative acoustic influences on the vOTC responses in the blind group should be present in the FFA, but not in the PPA.

      4) I find the manuscript rather biased with regard to the literature. This is a topic which has been extensively investigated in the past. For instance, the manuscript does not include relevant references for the present context, such as:

      Plaza, P., Renier, L., De Volder, A., & Rauschecker, J. (2015). Seeing faces with your ears activates the left fusiform face area, especially when you're blind. Journal of vision, 15(12), 197-197.

      Kitada, R., Okamoto, Y., Sasaki, A. T., Kochiyama, T., Miyahara, M., Lederman, S. J., & Sadato, N. (2013). Early visual experience and the recognition of basic facial expressions: involvement of the middle temporal and inferior frontal gyri during haptic identification by the early blind. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 7, 7.

      Pietrini, P., Furey, M. L., Ricciardi, E., Gobbini, M. I., Wu, W. H. C., Cohen, L., ... & Haxby, J. V. (2004). Beyond sensory images: Object-based representation in the human ventral pathway. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 101(15), 5658-5663.

      The first reference listed by the reviewer is actually a conference abstract. Thus, we feel that it would be premature to give it comparable weight to peer-reviewed papers. Furthermore, based on the abstract, without the published paper, we cannot assess the robustness of the results and their relevance to our study (particularly, it is unclear whether some effects were observed in the right FFA, and whether a statistically significant difference between blind and sighted subjects was detected).

      In the second reference, the authors did not observe effects in the FFA in the visual version of their experiment with sighted subjects, at the threshold of p < 0.05, corrected for multiple comparisons. In our opinion, this makes the null result of the tactile experiment, reported for the FFA, hard to interpret – thus, while the paper is very interesting in certain contexts, it is not particularly informative when it comes to the question addressed here.

      While the third reference reports interesting results, it does not investigate preference for inanimate objects or animate objects in the vOTC, which is the main topic of our paper (only comparisons vs. rest and between- and within-category correlations are reported). Furthermore, based on that study, we cannot conclude whether effects reported for faces are found in the face areas or in other parts of the vOTC (no analyses in specific vOTC areas were reported).

      These were the reasons why we did not refer to these materials in the previous version of the manuscript. Importantly, none of them compel us to revise our claims, and we refer to a number of other papers, directly relevant to the question we are interested in – that is, the difference between vOTC animate and inanimate areas in sensitivity to non-visual stimulation. Nevertheless, we agree that referring to materials suggested by the reviewer might be informative for non-expert readers – thus, we cite them in the revised version of our paper.

      Reviewer #3:

      Bola and colleagues set out to test the hypothesis that vOT domain specific organization is due to the evolutionary pressure to couple visual representations and downstream computations (e.g., action programs). A prediction of such theory is that cross-modal activations (e.g., response in FFA to face-related sounds) should be detected as a function of the transparency of such coupling (e.g., sounds associated with facial expression > speech).

      To this end, the Authors compared brain activity of 20 congenitally blind and 22 sighted subjects undergoing fMRI while performing a semantic judgment task (i.e., is it produced by a human?) on sounds belonging to 5 different categories (emotional and non-emotional facial expressions, speech, object sounds and animal sounds).The results indicate preferential response to sounds associated with facial expressions (vs. speech or animal/objects sounds) in the fusiform gyrus of blind individuals regardless of the emotional content.

      The issue tackled is relevant and timely for the field, and the method chosen (i.e., clinical model + univariate and multivariate fMRI analyses) well suited to address it. The analyses performed are overall sound and the paper clear and exhaustive.

      We thank the reviewer for this positive assessment.

      1) While I overall understand why the Authors would choose a broader ROI for multivariate (vs. univariate) analyses, I believe it would be appropriate to show both analyses on both ROIs. In particular, the fact that the ROI used for the univariate analyses is right-hemisphere only, while the multivariate one is bilateral should be (at least) discussed.

      We shortly discuss this issue in the Methods section: “The reason behind broader and bilateral ROI definition was that the multivariate analysis relies on dispersed and subthreshold activation and deactivation patterns, which might be well represented also by cross-talk between hemispheres (for example, a certain subcategory might be represented by activation of the right FFA and deactivation of the left analog of this area).”

      Constraining the FFA ROI in the multivariate analysis (i.e., using the same ROI as was used in the univariate analysis) makes the results slightly weaker, in both groups. However, the pattern of results is qualitatively comparable. Slight decrease in statistical power can be expected, for the reasons described in the Methods and cited above:

      Similarly, using broader FFA ROI in the univariate analysis (i.e., using the same ROI as was used in the multivariate analysis) results in qualitatively comparable, but slightly weaker effects in the blind group and no change in sighted subjects (no difference between sound categories). Again, this is expectable – visual studies show that the functional sensitivity to face-related stimuli is weaker in the left counterpart of the FFA than in the right FFA. This is also the case in our data - using broader and bilateral ROI essentially averages a stronger effect in the right FFA and a more subtle effect in the left counterpart of the FFA.

      We now clarify this issue in the Methods section.

      2) The significance of the multivariate results is established testing the cross-validated classification accuracy against chance-level with t-tests. Did these tests consider the hypothetical chance level based on class number? A permutation scheme assessing the null distribution would be advisable. In general, more details should be provided with respect to the multivariate analyses performed, for instance the confusion matrix in Figure 5B is never mentioned in the text.

      Yes, the chance level was calculated in a standard way, by dividing 100 % by the number of conditions/classes included in the analysis (note that all stimulus classes were presented equal number of times). To respond to the reviewer’s comment, we used a permutation approach to recalculate significances of all MVPA analyses reported in the paper (note that the whole-brain univariate analyses are already performed within the permutation framework). To this aim, we reran each analysis 1000 times with condition labels randomized and compared the actual result of this analysis with the null distribution created in this way (see the Methods section for details). We replicated all results reported in the paper. We now report this new analysis in the manuscript, changing the figure legends and the Methods section accordingly.

      The confusion matrix was not mentioned in the text because it is not a separate analysis. As explained in the figure legend, it is just a graphical representation of classifiers performance (i.e., its choices for specific stimulus classes) during the decoding analysis reported in Fig. 5A. To clarify this, we now briefly mention the graph presented in Fig. 5B in the main text.

      3) I wonder whether a representational similarity approach could be useful in better delineating similarity/differences in blind vs. sighted participants sounds representations in vOT. Such analysis could also help further exploring potential graded effects: i.e., sounds associated with facial expression (face related, with salient link to movement) > speech (face related, with less salient link with movement) > animals sounds (non-human face related) > object sounds (not face related at all). The above-mentioned confusion matrix could be the starting point of such investigation.

      We thank the reviewer for this interesting suggestion. In response to this comment, we performed an additional RSA analysis, aimed at investigating graded similarity in the FFA response patterns, across categories used in the experiment. Based on our hypothesis, we created a simple theoretical model assuming that responses to both types of facial expression sounds are the most similar to each other (animate sounds with high shape-action mapping transparency), somewhat similar to speech sounds (animate sounds with weaker shape-action mapping transparency), and the least similar to animal and object sounds (animate sounds with no clear shape-action mapping transparency and inanimate sounds). We observed a significant correlation between this theoretical model and FFA response patterns in the blind group (pFDR = 0.012), but not in the sighted group pFDR = 0.223). We believe that the RSA analysis further supports our visual-shape-to-action mapping conjecture, at least when it comes to blind subjects (see the Discussion section for our interpretation of the observed differences between the blind and the sighted subjects). We describe this new analysis in the revised text.

    1. What would I have? Dead, I have found the true friends of my lifetime still as true as tender and as faithful as when I was alive, and making my memory an incentive to good actions done in my name. Dead, I have found them when they might have slighted my name, and passed greedily over my grave to ease and wealth, lingering by the way, like single-hearted children, to recall their love for me when I was a poor frightened child. Dead, I have heard from the woman who would have been my wife if I had lived, the revolting truth that I should have purchased her, caring nothing for me, as a Sultan buys a slave.

      I found this entire paragraph extremely interesting due to the fact that this is all true. If we were to die, it would be the ultimate test of friendship and love. Being able to see who actually cared, or who did not is kind of horrifying to me. I think I would rather never know, then see some of the people I loved and thought loved me tell the truth of what they really feel, in a sense of cruelty. This would be something insane to watch play out, which is why I felt like this entire quote just needed to be highlighted because imagine being in those shoes. I think that in a way, it is selfish that he did not come back and was able to get the real emotions of everyone because some people wept, and were deeply affected. Yet again, I may feel like this because I would much rather never know, curiosity kills but ignorance is bliss.

    1. "sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others

      This is a description of the White gaze. It is the sense of that our lives are held in the time, space and identity of White folks as the TED talk spoke on. I believe that the double conscionuous can speak on not only does it hold about was white folks think of us and therefore what society thinks of us but rather how we think of ourselves in society. Often I believe that we sub consciously or consciously compare ourselves to the White gaze. As Cisneros spoke in the Video that she felt that she did not belong among other writers or see herself as a writer because her life/identity was not represented any where around her. She was comparing herself to the White master narrative that may can cause doubt in or own success and us as an individual of color.

    1. You can see wildness in the movement of glaciers, or you can track it in star-forming regions in the Orion Nebula. Wildness is everywhere.

      REFLECT: Wilderness = anything we can't control. Humans don't play nice with things we can't control.

      Emerson and Thoreau hint at the effect wildness has on us--the healing effect. I wonder how much of this effect comes down to resigning our ability to control the world around us. That desire to control is probably tiring and burdensome. Satisfaction may come from relinquishing it. It's certainly an Eastern philosophy kind of idea.

      CONNECTION: This makes me think of meditation and how it's gotten really popular with Apps like Calm and Headspace; it's big in the tech world. However, the ironic part is that it's used as a means to be MORE productive to have MORE control, to MASTER your world. If happiness boils down to relinquishing control and simply "being," then mediation has kind of been co-opted.

    1. Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

      This is incredibly relevant even today and it made me think about how the world may gain more knowledge but if we repeatedly ignore the facts of what we learn we will stay on this repetitive cycle of ignorance that’s been going on long before this line was ever written.

    1. Note: This rebuttal was posted by the corresponding author to Review Commons. Content has not been altered except for formatting.

      Learn more at Review Commons


      Reply to the reviewers

      Response to Reviewers

      We thank the reviewers for their careful reading of our manuscript and their valuable suggestions and comments. To address the reviewers’ concerns and improve our manuscript, we will complete the additional experiments and further revise the text as described below.


      Reviewer #1 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)):

      **Summary:**

      Provide a short summary of the findings and key conclusions (including methodology and model system(s) where appropriate). Please place your comments about significance in section 2. The authors present an in vivo analysis of pdzd8 (CG10362) and a synthetic ER-mitochondria tether in the regulation of locomotor activity, lifespan, and mitochondrial turnover of Drosophila melanogaster, using basic bioinformatics, RNAi, SPLICS, imaging and microscopies observations (i. e. TEM, SIM), fly lines, and a representative AD fly disease model, etc. The research methodologies were detailed in good order. The model system employed was suitable to address the research topic. The manuscript was written in a clear language and statistical analysis were correctly applied.

      **Major comments:**

      *-Are the key conclusions convincing?*

      Yes. The results/conclusions are logical and provide an overview of Pdzd8 in the regulation of mitochondrial quality control and neuronal homeostasis.

      *-Would additional experiments be essential to support the claims of the paper? Request additional experiments only where necessary for the paper as it is, and do not ask authors to open new lines of experimentation.*

      No. Experiments were generally well performed, and all the data support the conclusions.

      *-Are the suggested experiments realistic in terms of time and resources? It would help if you could add an estimated cost and time investment for substantial experiments.*

      No suggested experiments needed.

      *-Are the data and the methods presented in such a way that they can be reproduced?*

      Yes. The authors have followed proper experimental design and methods have been described in sufficient detail.

      *-Are the experiments adequately replicated and statistical analysis adequate?*

      Yes, they are.

      **Minor comments:**

      *-Specific experimental issues that are easily addressable.*

      No comment.

      *-Are prior studies referenced appropriately?*

      Yes. The relevant literatures have been cited appropriately.

      *-Are the text and figures clear and accurate?*

      1.Please pay attention to the correct spelling of the described protein name (Pdzd8) and gene name (should be in 'italic') throughout the manuscript, i. e. line 36, 98, and 556, etc.

      As this is the first published characterization of the fly homolog of the mammalian Pdzd8 We have decided to name the fly protein pdzd8, using the lower case “p” to distinguish it from the mammalian protein. We have checked and corrected our use of italics for the gene name as noted in track changes.

      2.In figure 1C and its figure legend, please state what the numbers "201" and "195" stand for.

      We have added the text “numbers on bars indicate number of mitochondria analysed” to the figure legend.

      3.Your data needs to be converted the lowercase letter "x" to math symbol "×" when representing times sign, i. e. line 523, 5x, etc.

      Corrected

      *-Do you have suggestions that would help the authors improve the presentation of their data and conclusions?*

      No comment.

      Reviewer #1 (Significance (Required)):

      *-Describe the nature and significance of the advance (e.g. conceptual, technical, clinical) for the field.*

      Discoveries from this study include 1) characterization of the tethering protein Pdzd8 in Drosophila melanogaster, and 2) shed light on a possible way on how to enhance mitochondrial quality control and to help promote healthy aging of neurons by manipulating MERCs.

      *-Place the work in the context of the existing literature (provide references, where appropriate).*

      With this manuscript, the authors present a straightforward but sound piece of scientific research, with the intent to illustrate the consequences of neuronal depletion of pdzd8 in Drosophila melanogaster. Since Pdzd8 plays specific functions in ER-mitochondrial tethering complexes and dysregulations of MERCs are damaging to neurons, this protein represents a good potential target. In this context the characterization of Pdzd8 should represent an interesting starting point. To this purpose, the gene was knockdown and the tether construct was recombinantly produced. The fly lines were then subjected to analysis both at the organismal and at the cellular level.

      *-State what audience might be interested in and influenced by the reported findings.* Audience might include those who are in the field of neuroscience and pharmaceutical, and benefit from an awareness of this research.

      *-Define your field of expertise with a few keywords to help the authors contextualize your point of view. Indicate if there are any parts of the paper that you do not have sufficient expertise to evaluate.*

      Key words in my field of expertise: Ageing, neurodegenerative diseases, Alzheimer's disease, mitophagy, NAD+, neuroprotection. My group is investigating the molecular mechanisms of ageing and age-related neurodegeneration (especially AD) using cross-species model systems, ranging from human brain samples, iPSCs, C. elegans, Drosophila melanogaster, and mice, therefore I have sufficient expertise to evaluate this paper.

      **Referees Cross-commenting**

      To this reviewer the key novelty of this paper was the study of the regulation of the mitochondrial-ER contact sites (MERCs) in life and health. The data indicate that MERCs mediated by the tethering protein pdzd8 play a critical role in the regulation of mitochondrial homeostasis, neuronal function, and lifespan. In a transitional perspective, this reviewer would ask to check whether this mechanism conserves in rodents or not (e.g. to to memory in the AD mice and to run lifespan in mitochondrial toxin condition). This may be to much. But will depend on the standard of the journal. We thank the reviewer for their input, evaluation and interest. We too are keen to know whether this mechanism is conserved and hope to investigate this in our ongoing work including characterizing a mouse mutant, but the current work already represents a substantial investment of resources and a worthy study in its own right as the first description of the in vivo role of pdzd8, so we feel it is beyond the scope of the current work.

      Reviewer #2

      (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)):

      Hewitt et al. describe and characterize for the first time the ortholog of pdzd8 in Drosophila melanogaster. In accordance with pdzd8's previously described function as a member of mitochondrial-ER contact sites (MERCs) the authors show reduced MERCs upon RNAi mediated depletion of pdzd8 via TEM, SIM and a split-GFP based contact site sensor. Pdzd8 depletion results in the increased life span as well as improved locomotor activity in aging flies while increase of MERCs with a synthetic tether accelerates the age-related declines in survival and locomotion. Moreover, pdzd8 depleted flies are more resistant against mitochondrial toxins. The authors correlate these protective effects of pdzd8 knockdown with an increase in mitophagy using a mitophagy sensor and describe a rescue of locomotor defects in an Alzheimer disease fly model by pdzd8 depletion.

      **Major comments:**

      1.The authors quantify the number of MERCs in thin sections of TEM (Fig 1B and C). It would add to the paper if the authors would show a representative reconstruction of the quantified somata, as a 3D reconstruction would visualize ER-Mito contacts more reliable than thin sections.

      We agree that the 3D reconstruction of TEM images would provide a satisfying addition to the current analyses, however such advanced techniques are not readily available. The current samples used to collect these data cannot be used to generate 3D reconstructions. To counter this, we have used three independent methods to analyse the changes in MERCs, all of which show a decrease in MERCs in the flies with less pdzd8 supporting that these observations are reproducible and robust.

      2.The authors quantify MERCs in pdzd8 KD also by SIM (Fig1F, G). However, they quantify the number of MERCs in epidermal cells while they also show SIM images of larval neurons (Fig S1D). For consistency and to support their claim of MERC reduction in neurons, we ask the authors to include the quantification based on larval neurons especially as the authors show that pdzd8 is predominantly expressed in the CNS.

      Unfortunately, the soma of larval neurons have extremely limited cytosol (see fig. S1D) which creates very challenging conditions to discern the spatial separation of ER and mitochondria by light microscopy. While co-localisation of organelle markers in such cells has been reported in the literature, we are extremely concerned that the lack of space within the cytosol renders such analysis unreliable. However, we will attempt to quantify the extent of co-localisation of the ER and mitochondria in these cells. In contrast, epidermal cells are much larger providing greater spatial separation of ER and mitochondria. Notably, we complement the co-localisation analysis of epidermal cells with two additional approaches, TEM analysis and the SPLICS reporter construct, to demonstrate pdzd8-RNAi results in decreased MERCs specifically in neurons.

      3.The authors describe a decreased NMJ volume in Fig 4G. It would improve and complete the functional characterization of pdzd8 in flies if the authors can provide further data whether pdzd8 KD causes a general synaptic defect. Can the authors show morphological synaptic defects in the existing TEM data of the adult brain or provide additional ERG recordings, which would elucidate the functional consequences of pdzd8 depletion in the CNS?

      Our TEM data are not suitable for us to properly analyse defects in synaptic morphology as our images centered around the cell bodies where the organelle morphology was easiest to distinguish and there are very few synapses. While it is not surprising that the knockdown of pdzd8 has some detrimental effects, we chose to focus our efforts on trying to determine the cause of the protective effect on locomotor activity in aged flies rather than to exhaustively characterise the myriad phenomena which may be impacted as a knock-on effect of the disrupted cell biology that we have demonstrated. We hope to further explore the detrimental functional consequences of pdzd8 depletion on such phenomena as neurotransmission in future work.

      1. Hewitt et al. suggest a beneficial effect of increased turnover of mitochondria for healthy aging. To convince readers we would like to ask the following:

      a) This claim is based on their observation of increased mitophagy in pdzd8 depleted flies using one reporter (Fig 5). Can the authors support their data with an alternative method as this is one of the key claims of the manuscript?

      The mitoQC tool is well established in the field and we have found it to perform better but consistent with mito-Keima (Lee et al. 2018 JCB doi: 10.1083/jcb.201801044). We would be happy to consider other assays if the reviewer can suggest an unbiased and established alternative.

      b) An increased turnover of Mitochondria would also suggest that there are more "young" mitochondria present in the pdzd8 KD neurons. Can the authors experimentally address that?

      We understand the reviewer’s point here but due to the continual fission and fusion, as well as piecemeal turnover of mitochondria (see Vincow et al. 2019 Autophagy doi: 10.1080/15548627.2019.1586258), the concept of ‘young’ versus ‘old’ mitochondria is misplaced. The mitochondrial network essentially exists as a milieu of components which are produced and degraded at different rates.

      c)Furthermore, we would like to ask the authors to use also the MERC tether as control in the mitophagy assay. This would allow further conclusions about the role of the mitophagy, its protective effect during aging and the role of MERCs in this process.

      We remind the reviewer that this MERC tether is constructed from an RFP with N- and C-terminal tethering peptides. The presence of this RFP prevents the proper analysis of the mitoQC mCherry signal. However, given the dramatic phenotypes we think that it is unlikely that a decrease in mitophagy alone can explain the detrimental effects of increased tethering.

      1. In Fig6 A,B the authors should include also the pdzd8 KD to support their claim that the rescue of climbing defects correlates with an reduction of MERCs.

      We thank the reviewer for this suggestion and we will perform this experiment.

      Moreover, it would be beneficial for their final conclusion, if the authors could show that increases mitophagy in the background of Ab42 expressing flies.

      We thank the reviewer for this suggestion and we will perform this experiment.

      **Minor comments:**

      1.Can the authors add to the figure legend of Fig 1F how the ER and Mitochondria were labeled?

      We have added the constructs to the figure legend (full genotypes for all figures are given in Table S2).

      2.Error bars should be added in the quantification of MERCs in Fig1C.

      The MERCs are quantified in three brains per genotype but as there were variable numbers of sections suitable for imaging from each brain the total values are combined to give a single percentage.

      3.A reference to Supplementary Fig S1D is missing in the main text.

      This figure is referenced in line 135

      4.Can the authors label the individual genotypes in Fig S3C and 4F?

      Figure labels and legends have been modified to clarify this.

      5.Can the author specify which brain region they imaged in Fig 5C?

      The regions imaged and quantified were chosen for their clear organelle morphology rather than targeting a specific brain region. All images were from the protocerebrum and the methods and figure legends have been updated to note this.

      6.Are the ATP levels normalized to ADP in Fig S3D? Can the authors specify in the figure and figure legend to what ATP was normalized?

      Figure labels and legends have been modified to clarify the ATP levels are normalised to total protein quantification of the samples.

      7.Please sort the supplementary figures in accordance to their reference order in the text.

      We thank the reviewer for checking this. This figure order will be rechecked in the final version as addressing reviewer comments is likely to lead to further changes.

      Reviewer #2 (Significance (Required)):

      The authors present here novel insights about the functional role of a new member of the MERCs, pdzd8, using RNAi mediated depletion and Drosophila melanogaster as a model system. As MERCs receive more attention especially in the context of their potential role in neurological diseases, the author's manuscript will be of high interest to the scientific community. The in vivo model combined with multiple different technical approaches add to the significance of the paper. There are some controls and additional experiments that are required to support the author's main claims and complete the functional characterization of pdzd8 (see major comments).

      Field of expertise: neuroscience, fly genetics, neurodegeneration.

      Reviewer #3

      (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)):

      This manuscript entitled "Decreasing pdzd8-mediated mitochondrial-ER contacts in neurons improves fitness by increasing mitophagy" by Hewitt and collaborators describes the role of the Drosophila ortholog of PDZD8 in ER-mitochondria contacts in neurons and the physiological consequence of pdzd8 loss. The authors show that ER-mitochondria contacts are reduced in fly neurons expressing a pdzd8-RNAi construct. Decreasing pdzd8 expression in neurons was accompanied by a slowed age-associated decline in locomotor activity, and an increased lifespan. In presence of mitochondrial toxins, neurons deficient for pdzd8 were protected. Finally, the authors showed that pdzd8 silencing increased mitophagy in aged neurons, and protected against neurodegeneration in a model of Alzheimer's disease.

      **Major points:**

      1)There are important controls that are missing. RNAi expression often affects off-target genes which could unfortunately modify the observed phenotypes. The authors should verify that a) the phenotypes observed by RNAi-mediated pdzd8 silencing can be rescued by the expression of an RNAi-insensitive pdzd8 construct (the authors should verify the rescue of the most crucial phenotypes described in the manuscript); b) the RNAi-LacZ-line that they use as control in the paper does not behave differently from a WT line, which could be induced by an off-target effect of the RNAi-LacZ (again with the most crucial phenotypes).

      While the Drosophila community is fortunate to have a plethora of readily available tools for interrogating the function of nearly all genes in the genome – tools which form the foundation of most work in Drosophila labs worldwide – the availability is not limitless. In this instance, the transgenic RNAi line generated as a resource for the community comprises a 500 bp hairpin, computed to be the most selective target for that gene. Being a 500 bp sequence it is unrealistic to be able to establish an RNAi-resistant variant that still faithfully functions as normal. Nevertheless, although imperfect we show in Figure S3B that pdzd8-RNAi rescues the climbing defect produced by overexpressing pdzd8, providing evidence the construct is specifically acting on this sequence.

      Similarly, the availability of ‘control’ RNAi reagents is generous but still limited. This LacZ-RNAi line is one of a few well-established controls that has provided a cornerstone reference for a wealth of studies. Nevertheless, we will provide experimental data that aged climbing of nSyb>LacZ-RNAi is highly comparable to several other well-established control genotypes.

      2) Did the author analyzed their EM data in a blinded-way to minimize subjective bias? This type of analysis is complicated by the manual annotation of ultrastructures, which is by nature subjective. For instance, this reviewer would have annotated the two mitochondria in the middle of Fig 1B, right as "Mitochondria with ER contact", as there is a membrane tube present at the interface of these two organelles.

      The EM data were analysed blinded to the genotypes. This is noted in the methods section.

      3) There is a controversy in the field on the role of PDZD8: some papers show its involvement in ER-mitochondria contacts, others in ER-lysosome contacts. The authors should discuss this point in more details. Moreover, the authors should localize the protein in Drosophila neurons; is the protein associated with mitochondria or endo/lysosomes?

      We recognize that there is some debate in the field over the localization and role of PDZD8. However, since there is currently no antibody against the Drosophila protein and the sequence is sufficiently divergent such that antibodies against the mammalian protein will not recognize the fly protein, we are not well-positioned to determine the localization of Drosophila pdzd8. Consequently, we will expand our discussion to reflect the differing views.

      We can offer instead to quantify the localization of mouse PDZD8 in our newly generated NIH-3T3 Pdzd8-Halo knock in line to help resolve the controversy regarding the location(s) and function(s) of mammalian Pdzd8.

      4) The authors should specify in more details how the different quantifications were performed. For instance Fig 1G: how many samples were quantified (i.e. how many flies, and how many neurons); what is compared? Fields-of-view, neurons, flies...?

      Further details have been added to the figure legends 1G (now H), 4I, 5 and Fig S2.

      **Minor point:**

      1)Could the authors show the SIM images Fig1F together with the binarized images.

      These images have been added to Figure 1 and the legend and text updated accordingly.

      2) It is surprising to see that data otherwise similar are represented with so many different types of graph (For instance Fig 5, bar graph, box-plot, violin plot). Why individual data points are not always present on the graphs?

      The graphs will be redrawn using more consistent representations once the data for the revisions has been gathered.

      3) The way that data are presented is sometimes odd: for instance, line 101, the authors wrote "To establish that MERCs were decreased...". This would imply that they knew the result before performing the experiment. And later, line 103 "Accordingly...".

      These sentences have been rephrased “To determine whether MERCs were decreased..” and “These results showed the…”

      Reviewer #3 (Significance (Required)):

      This study about the role of pdzd8 is timely. The functional description of inter-organelle contacts is a hot topic in cell biology. There are several recent reports describing the identification of pdzd8 role in inter-organelle contact formation. This manuscript provides data on the role of pdzd8 in a whole organism and expands our understanding of this protein.

      My expertise: inter-organelle contacts (human cells)

    1. Reviewer #1:

      The manuscript entitled "An evolutionary model identifies the main selective pressures for the evolution of genome-replication profiles" is an examination of the principles shaping evolution of replication origin placement. Overall I found the manuscript to be engaging and interesting, and the topic of general importance. It is quite compelling that with just two parameters, origin efficiency and distance between origins, a good model can be built to describe the dynamics of origin birth and death. While this work on its own is sufficiently important for publication, it would be very interesting to see whether the model can be updated in the future to address whether there are fork-stalling or origin-generating mechanisms that shape evolution of specific inter-origin spaces. This work provides a very good foundation for such efforts.

      I have a few major, general concerns I would like the authors to address.

      If I'm interpreting the methods correctly, it seems the parameters used in these simulations, such as mean birth rate, mean death rate, gamma, and beta, were fit to the data once, and used as point estimates during simulation. If true, I expect the simulations to be yielding estimates of birth and death rates with a much narrower distribution of outcomes than is likely to be realistic given what an appropriate level of confidence in those parameter estimates would be. Could the parameters be fit to data in such a way that we attain an estimate of confidence in the parameter values, from which a distribution could be generated and sampled from during simulation?

      Closely related to my prior concern, I would like the authors to demonstrate the general predictive value of their model on out-of-sample data. Can the model be applied to other data on replication timing? Without such an attempt to demonstrate the model's applicability to out-of-sample prediction, the reader cannot ascertain whether the model is overfit to the Lachancea data from Agier et al, 2018. Also, keeps the parameter estimates here from being overfit to better predict origin birth and death events in closely related branches of the Lachancea tree in Figure S1? Are gamma and beta inferred in a way that accounts for the higher correlation in birth and death events in closer-related branches than in distal branches, or has the fit ignored those correlations?

      The authors state that their model identifies selective pressures. The authors imply, and specifically state in lines 238-242, that increased death rate of origins which happen to be nearby highly efficient origins represents selective pressure against the less efficient origins. It isn't until the discussion that the authors raise the possibility that there may simply be a lack of selective pressure to retain inefficient origins that are near highly efficient origins. In my view, it's more likely that selection for the existence of an inefficient origin is simply lower than the drift barrier, so mutagenesis and drift can passively remove such origins over time without the need to invoke selection against inefficient origins.

      Figure 3 is intended to show that the stall-aversion and interference model performs better at predicting correlations between efficiency of lost origins and their nearest neighbor. I agree, but I do not think Figure 3 presents a strong case for this conclusion. Fig S6 presents stronger evidence to me. While fig 3 does qualitatively suggest that the joint model may predict the correlation between neighboring origin efficiency and origin loss better than the double-stall model alone, it almost appears to me that the model with fork stalling and interference has significantly overestimated the correlation. Is there a quantitative way, perhaps using information criteria, though I admittedly am not sure how one would go about doing that with simulations such as these, to demonstrate that the model with both effects has better predictive value than the one with only fork stalling?

      There are a couple of assumptions of the model that I would like the authors to examine in further detail. First, that origin birth events occur in the middle of an inter-origin space. I am not aware of evidence pointing to this being a good a priori assumption. Can you re-run the simulations, allowing origins to arise at a random site within the inter-origin space into which it is born? Second, is it reasonable to expect origin firing rates to reshuffle to a new value randomly, without any dependence on their prior rate? Perhaps I'm mistaken, but it seems to me that an origin's firing rate should evolve more gradually, and should have a higher probability of sampling from values near its current value than from values very far from its current value.

    1. Ah, the old advertising games... It's kind of hard to explain for new generation of players, but back in the days we had games fully dedicated to certain brands. And they wanted us to pay for them. Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about games like Zool and Biker Mice from Mars that used to include excessive product placement. Even some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games had it. I'm talking about games that were created solely to promote a certain brand. Like Pepsiman, where we played as that weird Pepsi mascot, or Avoid the Noid with the scary bunny-like... creature from Domino's (there was actually another game about him, but it was just a “hack” of somewhat popular Famicom game Kamen no Ninja: Hanamaru). Like I've said, it's kind of hard to explain, but back in the days, kids were less sarcastic, while Ads were... well, a bit more than just Ads.With no Internet, with TV being way more than it's today and with way, WAY less rules applied (because SEGA does what Nintendon't), Ads were more than just that annoying thing that interrupts Rhett and Link on YouTube. Those were almost art on their own. And the perfect scenario for a brand was to create the mascots so cool that everybody would want to buy merchandise with it. I mean, aside from the main product. Like, everybody loves Cap'n Crunch (huge fan here). But would you also pay for a PEZ dispenser with the man? Would you like a T-shirt? That's how it worked back in the days. And with video games starting to recover from large-scale recession of early 80s, when crappy products like Pepsi Invaders almost killed the entire market, we've got ourselves advertising games... that were actually quite good.Believe it, or not, but the games about 7-Up's Spot, Cheetos' Chester Cheetah and even McDonald's Ronald McDonald were actually pretty solid. And sometimes there were even games that tried to achieve more than that. From a fourth generation platformer with kickass soundtrack called Global Gladiators that used to include McDonald's kids Mick and Mack (previously included in the game called MC Kids, which wasn't as good) to a weird 3D action game called Darkened Skye, which featured magic system based on Skittles. Let's just say that advertising games were not as simple as you may think. And this one? Not only it's my most favorite game of the kind, it's, like, one of my most favorite puzzle games... ever. Together with The Incredible Machines, Supaplex and so on. It's that good.First of all, Pushover is a game that was made to promote a popular British snack Quavers (they're so curly!). Quavers are the curly potato puffs and their mascot, Colin Curly... just lost all of them. So, as Colin's ant friend, we need to go down through the ant hill to some caves (because reasons) and get them back. That's pretty much all the background we've got here. Nothing big, nothing really interesting, but... it doesn't matter. Like... at all. The thing is – Pushover is an action puzzle game, the story doesn't really matter in that genre, while gameplay-wise... well, like I've said, this game is totally awesome.Long story short, Pushover is all about the domino effect. You push (hence the title) one block and watch the others falling. Naturally, your goal is to drop all the blocks on level during the limited amount of time. After that, you'll be able to exit the current level and get the password for the next one. Which will be very useful, since the game comes with the whooping 100 levels, some of which will be pretty tricky. Sounds pretty dull, though, can't argue with that. I mean, who cares about domino, right? Pushing blocks on 100 levels... sounds boring, right? But it's not that simple.See, there are ten different types of blocks in this game. All with their own unique properties. And trying to figure out how to drop all blocks on the levels with just a couple of pushes? It's just fun. Very, very fun. So fun that I actually love this game more than Lemmings. And everybody knows just how fun Lemmings game is. Pushover is just... well, it's hard to explain, but it's one of those games, which just “click”. It's one of those games, in which “stars” aligned perfectly. Controls are simple enough, the puzzles are very interesting and tricky (but not too tricky to make you feel bad), the graphics is very cute, the sound has that awesome “Sound Blaster” feeling... Pushover is just one of those games that you can't stop playing. 28 years later? I still can't get enough of it. And it's not just me. Even though the game was ported to quite a lot of systems (there was even SNES version with all Quavers Ads completely removed), there was a fan-made remake released in 2006. Guess, it says something.What we have here is a 100% original (not remade) DOS version (runs through DOSBox), but guess what? No complains here. Even though very often Amiga versions had better music, Pushover was not one of such games (I totally prefer the DOS sound), while all “big three” versions (Amiga, Atari ST and DOS) look almost identical and I'm not a big fan of those “filters” from fan-made remake. I mean... it's pretty cool version and stuff, but... there's nothing like the original.So, yeah. I can't recommend this game enough. Pushover is charming, cute, smart and extremely addicting puzzle game from early nineties. You like games like Lemmings, Bomberman, Wrecking Crew and so on? You should totally check this one out. Like the original Goonies (which also got fan-made remake, by the way), this game is a forgotten gem from the past. It's in my Steam favorites and it'll stay there forever. I love it that much. Dixi.
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} } @media screen and (min-width: 640px) { .rad-cover .rad-header-wrapper { margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; } } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-cover .rad-header-wrapper { max-width: 900px; margin-bottom: 36px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) and screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-cover .rad-header-wrapper { margin-bottom: 45px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) and screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-cover .rad-header-wrapper { margin-bottom: 45px; } } .rad-cover .rad-headline, .rad-cover .rad-summary, .rad-cover .rad-byline-pubdate { font-family: "nyt-mag-sans", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; } .rad-cover .rad-headline, .rad-cover .rad-summary, .rad-cover .rad-byline-pubdate, .rad-cover .rad-translation-links { margin-bottom: 12px; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-cover .rad-headline, .rad-cover .rad-summary, .rad-cover .rad-byline-pubdate, .rad-cover .rad-translation-links { margin-bottom: 15px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-cover .rad-headline, .rad-cover .rad-summary, .rad-cover .rad-byline-pubdate, .rad-cover .rad-translation-links { margin-bottom: 15px; } } .rad-cover .rad-headline { font-family: "nyt-mag-slab", georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-weight: 200; font-size: 34px; line-height: .95; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; -webkit-font-feature-settings: "kern"; -moz-font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; -webkit-font-smoothing: auto; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-cover .rad-headline { font-size: 5vmax; line-height: .95; padding: 0; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; -webkit-font-feature-settings: "kern"; -moz-font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1080px) { .rad-cover .rad-headline { font-size: 4vw; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1200px) { .rad-cover .rad-headline { font-size: 52px; } } .rad-cover .rad-summary { display: block; font-size: 18px; color: #333333; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; -webkit-font-feature-settings: "kern"; -moz-font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; } .rad-cover .rad-byline-pubdate { font-size: 11px; } .rad-cover .rad-byline { font-weight: bold; margin-right: 12px; } .rad-cover .rad-pubdate { font-weight: 300; } .rad-cover .rad-byline a:link, .rad-cover .rad-byline a:visited { color: #333333; } .rad-cover .rad-social:last-child:after, .rad-cover .rad-translation-links:last-child:after, .rad-cover .rad-byline-pubdate:last-child:after { display: block; content: ' '; height: 1px; background: #e2e2e2; margin: 25px 0; width: 100px; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-cover .rad-social:last-child:after, .rad-cover .rad-translation-links:last-child:after, .rad-cover .rad-byline-pubdate:last-child:after { display: none; } } @supports (filter: blur(10px)) { .rad-cover .rad-lqip { filter: blur(100px); opacity: 1; } } .rad-translation-links { display: block; margin: 0 0 24px; max-width: 600px; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-translation-links { text-align: center; margin: 15px auto 0; } } .rad-translation-links a { display: block; text-align: left; font: 500 14px/1.4 "nyt-franklin", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; text-decoration: none; margin-right: 30px; margin-bottom: 9px; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; } .rad-translation-links a:last-of-type { margin-bottom: 0; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-translation-links a { display: inline-block; margin-bottom: 0; margin-right: 31px; position: relative; } .rad-translation-links a:after { content: ""; border-right: 1px #e2e2e2 solid; width: 1px; height: 30px; position: absolute; right: -16px; top: -5px; } .rad-translation-links a:last-child { margin-right: 0; } .rad-translation-links a:last-child:after { display: none; } .rad-translation-links a:hover { border-bottom: 1px solid #6188a6; } } .rad-cover.full-bleed, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover { display: block; } .rad-cover.full-bleed figure.media, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover figure.media { max-width: 100%; } .rad-cover.full-bleed figure.media .image, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover figure.media .image, .rad-cover.full-bleed figure.media .rad-video-wrapper, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover figure.media .rad-video-wrapper { height: 100vw; } .rad-cover.full-bleed figure.media .image img, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover figure.media .image img, .rad-cover.full-bleed figure.media .rad-video-wrapper img, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover figure.media .rad-video-wrapper img, .rad-cover.full-bleed figure.media .image video, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover figure.media .image video, .rad-cover.full-bleed figure.media .rad-video-wrapper video, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover figure.media .rad-video-wrapper video { -o-object-fit: cover; object-fit: cover; width: 100%; height: 100%; } .rad-cover.full-bleed figure.media .image video, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover figure.media .image video, .rad-cover.full-bleed figure.media .rad-video-wrapper video, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover figure.media .rad-video-wrapper video, .rad-cover.full-bleed figure.media .image .rad-vhs-video, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover figure.media .image .rad-vhs-video, .rad-cover.full-bleed figure.media .rad-video-wrapper .rad-vhs-video, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover figure.media .rad-video-wrapper .rad-vhs-video { -o-object-position: inherit; object-position: inherit; } .rad-cover.full-bleed .rad-header, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover .rad-header { display: block; } @media screen and (min-width: 1020px) { .rad-cover.full-bleed, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover { height: 100vh; padding-top: 0; margin-bottom: 120px; } .rad-cover.full-bleed .rad-header, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover .rad-header { position: absolute; left: 0; bottom: 0; padding: 50px; color: black; background: transparent; text-align: left; margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; box-sizing: border-box; } .rad-cover.full-bleed .rad-header.header-white, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover .rad-header.header-white { color: #ffffff; } .rad-cover.full-bleed .rad-header.has-gradient, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover .rad-header.has-gradient { background-image: linear-gradient(0, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.25), transparent); } .rad-cover.full-bleed .rad-header-wrapper, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover .rad-header-wrapper { margin: 0; padding: 0; text-align: left; } .rad-cover.full-bleed figure.media .rad-video-wrapper, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover figure.media .rad-video-wrapper, .rad-cover.full-bleed figure.media .image, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover figure.media .image { height: 100vh; width: 100%; } .rad-cover.full-bleed .media.photo .rad-caption, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover .media.photo .rad-caption { max-width: calc(100% - 100px); margin: 5px auto 0; } .rad-cover.full-bleed .media.photo .rad-caption .rad-caption-wrapper, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover .media.photo .rad-caption .rad-caption-wrapper { margin: 0; padding: 0; } .rad-cover.full-bleed .rad-headline, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover .rad-headline, .rad-cover.full-bleed .rad-summary, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover .rad-summary, .rad-cover.full-bleed .rad-byline-pubdate, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover .rad-byline-pubdate { text-align: left; margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; } .rad-cover.full-bleed .rad-summary, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover .rad-summary { color: inherit; margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0; } .rad-cover.full-bleed .rad-byline a:link, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover .rad-byline a:link, .rad-cover.full-bleed .rad-byline a:visited, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover .rad-byline a:visited { color: inherit; } .rad-cover.full-bleed .rad-social .sharetools-menu, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover .rad-social .sharetools-menu { margin-bottom: 0; } .rad-cover.full-bleed .rad-translation-links, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover .rad-translation-links { text-align: left; margin: 15px 0 0; } .rad-cover.full-bleed .rad-translation-links a, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover .rad-translation-links a { color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.8); } .rad-cover.full-bleed .rad-translation-links a:after, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover .rad-translation-links a:after { height: 20px; top: 0; opacity: 0.5; } .rad-cover.full-bleed .rad-translation-links a:hover, .rad-cover.full-bleed-cover .rad-translation-links a:hover { border-bottom: 1px solid rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.8); } } .rad-cover.headline-image-topper { -ms-flex-direction: column; flex-direction: column; } .rad-cover.headline-image-topper figure.media .image, .rad-cover.headline-image-topper figure.media .video-wrapper { height: 100vw; } .rad-cover.headline-image-topper figure.media.photo img { max-width: none; position: absolute; top: 0; width: 100vw; } @media screen and (min-width: 960px) { .rad-cover.headline-image-topper { -ms-flex-direction: row; flex-direction: row; -ms-flex-align: center; align-items: center; height: 100vh; padding-top: 0; border-bottom: 1px solid #e2e2e2; margin-bottom: 150px; } .rad-cover.headline-image-topper figure.media { padding-bottom: 0; } .rad-cover.headline-image-topper figure.media .image, .rad-cover.headline-image-topper figure.media .video-wrapper { width: 50vw; height: 100vh; overflow: hidden; } .rad-cover.headline-image-topper figure.media .image img, .rad-cover.headline-image-topper figure.media .video-wrapper img, .rad-cover.headline-image-topper figure.media .image video, .rad-cover.headline-image-topper figure.media .video-wrapper video { -o-object-fit: cover; object-fit: cover; width: 100%; height: 100%; } .rad-cover.headline-image-topper figure.media.photo img:not(.ll-loaded) { width: 100vw; } .rad-cover.headline-image-topper figure.media.photo .rad-caption-wrapper { position: absolute; top: 100%; left: 0; width: 50vw; max-width: 600px; padding: 5px; } .rad-cover.headline-image-topper .rad-header-wrapper { padding: 40px; } .rad-cover.headline-image-topper .story-meta { padding: 30px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 960px) { .has-headline-image-topper #masthead:not(.in-content) { width: 50%; margin-left: 50%; } .has-headline-image-topper #masthead:not(.in-content) .button-text, .has-headline-image-topper #masthead:not(.in-content) .sharetool-text { display: none; } } .rad-story-body .header, .rad-story-body .blockquote, .rad-story-body .paragraph { max-width: 600px; margin-left: 20px; margin-right: 20px; box-sizing: border-box; } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-story-body .header, .rad-story-body .blockquote, .rad-story-body .paragraph { max-width: 630px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 640px) { .rad-story-body .header, .rad-story-body .blockquote, .rad-story-body .paragraph { margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; } } .rad-story-body .header { font-family: "nyt-mag-sans", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 24px; padding-top: 36px; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-story-body .header { margin-bottom: 30px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-story-body .header { margin-bottom: 30px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-story-body .header { padding-top: 45px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-story-body .header { padding-top: 45px; } } .rad-story-body blockquote.blockquote { font-family: "imperial-normal-500", georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 12px; border-left: 1px solid #e2e2e2; padding-left: 1em; padding-right: 1em; color: #666666; margin-top: 12px; margin-bottom: 24px; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-story-body blockquote.blockquote { font-size: 20px; line-height: 30px; margin-bottom: 15px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-story-body blockquote.blockquote { font-size: 20px; line-height: 30px; margin-bottom: 15px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-story-body blockquote.blockquote { margin-top: 15px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-story-body blockquote.blockquote { margin-top: 15px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-story-body blockquote.blockquote { margin-bottom: 30px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-story-body blockquote.blockquote { margin-bottom: 30px; } } .rad-story-body blockquote.blockquote p { font-family: "imperial-normal-500", georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 12px; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-story-body blockquote.blockquote p { font-size: 20px; line-height: 30px; margin-bottom: 15px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-story-body blockquote.blockquote p { font-size: 20px; line-height: 30px; margin-bottom: 15px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-story-body blockquote.blockquote p { margin-bottom: 15px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-story-body blockquote.blockquote p { margin-bottom: 15px; } } .rad-story-body blockquote.blockquote p::last-child { margin-bottom: 0; } .rad-story-body h3.header { font-size: 32px; font-weight: 300; line-height: 1.1; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-story-body h3.header { font-weight: 100; font-size: 42px; } } .rad-story-body h4.header { font-size: 24px; font-weight: 500; line-height: 1.1; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-story-body h4.header { font-size: 28px; } } .rad-story-body h5.header { font-size: 18px; font-weight: 700; line-height: 1.1; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-story-body h5.header { font-size: 24px; } } .rad-story-body h6.header-label { font-family: "nyt-franklin", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; text-transform: uppercase; letter-spacing: 0.1rem; font-size: 15px; font-weight: 700; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-story-body h6.header-label { font-size: 18px; } } .rad-story-body .rule--story { max-width: 600px; margin-left: 20px; margin-right: 20px; border: none; border-top: 1px solid #e2e2e2; margin-top: 36px; max-width: 300px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-story-body .rule--story { max-width: 630px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 640px) { .rad-story-body .rule--story { margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; } } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-story-body .rule--story { margin-top: 45px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-story-body .rule--story { margin-top: 45px; } } .rad-story-body .rule--story + p.paragraph { margin-top: 36px; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-story-body .rule--story + p.paragraph { margin-top: 45px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-story-body .rule--story + p.paragraph { margin-top: 45px; } } .rad-story-body p.paragraph { font-family: "imperial-normal-500", georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px; margin-bottom: 12px; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-story-body p.paragraph { font-size: 20px; line-height: 30px; margin-bottom: 15px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-story-body p.paragraph { font-size: 20px; line-height: 30px; margin-bottom: 15px; } } .rad-story-body p.paragraph:last-child { margin-bottom: 36px; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-story-body p.paragraph:last-child { margin-bottom: 45px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-story-body p.paragraph:last-child { margin-bottom: 45px; } } .rad-story-body p.paragraph strong, .rad-story-body p.paragraph b { font-family: "nyt-mag-sans", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: bold; font-size: 95%; } .rad-story-body p.paragraph a { color: #326891; position: relative; text-shadow: 3px 1px 0 #ffffff, -3px 1px 0 #ffffff, 0 1px 0 #ffffff; background-image: linear-gradient(to bottom, rgba(50, 104, 145, 0) 50%, rgba(50, 104, 145, 0.4) 50%); background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; background-position: 0 calc(100% - 1px); text-decoration: none; } .rad-story-body p.paragraph a:hover { text-shadow: 3px 1px 0 #ffffff, -3px 1px 0 #ffffff, 0 1px 0 #ffffff; text-decoration: none; background-image: linear-gradient(to bottom, rgba(50, 104, 145, 0) 50%, #326891 50%); } .rad-story-body p.paragraph a:active { top: 1px; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-story-body p.paragraph a { background-position: 0 calc(100% - 1px); } .rad-story-body p.paragraph a:hover { text-shadow: 3px 1px 0 #ffffff, -3px 1px 0 #ffffff, 0 1px 0 #ffffff, 4px 1px 0 #ffffff, -4px 1px 0 #ffffff; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-story-body p.paragraph a { background-position: 0 calc(100% - 1px); } .rad-story-body p.paragraph a:hover { text-shadow: 3px 2px 0 #ffffff, -3px 2px 0 #ffffff, 0 2px 0 #ffffff, 4px 2px 0 #ffffff, -4px 2px 0 #ffffff; } } .rad-story-body p.paragraph.paragraph-detail { font-family: "nyt-franklin", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; color: #999999; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-story-body p.paragraph.paragraph-detail { font-size: 16px; } } .rad-story-body p.paragraph.paragraph-summary { font-family: "nyt-franklin", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-story-body p.paragraph.paragraph-summary { font-size: 21px; } } .section-magazine .d-pullquote-wrapper .d-pullquote, .d-pullquote { padding: 0 !important; } .section-magazine .d-pullquote-wrapper .d-pullquote p, .d-pullquote p { text-align: left !important; font-family: "nyt-mag-slab", georgia, "times new roman", times, serif !important; font-size: 32px !important; line-height: 1 !important; } .rad-interactive .rad-interactive-wrapper { border-top: none !important; border-bottom: none !important; } .rad-story-body .dropcap { float: left; display: block; position: relative; font-family: "nyt-mag-slab", georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-weight: 200; font-size: 3.2rem; line-height: 1; height: auto; margin-right: 34px; margin-top: 3px; overflow: hidden; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-story-body .dropcap { font-weight: 100; height: auto; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; } } .rad-lead-in { font-family: "nyt-cheltenham-sh", georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; text-transform: uppercase; letter-spacing: 0.05em; font-weight: 600; font-size: 90%; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; -webkit-font-feature-settings: "kern"; -moz-font-feature-settings: "kern"; font-feature-settings: "kern"; } .rad-corrections { max-width: 600px; margin-left: 20px; margin-right: 20px; } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-corrections { max-width: 630px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 640px) { .rad-corrections { margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; } } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-corrections { padding: 0; } .rad-corrections:before { width: 100px; } } .rad-corrections p { font-family: "imperial-normal-500", georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 24px; } .rad-corrections p { font-style: italic; } .rad-corrections h5 { font-size: 15px; font-family: "nyt-franklin", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: 400; color: #cccccc; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-top: 2em; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-corrections h5 { font-size: 15px; } } .rad-corrections h5 strong { font-weight: bold; color: #000000; padding-right: 10px; } .rad-article-credits, .interactive-credit { max-width: 600px; margin-left: 20px; margin-right: 20px; } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-article-credits, .interactive-credit { max-width: 630px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 640px) { .rad-article-credits, .interactive-credit { margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; } } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-article-credits, .interactive-credit { padding: 0; } .rad-article-credits:before, .interactive-credit:before { width: 100px; } } .rad-article-credits p, .interactive-credit p { color: #999999; font-family: "nyt-mag-sans", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px; line-height: 1.3; } .rad-article-credits:before { display: block; content: ' '; width: 100px; height: 1px; background-color: #e2e2e2; margin-top: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px; } .media.audio, .media.photo, .media.video { margin: 0 auto; padding-bottom: 24px; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .media.audio, .media.photo, .media.video { padding-bottom: 30px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .media.audio, .media.photo, .media.video { padding-bottom: 30px; } } .media.audio .rad-media-wrapper, .media.photo .rad-media-wrapper, .media.video .rad-media-wrapper { padding: 0 20px; } .full_bleed.media.audio .rad-media-wrapper, .full_bleed.media.photo .rad-media-wrapper, .full_bleed.media.video .rad-media-wrapper, .jumbo.media.audio .rad-media-wrapper, .jumbo.media.photo .rad-media-wrapper, .jumbo.media.video .rad-media-wrapper { padding: 0; } @media screen and (min-width: 600px) { .media.audio .rad-media-wrapper, .media.photo .rad-media-wrapper, .media.video .rad-media-wrapper { padding: 0; } } .media.audio .image, .media.photo .image, .media.video .image { padding: 0; margin-bottom: 0; overflow: hidden; box-sizing: border-box; } .media.audio.large, .media.photo.large, .media.video.large { max-width: 600px; } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .media.audio.large, .media.photo.large, .media.video.large { max-width: 630px; } } .media.audio.jumbo, .media.photo.jumbo, .media.video.jumbo { max-width: 1070px; } .media.audio.full_bleed, .media.photo.full_bleed, .media.video.full_bleed { max-width: 1400px; } .media.audio.jumbo .rad-caption-wrapper, .media.photo.jumbo .rad-caption-wrapper, .media.video.jumbo .rad-caption-wrapper { padding-left: 20px; padding-right: 20px; margin-left: 0; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .media.audio.jumbo .rad-caption-wrapper, .media.photo.jumbo .rad-caption-wrapper, .media.video.jumbo .rad-caption-wrapper { max-width: 600px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .media.audio.jumbo .rad-caption-wrapper, .media.photo.jumbo .rad-caption-wrapper, .media.video.jumbo .rad-caption-wrapper { padding-left: 0; max-width: 630px; } } .media.audio.full_bleed .rad-caption-wrapper, .media.photo.full_bleed .rad-caption-wrapper, .media.video.full_bleed .rad-caption-wrapper { padding-left: 20px; padding-right: 20px; margin-left: 0; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .media.audio.full_bleed .rad-caption-wrapper, .media.photo.full_bleed .rad-caption-wrapper, .media.video.full_bleed .rad-caption-wrapper { max-width: 600px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .media.audio.full_bleed .rad-caption-wrapper, .media.photo.full_bleed .rad-caption-wrapper, .media.video.full_bleed .rad-caption-wrapper { max-width: 630px; } } .paragraph + .media.audio, .paragraph + .media.photo, .paragraph + .media.video { margin-top: 24px; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .paragraph + .media.audio, .paragraph + .media.photo, .paragraph + .media.video { margin-top: 30px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .paragraph + .media.audio, .paragraph + .media.photo, .paragraph + .media.video { margin-top: 30px; } } .media.audio .rad-caption-wrapper, .media.photo .rad-caption-wrapper, .media.video .rad-caption-wrapper { display: block; margin: 0 auto; padding: 5px 0 0; max-width: 600px; } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .media.audio .rad-caption-wrapper, .media.photo .rad-caption-wrapper, .media.video .rad-caption-wrapper { max-width: 630px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 600px) { .small.media.audio .rad-caption-wrapper, .small.media.photo .rad-caption-wrapper, .small.media.video .rad-caption-wrapper { padding-right: 0; padding-left: 0; } } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .full_bleed.media.audio .rad-caption-wrapper, .full_bleed.media.photo .rad-caption-wrapper, .full_bleed.media.video .rad-caption-wrapper, .jumbo.media.audio .rad-caption-wrapper, .jumbo.media.photo .rad-caption-wrapper, .jumbo.media.video .rad-caption-wrapper, .large.media.audio .rad-caption-wrapper, .large.media.photo .rad-caption-wrapper, .large.media.video .rad-caption-wrapper { box-sizing: border-box; } } .media.audio .rad-caption-text, .media.photo .rad-caption-text, .media.video .rad-caption-text { font-family: "nyt-mag-sans", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; color: #666666; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 8.5px; } .media.audio .rad-credit, .media.photo .rad-credit, .media.video .rad-credit { clear: both; font-family: "nyt-mag-sans", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; color: #999999; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 8.5px; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .media.audio .rad-credit, .media.photo .rad-credit, .media.video .rad-credit { padding: 0; } } .full_bleed.media.audio .rad-credit, .full_bleed.media.photo .rad-credit, .full_bleed.media.video .rad-credit, .jumbo .media.audio .rad-credit, .jumbo .media.photo .rad-credit, .jumbo .media.video .rad-credit { padding-right: 3px; } .image img.rad-lazy { width: 100%; opacity: 0.3; transition: opacity 0.5s; margin-bottom: 0; height: 0; } .image img.rad-lazy.ll-loaded { height: auto; opacity: 1; z-index: 3; position: relative; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .media.video.small .rad-caption-wrapper { box-sizing: border-box; padding-right: 200px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .media.video.jumbo .rad-caption-wrapper { padding-left: 20px; } } .media.photo.small { margin: 0 auto; margin-top: 24px; margin-bottom: 24px; padding: 0; position: relative; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .media.photo.small { margin-top: 30px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .media.photo.small { margin-top: 30px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .media.photo.small { margin-bottom: 30px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .media.photo.small { margin-bottom: 30px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 600px) { .media.photo.small { margin: 0 auto; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1005px) { .media.photo.small { max-width: 1070px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1335px) { .media.photo.small { max-width: 600px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 600px) { .media.photo.small .rad-media-wrapper, .media.photo.small .rad-interactive-wrapper { width: 33.33333333%; position: relative; float: right; margin: 7px 20px 20px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 960px) { .media.photo.small .rad-media-wrapper, .media.photo.small .rad-interactive-wrapper { width: 300px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1335px) { .media.photo.small .rad-media-wrapper, .media.photo.small .rad-interactive-wrapper { width: 50%; margin: 0 calc(-50% - 2em) 2rem 2rem; } } .rad-diptych { max-width: 1110px; margin-left: 20px; margin-right: 20px; margin-bottom: 0; padding-top: 24px; overflow: hidden; clear: both; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-diptych { padding-top: 30px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-diptych { padding-top: 30px; } } .rad-diptych .media.video .rad-media-wrapper, .rad-diptych .media.photo .rad-media-wrapper { padding: 0; } .rad-diptych .media.photo, .rad-diptych .media.video { max-width: 100%; } .rad-diptych .media.photo .rad-caption-text, .rad-diptych .media.video .rad-caption-text, .rad-diptych .media.photo .rad-credit, .rad-diptych .media.video .rad-credit { padding-left: 0; padding-right: 0; } .rad-diptych .media.video .rad-caption .rad-caption-wrapper, .rad-diptych .media.photo .rad-caption .rad-caption-wrapper { padding: 5px 0 0; max-width: 600px; margin: 0; } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-diptych .media.video .rad-caption .rad-caption-wrapper, .rad-diptych .media.photo .rad-caption .rad-caption-wrapper { max-width: 630px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-diptych { margin: 0 auto; margin-top: 24px; } .rad-diptych .media.photo.small, .rad-diptych .media.photo.large, .rad-diptych .media.video.small, .rad-diptych .media.video.large { width: 50%; box-sizing: border-box; float: left; margin: 0; margin-bottom: 36px; padding: 0 10px 0 20px; } .rad-diptych .media.photo.small .rad-media-wrapper, .rad-diptych .media.photo.large .rad-media-wrapper, .rad-diptych .media.video.small .rad-media-wrapper, .rad-diptych .media.video.large .rad-media-wrapper { width: 100% !important; margin: 0 !important; } .rad-diptych .media.photo.small + .photo.small, .rad-diptych .media.photo.large + .photo.small, .rad-diptych .media.video.small + .photo.small, .rad-diptych .media.video.large + .photo.small, .rad-diptych .media.photo.small + .photo.large, .rad-diptych .media.photo.large + .photo.large, .rad-diptych .media.video.small + .photo.large, .rad-diptych .media.video.large + .photo.large, .rad-diptych .media.photo.small + .video.small, .rad-diptych .media.photo.large + .video.small, .rad-diptych .media.video.small + .video.small, .rad-diptych .media.video.large + .video.small, .rad-diptych .media.photo.small + .video.large, .rad-diptych .media.photo.large + .video.large, .rad-diptych .media.video.small + .video.large, .rad-diptych .media.video.large + .video.large { padding-left: 10px; float: right; padding-right: 20px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) and screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-diptych { margin-top: 30px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) and screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-diptych { margin-top: 30px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) and screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-diptych .media.photo.small, .rad-diptych .media.photo.large, .rad-diptych .media.video.small, .rad-diptych .media.video.large { margin-bottom: 45px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) and screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-diptych .media.photo.small, .rad-diptych .media.photo.large, .rad-diptych .media.video.small, .rad-diptych .media.video.large { margin-bottom: 45px; } } .media.video { margin: 0 auto; padding-bottom: 24px; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .media.video { padding-bottom: 30px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .media.video { padding-bottom: 30px; } } .media.video.small { max-width: 600px; } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .media.video.small { max-width: 630px; } } .media.video.large { max-width: 1070px; } .media.video.jumbo { max-width: 1400px; } .media.video.small .rad-caption-wrapper, .media.video.large .rad-caption-wrapper { max-width: 600px; margin-left: 20px; margin-right: 20px; } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .media.video.small .rad-caption-wrapper, .media.video.large .rad-caption-wrapper { max-width: 630px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 640px) { .media.video.small .rad-caption-wrapper, .media.video.large .rad-caption-wrapper { margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; } } .paragraph + .media.video { margin-top: 24px; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .paragraph + .media.video { margin-top: 30px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .paragraph + .media.video { margin-top: 30px; } } .media.video .rad-credit { display: block; margin-top: 0; padding: 0 3px 0 0; } .rad-spinner { position: absolute; top: 50%; left: 50%; z-index: 2; transform: translate3d(-50%, -50%, 0); } .rad-spinner:after { content: ''; display: block; box-sizing: border-box; width: 40px; height: 40px; border-radius: 100%; border: 5px solid rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.2); border-top-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.5); animation: spin 1s infinite linear; } @keyframes spin { 100% { transform: rotate(360deg); } } .media.audio { float: none; margin: 30px auto; padding: 0; max-width: 600px; margin-left: 20px; margin-right: 20px; } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .media.audio { max-width: 630px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 640px) { .media.audio { margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; } } .media.audio .rad-media-wrapper { padding: 0; } .media.audio.small { max-width: 600px; width: 600px; } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .media.audio.small { max-width: 630px; width: 630px; } } .media.audio.large { width: inherit; } .media.audio.jumbo { max-width: 1400px; width: 1400px; } .media.audio.small .rad-caption-wrapper, .media.audio.large .rad-caption-wrapper { max-width: 600px; margin-left: 20px; margin-right: 20px; } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .media.audio.small .rad-caption-wrapper, .media.audio.large .rad-caption-wrapper { max-width: 630px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 640px) { .media.audio.small .rad-caption-wrapper, .media.audio.large .rad-caption-wrapper { margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; } } .rad-interactive { max-width: 2000px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 2px; margin-top: 24px; position: relative; overflow: hidden; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-interactive { margin-top: 30px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-interactive { margin-top: 30px; } } .rad-interactive .rad-interactive-wrapper { padding: 15px 0; border-top: 1px solid #e2e2e2; border-bottom: 1px solid #e2e2e2; margin-bottom: 24px; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-interactive .rad-interactive-wrapper { margin-bottom: 30px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-interactive .rad-interactive-wrapper { margin-bottom: 30px; } } .rad-interactive.small { overflow: visible; margin: 0 auto; margin-top: 24px; margin-bottom: 24px; padding: 0; position: relative; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-interactive.small { margin-top: 30px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-interactive.small { margin-top: 30px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-interactive.small { margin-bottom: 30px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-interactive.small { margin-bottom: 30px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 600px) { .rad-interactive.small { margin: 0 auto; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1005px) { .rad-interactive.small { max-width: 1070px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1335px) { .rad-interactive.small { max-width: 600px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 600px) { .rad-interactive.small .rad-media-wrapper, .rad-interactive.small .rad-interactive-wrapper { width: 33.33333333%; position: relative; float: right; margin: 7px 20px 20px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 960px) { .rad-interactive.small .rad-media-wrapper, .rad-interactive.small .rad-interactive-wrapper { width: 300px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1335px) { .rad-interactive.small .rad-media-wrapper, .rad-interactive.small .rad-interactive-wrapper { width: 50%; margin: 0 calc(-50% - 2em) 2rem 2rem; } } .rad-interactive.large { max-width: 600px; } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-interactive.large { max-width: 630px; } } .rad-interactive.jumbo { max-width: 1070px; } .rad-interactive.full_bleed { margin: 0 auto; max-width: 100%; } .rad-interactive.full_bleed .rad-interactive-wrapper { border: none; padding: 0; } .rad-interactive.small, .rad-interactive.large, .rad-interactive.jumbo { padding: 0 20px; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-interactive.small, .rad-interactive.large, .rad-interactive.jumbo { padding: 0; } } .rad-interactive img { margin-bottom: 0; } .rad-interactive .interactive-summary { font-family: "nyt-cheltenham-sh", georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.4; color: #666666; padding-top: 5px; } .rad-interactive .credit, .rad-interactive .notes, .rad-interactive .source { display: block; padding: 0 3px; margin-top: 5px; margin-bottom: 0; font-family: "nyt-mag-sans", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; color: #999999; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 8.5px; } .rad-interactive + .media.photo { margin-top: 24px; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-interactive + .media.photo { margin-top: 30px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-interactive + .media.photo { margin-top: 30px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-interactive + .media.photo { margin-top: 0; } } .rad-series-box { max-width: 600px; margin-left: 20px; margin-right: 20px; padding-top: 48px; } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-series-box { max-width: 630px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 640px) { .rad-series-box { margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; } } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-series-box { padding-top: 60px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-series-box { padding-top: 60px; } } .rad-series-box h2 { font-weight: 700; font-family: "nyt-franklin", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.1; margin-bottom: 20px; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-series-box h2 { font-size: 17px; } } .rad-series-links { color: #000000; } .rad-series-links .rad-caption { display: none; } .rad-series-links a { color: #000000; display: table; width: 100%; margin-bottom: 1rem; } .rad-series-links a:hover { text-decoration: none; } .has-no-touch .rad-series-links a:hover h3 { border-bottom: 2px solid #cccccc; text-shadow: 0 2px 0 #fff; } .rad-series-links .promo-info, .rad-series-links .promo-image { display: table-cell; vertical-align: middle; } .rad-series-links .promo-info { padding: 0 0 0 20px; } .rad-series-links h3 { display: inline; font-family: "nyt-cheltenham-sh", georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 17px; font-weight: 400; line-height: 1.1; margin-right: 5px; } @media screen and (min-width: 769px) { .rad-series-links h3 { font-family: "nyt-cheltenham", georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-size: 21px; line-height: 1.2; } } .rad-series-links .pubdate { display: inline; color: #cccccc; font-family: "nyt-franklin", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-transform: uppercase; letter-spacing: 0.02em; white-space: nowrap; } .rad-series-links .promo-image { width: 33%; margin: 0; padding: 0; } .rad-series-links .promo-image:empty:after { display: block; content: ' '; width: 100%; padding-bottom: 66.667%; } .rad-series-links .media.photo { margin: 0; padding: 0; } .rad-series-links .media.photo .rad-media-wrapper { margin: 0; padding: 0; } #story { opacity: 1; position: relative; transform: none; transition: all 0.45s ease-in-out; } .rad-fade #story { transform: translateY(0); opacity: 0; } .rad-unload #story { transform: translateY(-60px); } #masthead { position: relative; opacity: 1; transform: translateY(0); transition: transform 0.45s ease-in-out; } .rad-fade #masthead { opacity: 0 !important; transform: translateY(0); transition: opacity 0.45s ease-in-out; } .rad-unload #masthead { opacity: 0; transform: translateY(-60px); transition: all 0.45s ease-in-out; } #related-coverage, .viewport-medium #related-coverage { margin-top: 48px; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { #related-coverage, .viewport-medium #related-coverage { margin-top: 60px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { #related-coverage, .viewport-medium #related-coverage { margin-top: 60px; } } .rad-article + .rad-article { border-top: 2px solid #e2e2e2; transform: translate3d(0, 0, 0); transition: transform 0.4s ease-in; } .rad-article + .rad-article.is-loaded { transform: none; } .rad-article .rad-series-link-wrapper { max-width: 600px; margin-left: 20px; margin-right: 20px; margin-bottom: 5rem; } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-article .rad-series-link-wrapper { max-width: 630px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 640px) { .rad-article .rad-series-link-wrapper { margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; } } .rad-article .rad-series-link { color: #326891; position: relative; text-shadow: 3px 1px 0 #ffffff, -3px 1px 0 #ffffff, 0 1px 0 #ffffff; background-image: linear-gradient(to bottom, rgba(50, 104, 145, 0) 50%, rgba(50, 104, 145, 0.4) 50%); background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 2px 2px; background-position: 0 calc(100% - 1px); text-decoration: none; font-family: "nyt-franklin", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: bold; opacity: 1; transition: opacity 0.4s ease-in; } .rad-article .rad-series-link:hover { text-shadow: 3px 1px 0 #ffffff, -3px 1px 0 #ffffff, 0 1px 0 #ffffff; text-decoration: none; background-image: linear-gradient(to bottom, rgba(50, 104, 145, 0) 50%, #326891 50%); } .rad-article .rad-series-link:active { top: 1px; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-article .rad-series-link { background-position: 0 calc(100% - 1px); } .rad-article .rad-series-link:hover { text-shadow: 3px 1px 0 #ffffff, -3px 1px 0 #ffffff, 0 1px 0 #ffffff, 4px 1px 0 #ffffff, -4px 1px 0 #ffffff; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-article .rad-series-link { background-position: 0 calc(100% - 1px); } .rad-article .rad-series-link:hover { text-shadow: 3px 2px 0 #ffffff, -3px 2px 0 #ffffff, 0 2px 0 #ffffff, 4px 2px 0 #ffffff, -4px 2px 0 #ffffff; } } .rad-article.article-active .rad-series-link, .rad-article.article-loading .rad-series-link { opacity: 0; pointer-events: none; } .rad-article.article-active + .rad-article { transform: translate3d(0, 300px, 0); } .rad-article.article-active.is-loaded + .rad-article { transform: translate3d(0, 0, 0); } .rad-article .rad-story-body-inner { transition: all 0.4s ease-in; opacity: 0; max-height: 0; overflow: hidden; } .rad-article.article-active .rad-story-body-inner { opacity: 1; max-height: 100%; } .rad-article .rad-story-body-mask { display: block; margin-top: -150px; width: 100%; height: 150px; background: linear-gradient(to bottom, rgba(255, 255, 255, 0) 0%, rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.5) 10%, #ffffff 100%); opacity: 1; transition: opacity 0.3s ease-in; position: relative; z-index: 10; } .rad-story-body-mask .rad-spinner:after { border-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2); border-top-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.7); height: 30px; width: 30px; border-width: 3px; box-shadow: 0 0 3px #fff; } .rad-story-body-mask .rad-spinner { opacity: 0; transition: opacity 0.4s ease-in; } .article-loading .rad-story-body-mask .rad-spinner { opacity: 1; } .rad-article.article-active .rad-story-body-mask { pointer-events: none; opacity: 0; } .rad-social .sharetool { display: inline-block; } .rad-social .sharetool a { width: 32px; height: 32px; display: inline-block; padding: 0; border-radius: 20px; color: white !important; line-height: 1.2 !important; background-size: contain; background-repeat: no-repeat; } .rad-social .sharetool a .sharetool-text { visibility: hidden; } .rad-social .sharetool a[data-share="twitter"] { background-image: url('data:image/svg+xml;base64,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'); } .rad-social .sharetool a[data-share="twitter"]:hover { background-image: url('data:image/svg+xml;base64,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'); } .rad-social .sharetool a[data-share="facebook"] { background-image: url('data:image/svg+xml;base64,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'); } .rad-social .sharetool a[data-share="facebook"]:hover { background-image: url('data:image/svg+xml;base64,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'); } .rad-social .sharetool + .sharetool a { margin-left: 5px; } .rad-social .sharetools-menu { margin: 15px 0; } .ad.top-ad { border-color: transparent; } .rad-ad-wrapper { margin: 0 auto; margin-top: 36px; margin-bottom: 48px; text-align: center; background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.05); } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-ad-wrapper { margin-top: 45px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-ad-wrapper { margin-top: 45px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-ad-wrapper { margin-bottom: 60px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1155px) { .rad-ad-wrapper { margin-bottom: 60px; } } .rad-ad-wrapper.has-border { padding: 30px 0; border-color: #e2e2e2; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px 0; } .rad-ad-wrapper .ad { margin: 30px auto 50px; } .rad-ad-wrapper .ad:before { display: block; content: 'Advertisement'; text-transform: uppercase; font-family: "nyt-franklin", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; color: #cccccc; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 0.05em; text-align: center; width: 100%; padding-bottom: 5px; } .rad-ad-wrapper:last-child { border-width: 0; margin: 40px 20px; padding: 30px 0; } @media screen and (min-width: 720px) { .rad-ad-wrapper:last-child { max-width: 705px; margin: 40px auto 0; } } @media screen and (min-width: 960px) { .rad-ad-wrapper:last-child { max-width: 945px; } } .rad-ad-wrapper .rad-ad { display: inline-block; width: 100%; } @media print { * { background: #fff !important; } .quick-navigation, #masthead .story-meta, .user-tools, .search-flyout-panel, .notification-modals, .announcments, #navigation, #mobile-navigation, .rad-ad-wrapper, figure, .rad-interactive, .media.video, .media.photo, #footer, #related-coverage, .visually-hidden, #page-footer li, .ad, .last-nav, .rad-cover-container, .cover-caption, .cover-replay, .nyt-logo, .location-header-wrapper img { display: none !important; } #page-footer ul { list-style: none; margin: 0; padding: 0; } #page-footer nav ul li:first-child { display: block !important; text-align: center; } .masthead { padding-bottom: 0.2in; margin-bottom: 0.2in; margin-top: 45px; position: static !important; } .masthead .branding { float: none !important; display: block !important; height: 20px; margin: 0 auto; text-align: center; } a { color: #000 !important; text-decoration: none !important; } .rad-cover { height: auto !important; margin-bottom: 0 !important; } .rad-cover .story-heading { color: #111 !important; position: static !important; text-align: center !important; margin: 0 !important; } .rad-cover .interactive-header { position: static !important; max-width: 600px; margin: 0 auto !important; } .rad-cover .interactive-header p { position: static !important; max-width: 600px; color: #111 !important; } .rad-cover .interactive-header p br { display: none !important; } } .topnav { position: fixed; height: 50px; top: 0; left: 0; right: 0; transition: top 0.25s ease-in-out, opacity 0s linear 0.25s, background-color 0.25s linear; z-index: 5555; display: -ms-flexbox; display: flex; -ms-flex-pack: justify; justify-content: space-between; } @media screen and (min-width: 1020px) { .topnav { display: block; height: 67px; top: -67px; opacity: 0; background-color: #000; } .topnav path { fill: #fff; } .topnav .toggler { display: none; } } .topnav .toggler { outline: 0; padding: 4px 10px 6px; background: transparent; outline: none; border: 0px; } .topnav .toggler.is-active { transform: rotate(-180deg); } .topnav .toggler img { opacity: 0; width: 14px; margin: 0px; transition: opacity 0.25s linear; } .topnav__wrapper { display: -ms-flexbox; display: flex; width: 100%; } @media screen and (min-width: 1020px) { .topnav__wrapper { width: auto; } } .topnav__contents { position: fixed; height: calc(100vh - 50px); opacity: 0; top: -100vh; left: 0; right: 0; transition: top 0.5s ease-in-out, opacity 0s linear 0.5s; background: #000; overflow-y: auto; -ms-flex: 1; flex: 1; display: -ms-flexbox; display: flex; } .topnav__contents.show-nav { top: 50px; opacity: 1; transition: top 0.5s ease-in-out, opacity 0s linear 0s; } @media screen and (min-width: 1020px) { .topnav__contents.show-nav { top: auto; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1020px) { .topnav__contents { position: relative; top: auto; height: auto; left: auto; right: auto; max-width: calc(100% - 260px); overflow-y: hidden; opacity: 1; } } .topnav--show-nav { top: 0; opacity: 1; background-color: #000; transition: top 0.25s ease-in-out, opacity 0s linear 0s, background-color 0.25s linear 0s; } .topnav--show-nav .toggler img { opacity: 1; } .topnav--show-nav .topnav__kicker span { opacity: 1; } .topnav--show-nav .topnav__kicker path { fill: #fff; } .topnav--show-nav .topnav__kicker span { color: #ff2700; } .topnav__control { display: none; position: absolute; top: 0; bottom: 0; height: 67px; width: 50px; z-index: -1; opacity: 0; -ms-flex-pack: center; justify-content: center; -ms-flex-align: center; align-items: center; background: #000; transition: opacity 0.25s linear; width: 32px; background-position: 50% 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: auto 17px; } @media screen and (min-width: 1020px) { .topnav__control { display: -ms-flexbox; display: flex; } } .topnav__control img { width: 25px; opacity: 0; } .topnav__control--show { z-index: 1; opacity: 1; } .topnav__control--show:hover { opacity: 1; } .topnav__control--prev { left: 260px; background-image: url('data:image/png;base64,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'); } .topnav__control--next { right: 0; width: 32px; background-image: url('data:image/png;base64,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'); background-position: 50% 45%; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: auto 17px; } .topnav__control--next img { opacity: 0; } .topnav__kicker { position: relative; z-index: 2; -ms-flex: 0 0 auto; flex: 0 0 auto; padding: 10px 0 10px 20px; display: -ms-flexbox; display: flex; font-family: "nyt-mag-sans", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.025em; font-size: 13.5px; color: #fff; text-align: left; line-height: 1; box-sizing: border-box; height: 50px; -ms-flex-align: left; align-items: left; -ms-flex-pack: justify; justify-content: space-between; -ms-flex-align: center; align-items: center; width: 100%; } .topnav__kicker span { opacity: 0; transition: opacity 0.25s linear; } .topnav__kicker path { fill: #000; } .topnav__kicker span { color: #000; } .topnav__kicker svg { display: inline-block; max-width: calc(75vw - 100px); margin-right: 15px; } @media screen and (min-width: 1020px) { .topnav__kicker { padding: 10px 20px; width: auto; -ms-flex-align: start; align-items: flex-start; height: 67px; -ms-flex-pack: center; justify-content: center; -ms-flex-direction: column; flex-direction: column; background: #000; } .topnav__kicker span { opacity: 1; } .topnav__kicker path { fill: #fff; } .topnav__kicker svg { margin-right: 0; max-width: 220px; margin-top: -2px; } .topnav__kicker:before { content: ''; display: block; position: absolute; top: 10px; bottom: 10px; right: 0; width: 1px; background: #fff; } } .topnav ul { -ms-flex: 1; flex: 1; display: -ms-flexbox; display: flex; width: auto; position: relative; z-index: 1; -ms-flex-direction: column; flex-direction: column; -ms-flex-align: center; align-items: center; margin: 0; overflow: hidden; } @media screen and (min-width: 1020px) { .topnav ul { margin: 0 32px 0 0; padding-top: 0; -ms-flex-direction: row; flex-direction: row; -ms-flex-align: start; align-items: flex-start; -ms-flex-pack: start; justify-content: flex-start; } } .topnav ul li { display: -ms-flexbox; display: flex; -ms-flex-direction: column; flex-direction: column; -ms-flex-pack: start; justify-content: flex-start; padding: 30px 20px; font-family: "nyt-mag-sans", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5px; color: #fff; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.1; position: relative; border-bottom: 1px solid #5f5f5f; -ms-flex: 0 0 auto; flex: 0 0 auto; letter-spacing: 0.025em; } @media screen and (min-width: 1020px) { .topnav ul li { width: calc(33vw - 92px); } } @media screen and (min-width: 1607px) { .topnav ul li { width: calc(25vw - 72px); } } .topnav ul li:last-of-type { border-bottom: 0; } .topnav ul li a { color: #fff; text-align: center; padding: 0; line-height: 1.55; max-width: 70%; margin: 0 auto; } @media screen and (min-width: 1020px) { .topnav ul li a { line-height: 1.1; padding: 0; text-align: left; max-width: 320px; margin: 0; } } .topnav ul li a:hover { text-decoration: none; } @media screen and (min-width: 1020px) { .topnav ul li { border-bottom: 0; height: 67px; padding: 12px 15px; font-size: 13.5px; } .topnav ul li:before { content: ''; display: block; position: absolute; top: 12px; bottom: 12px; right: 0; width: 1px; background: #fff; } } .topnav ul li:last-of-type:before { display: none; } #masthead { width: 100% !important; margin-left: 0 !important; border-bottom: 0px !important; display: none; } @media screen and (min-width: 1020px) { #masthead { display: block; } } #masthead .branding { display: inline-block; text-align: left !important; top: 5px; display: none; } #masthead .branding .branding-heading { float: left; margin-left: 20px; text-align: left; } #masthead .branding svg path { fill: #fff !important; } @media screen and (min-width: 1020px) { #masthead .branding { box-sizing: border-box; display: -ms-flexbox; display: flex; -ms-flex-pack: justify; justify-content: space-between; -ms-flex-align: center; align-items: center; color: #ff2700; font-family: "nyt-mag-sans", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 0.025em; left: 25px; top: 10px; opacity: 1; } #masthead .branding.vertical { max-width: calc(50vw - 25px); padding-right: 25px; } #masthead .branding.horizontal { width: calc(23.648649vw + 122px); min-width: 460px; } #masthead .branding span { -ms-flex: 0 0 auto; flex: 0 0 auto; } #masthead .branding .branding-heading { float: none; margin-left: 0; -ms-flex: 1; flex: 1; } } #masthead .branding .branding-label { display: none !important; } #masthead.in-content { background: transparent; box-shadow: none; display: none; } #masthead.in-content .container { background: transparent; box-shadow: none; border-bottom: 0; } #masthead.in-content .container .branding { display: none; } #masthead.in-content .container .user-tools { background: transparent; box-shadow: none; opacity: .4; } #masthead.in-content .container .user-tools .save-sharetool { display: none; } @media screen and (min-width: 1020px) { #masthead.in-content { top: 67px; display: block; } } #masthead .container { width: 100% !important; max-width: 100% !important; padding: 2px 60px 0 15px; z-index: 1; box-sizing: border-box; } @media screen and (min-width: 1020px) { #masthead .container { padding-right: 0; padding-top: 0; } } #masthead .container.slug-24mag-mushrooms .branding { top: 5px; } #masthead .container .quick-navigation { display: none !important; } #masthead .container .sharetools-menu > .facebook-sharetool, #masthead .container .sharetools-menu > .twitter-sharetool, #masthead .container .sharetools-menu > .email-sharetool { display: none !important; } #masthead .container .story-meta { display: none !important; } .rad-cover, .rad-cover.full-bleed { height: auto; margin-bottom: 60px; } .rad-cover .rad-header, .rad-cover.full-bleed .rad-header { position: relative; display: block; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "nyt-mag-sans", arial, helvetica, sans-serif; padding: 0; max-width: 600px; margin: 60px auto 0; background: transparent; color: #000; } .rad-cover .rad-header .rad-second-byline, .rad-cover.full-bleed .rad-header .rad-second-byline { display: block; } @media screen and (min-width: 1020px) { .rad-cover, .rad-cover.full-bleed { margin-bottom: 120px; } .rad-cover .rad-header, .rad-cover.full-bleed .rad-header { margin-top: 0; } .rad-cover.vertical, .rad-cover.full-bleed.vertical { background: #000 !important; height: 100vh; } .rad-cover.vertical .rad-header, .rad-cover.full-bleed.vertical .rad-header { position: absolute; color: #fff; padding: 50px; } .rad-cover.vertical .media, .rad-cover.full-bleed.vertical .media { float: right; max-width: 50vw; } .rad-cover.vertical .media .rad-caption, .rad-cover.full-bleed.vertical .media .rad-caption { max-width: 100%; float: right; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0 30px; } .rad-cover.vertical .rad-header, .rad-cover.full-bleed.vertical .rad-header { max-width: 50vw; text-align: center; height: 100%; display: -ms-flexbox; display: flex; -ms-flex-pack: center; justify-content: center; -ms-flex-align: center; align-items: center; } .rad-cover.vertical .rad-header .rad-headline, .rad-cover.full-bleed.vertical .rad-header .rad-headline, .rad-cover.vertical .rad-header .rad-summary, .rad-cover.full-bleed.vertical .rad-header .rad-summary, .rad-cover.vertical .rad-header .rad-byline-pubdate, .rad-cover.full-bleed.vertical .rad-header .rad-byline-pubdate { text-align: center; max-width: 600px; } } @media screen and (min-width: 1020px) { .rad-cover.horizontal, .rad-cover.full-bleed.horizontal { background: #000 !important; height: 100vh; } .rad-cover.horizontal .rad-header, .rad-cover.full-bleed.horizontal .rad-header { position: absolute; color: #fff; padding: 50px; } .rad-cover.horizontal .media, .rad-cover.full-bleed.horizontal .media { float: right; width: 76.351351vw; max-width: calc(100vw - 335px); } .rad-cover.horizontal .media .rad-caption, .rad-cover.full-bleed.horizontal .media .rad-caption { max-width: 100%; float: right; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0 30px; } .rad-cover.horizontal .rad-header, .rad-cover.full-bleed.horizontal .rad-header { width: 23.648649vw; min-width: 335px; padding: 30px; } } /*! * Hamburgers * @description Tasty CSS-animated hamburgers * @author Jonathan Suh @jonsuh * @site https://jonsuh.com/hamburgers * @link https://github.com/jonsuh/hamburgers */ .topnav--show-nav .hamburger { opacity: 1; } .topnav--show-nav .hamburger .hamburger-inner, .topnav--show-nav .hamburger .hamburger-inner::before, .topnav--show-nav .hamburger .hamburger-inner::after { background-color: #fff; 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margin: 50px; } .rad-article[data-slug="15mag-puerto-rico-oak"] .rad-article-credits { display: none; } The Education Issue The Disappearing Schools of Puerto Rico The Koch Foundation Is Trying to Reshape Foreign Policy. With Liberal Allies. I Was a Low-Income College Student. Classes Weren’t the Hard Part. What College Admissions Offices Really Want Anthony Abraham Jack, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Joshua Rashaad McFadden for The New York Times I Was a Low-Income College Student.Classes Weren’t the Hard Part. Schools must learn that when you come frompoverty, you need more than financial aid to succeed. By ANTHONY ABRAHAM JACK SEPT. 10, 2019 Night came early in the chill of March. It was my freshman year at Amherst College, a small school of some 1,600 undergraduates in the hills of western Massachusetts, and I was a kid on scholarship from Miami. I had just survived my first winter, but spring seemed just as frigid. Amherst felt a little colder — or perhaps just lonelier — without the money to return home for spring break like so many of my peers. At that moment, however, I thought less of home and more about the gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach. I walked past Valentine Hall, the cafeteria, its large windows ghostly in the moonlight. Only the emergency exit signs blazed red in the darkness. There was just enough light to see the chairs stacked on top of the tables and the trays out of reach through the gates that barred me from entry. Amherst provided no meals during holidays and breaks, but not all of us could afford to leave campus. After my first year, I knew when these disruptions were coming and planned for hungry days, charting them on my calendar. Back home in Miami, we knew what to do when money was tight and the family needed to be fed. At the time, in the late ’90s, McDonald’s ran a special: 29-cent hamburgers on Wednesdays and 39-cent cheeseburgers on Sundays. Without that special, I am not sure what we would have done when the week outlasted our reserves before payday. But up at Amherst, there was no McDonald’s special, no quick fix. I worked extra shifts as a gym monitor to help cover the unavoidable costs of staying on campus during breaks. At the gym, the vending machines were stocked with Cheetos and Yoo-hoos, welcome complements to the ham-and-cheese and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches I got from CVS; there are no corner stores or bodegas in Amherst. Not so welcome was the air conditioning on full force in the gym, despite lingering mounds of snow outside. I would check in 20 or so people during my 10-hour shifts, mostly faculty and staff who lived in the area. I recognized them, but they didn’t pay me much mind. Friends would not return until the Friday and Saturday before classes began again. Many came back tan. But what I noticed more was how so many of them returned rested — how different our holidays had been. We like to think that landing a coveted college spot is a golden ticket for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. We think less critically about what happens next. I lived this gap as a first-generation college student. And I returned to it as a first-generation graduate student, spending two years observing campus life and interviewing more than 100 undergraduates at an elite university. Many students from low-income families described having to learn and decode a whole new set of cues and terms like professors’ “office hours” (many didn’t know what they were or how to use them), and foreign rituals like being invited to get coffee with an instructor (and not knowing whether they were expected to pay) — all those moments between convocation and commencement where college life is actually lived. function getFlexData() { return {"data":{"quote":"‘My financial-aid officer didn’t understand why I worked so many jobs or why I picked up even more hours at times.’","attribution":""}}; }var NYTD=NYTD || {}; NYTD.FlexTypes = NYTD.FlexTypes || []; NYTD.FlexTypes.push({"target":"FT100000006707195","type":"Pull Quote","data":{"quote":"‘My financial-aid officer didn’t understand why I worked so many jobs or why I picked up even more hours at times.’","attribution":""}}); ‘My financial-aid officer didn’t understand why I worked so many jobs or why I picked up even more hours at times.’ Now, as a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I teach a course I’ve titled C.R.E.A.M. (Cash Rules Everything Around Me) — borrowing the title of that still-relevant Wu-Tang Clan track — in which we examine how poverty shapes the ways in which many students make it to and through college. Admission alone, as it turns out, is not the great equalizer. Just walking through the campus gates unavoidably heightens these students’ awareness and experience of the deep inequalities around them. I’ve spent half my life in Miami and the other half in Massachusetts. One 20-minute phone call with an Amherst football coach when I was a high school senior, and a college brochure that arrived two days later, brought this dual citizenship into existence. I can still hear my brother asking, “What is an Amherst?” We didn’t have internet at home, so we had to wait to get to the school computer lab before we could look up the unfamiliar name. We learned that the “H” was as silent as my brother was when he found out a United States president — Calvin Coolidge — was an alumnus, and so was the eminent black physician Dr. Charles Drew. Now maybe his baby brother could be one, too. The path from Miami to Massachusetts was not one that everyone around me could see. I attended George Washington Carver Middle School, which had an International Baccalaureate program, in my neighborhood, Coconut Grove. But the summer before I started at Carver, I took some summer school electives at Ponce de Leon Middle School, our zoned school, where my mom worked as a security guard and which she helped to desegregate in the ’60s. Before the starting bell one day, an assistant principal from Carver saw me goofing around with some friends from around the way. She strode over and said to me, “You don’t have the potential to be a Carverite.” That assistant principal saw black, boisterous boys and deemed us, and me, less than. She didn’t see my drive to succeed. My family didn’t have much, but since my days in Head Start, I was always a top performer in every subject. During one rough patch, I stayed home from school for a few days when we couldn’t afford all the supplies needed to carry out my science-fair experiment on bulb voltage and battery life. I developed my hypotheses and outlined my proposed methods without the materials and had everything ready to go when we were able to afford the supplies. I missed the ribbon but got the A. So on that summer morning when the assistant principal admonished me, anger welled up inside me, but I couldn’t let it show. That would have just played into her preconceived notion of who — or rather, what — I was. I had to prove her wrong. I had to prove myself right. But even as I write these words, I’m aware that this is exactly the kind of story that poor, black and Latinx students are conditioned to write for college application essays. In everyday life, as the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote, we “wear the mask that grins and lies” that “hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,” but when we write these all-important essays we are pushed — by teachers, counselors and anyone who gives advice — to tug the heartstrings of upper-middle-class white admissions officers. “Make them cry,” we hear. And so we pimp out our trauma for a shot at a future we want but can’t fully imagine. At Coral Gables Senior High, I was the safe friend in the eyes of my friends’ mothers. The nerdy, chubby kid who geeked out to novels and cartoons did not pose as much of a threat as his less bookish football teammates. But being the safe friend couldn’t protect me any more than anyone else from the dangers all around us. I’m still haunted by the memory of one night when a group of us decided to go to the CocoWalk AMC theater for a movie. We ran into some folks from school near the corner of Frow and Elizabeth and stopped to joke and roast one another. Then, up ahead at the corner, we heard raised voices. We could make out three men starting to fight. As we watched, frozen, one picked up a cinder block and heaved it down on the head of another man on the ground. An angry voice rang out in our direction: “Who dat is down there?!” Terrified, we sprinted away behind the nearby houses. After seconds that felt like forever, doors slammed and a car sped off. We came out only after the roar of dual exhaust pipes faded away and raced home in the opposite direction, knowing better than to stay and invite questions. Once I was at Amherst, the phone would ring with news of similar nights. I would be reading a novel for class or reviewing my chemistry notes for a test when my mother’s ring tone, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” by the Tokens, would break the silence. Something in her “Hey, Tony, you busy?” let me know I was about to share in the emotional burden that bad news brings. My family didn’t understand how disruptive those calls could be. Neither did I, really. No one had ever left. We normally went through these events together. But I was no longer able to help figure out when the coast was clear, to investigate the flashing police lights. I always wondered, unnerved, just how close my family was to whatever prompted such a call. I was away. They were still there. Neighborhoods are more than a collection of homes and shops, more than uneven sidewalks or winding roads. Some communities protect us from hurt, harm and danger. Others provide no respite at all. This process is not random but the consequence of historical patterns of exclusion and racism. Life in privileged communities means that children traverse safer streets, have access to good schools and interact with neighbors who can supply more than the proverbial cup of sugar. Life in distressed communities can mean learning to distinguish between firecrackers and gunshots. These starkly different environments have a profound impact on children’s cognitive functioning, social development and physical health. Research on concentrated disadvantage makes it abundantly clear that inequality depresses the mobility prospects of even the brightest kids, with poor black youth disproportionately exposed to neighborhood violence. In his 2010 study of Chicago youth from adolescence to young adulthood, the sociologist Patrick Sharkey, then at New York University and now at Princeton, shows how such violence disrupts learning in ways equivalent to missing two years of schooling. And yet we equate performance on tests with potential, as if learning happens in a vacuum. It doesn’t. Even if they make it to dorms on leafy-green campuses, disadvantaged students still live in poverty’s long shadow. They worry about those back home just as much as those back home worry about them. At Amherst, I would get messages, in the few moments I had between lunch and lab, announcing that someone needed something: $75 for diabetes medicine or $100 to turn the lights back on. One day a call announced that a $675 mortgage payment needed to be paid. It wasn’t the first time. I was annoyed. I was mad that I was annoyed. Was I not the future they had invested in all these years? Did I have enough to spare? Were they expecting the whole thing? How much time did I have? This was before apps like Venmo that allow you to send money to anyone instantly, so it would take almost three hours, start to finish, to get to the nearest Walmart, on Route 9, to send a bit of spare cash home by MoneyGram. That ride on the B43 bus was as lonely as it was long. By my junior year, I had secured four jobs in addition to monitoring and cleaning the gym. My financial-aid officer didn’t understand why I worked so many jobs or why I picked up even more hours at times. That fall, right after Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma, I was called in to the financial-aid office. They wanted to discuss my work schedule and to tell me that they would be reaching out to my bosses to let them know I needed to cut back hours. I was working too much; that’s what the work-study rules said. I pleaded with them not to. I needed the money. More truthfully, my family and I did. One responsibility of being the one who leaves is sending remittances back, a reality that many of us who are the first to venture away from home know all too well. I assured the officials I was handling all my work. In truth, I was really just pushing through; I became a robot, hyperscheduled and mechanical in my interactions. My grades were good, and so I thought I was good. I worried that if I worked less, I would not be able to help my family recover from the storms, let alone get through all their everyday emergencies. But if I was their safety net, I had none. [What college admissions offices really want.] I was surprised this spring when I learned about the College Board’s new Environmental Context Dashboard, renamed Landscape, a set of measures for colleges to use in admissions that takes into consideration students’ neighborhood and high school environments, the constellation of influences — individual and institutional — that shape students’ chances at upward mobility. Critics saw this “adversity index,” as it came to be known, as just another attempt by the College Board to maintain its dominance over college admissions or elide the harm that the SAT has inflicted upon generations of youth from disadvantaged communities. (After pressure, the College Board announced it would not combine the neighborhood and school scores into one individual score.) I hated the SAT. It stole Saturdays from me, especially when I transferred to the private high school where I spent my senior year on a scholarship. And not because I went to tutoring sessions or met with private coaches but because my more privileged peers did, while I passed the hours at home by myself. (I wasn’t doing practice tests either. I couldn’t afford the book.) Those lonely afternoons served as reminders of my poverty and also my precarious future. But now, as a sociologist of education who spent two years interning in the Amherst admissions office, I see the College Board’s new index as a step — and just one step — in the right direction to demonstrate the impact of instability that contributes to differences in performance and social well-being to admissions committees, those gatekeepers of higher education. And at a time when affirmative action is under renewed attack, the index permits an alternative to explicit considerations of race in college admissions by taking into account the ecological factors that are intimately tied to race. The supplemental scores Landscape provides can’t level the playing field, but they offer some context for just how unequal it is. Colleges have made racial and class diversity into virtues with which they welcome students during orientation and entice alumni to make donations. But students of color and those from lower-income backgrounds often bear the brunt of the tension that exists between proclamation and practice of this social experiment. Schools cannot simply showcase smiling black and brown faces in their glossy brochures and students wearing shirts blaring “First Gen and Proud” in curated videos and then abdicate responsibility for the problems from home that a more diverse class may bring with them to campus. Does this entail going beyond providing tuition, room and board? Yes. It requires colleges and universities to question what they take for granted, about their students and about the institutions themselves. And to do this, they’ll need more than an algorithm. What’s needed is a deeply human touch. This means ensuring that campus services meet the needs of all students. College can be a difficult time for everyone. Divorces of parents and deaths of grandparents are not uncommon. Counselors and advisers are more or less prepared for these universal types of challenges. But whom do students turn to when they get those 2 a.m. calls bringing news of street violence, eviction or arrests? Hiring more diverse staff and administrators, as well as those who are familiar with these issues, is important in this effort — but this work can’t just be consigned to the diversity dean, who is often the only person of color in the office. [Sign up for Race/Related, a weekly newsletter focused on race, identity and culture.] College administrations must make a sustained effort to understand the stress and isolation that can define everyday college life for these more vulnerable students.

      He explaining how difficult it can be trying to succeed through college and still maintain through your personal life without it not affecting your academics.

  3. Jan 2021
    1. Self-Serving Biases You may recall that the process of making causal attributions is supposed to proceed in a careful, rational, and even scientific manner. But this assumption turns out to be, at least in part, untrue. Our attributions are sometimes biased by affect—particularly the desire to enhance the self that we talked about in Chapter 3. Although we would like to think that we are always rational and accurate in our attributions, we often tend to distort them to make us feel better. Self-serving attributions are attributions that help us meet our desire to see ourselves positively (Mezulis, Abramson, Hyde, & Hankin, 2004). A particularly common example is the self-serving bias, which is the tendency to attribute our successes to ourselves, and our failures to others and the situation. We all make self-enhancing attributions from time to time. If a teacher’s students do well on an exam, he may make a personal attribution for their successes (“I am, after all, a great teacher!”). On the other hand, when they do poorly on an exam, the teacher may tend to make a situational attribution and blame them for their failure (“Why didn’t you all study harder?”). You can see that this process is clearly not the type of scientific, rational, and careful process that attribution theory suggests the teacher should be following. It’s unfair, although it does make him feel better about himself. If he were really acting like a scientist, however, he would determine ahead of time what causes good or poor exam scores and make the appropriate attribution, regardless of the outcome. You might have noticed yourself making self-serving attributions too. Perhaps you have blamed another driver for an accident that you were in or blamed your partner rather than yourself for a breakup. Or perhaps you have taken credit (internal) for your successes but blamed your failures on external causes. If these judgments were somewhat less than accurate, but they did benefit you, then they were indeed self-serving. Interestingly, we do not as often show this bias when making attributions about the successes and setbacks of others. This tendency to make more charitable attributions about ourselves than others about positive and negative outcomes often links to the actor-observer difference that we mentioned earlier in this section. It appears that the tendency to make external attributions about our own behavior and internal attributions about the conduct of others is particularly strong in situations where the behavior involves undesirable outcomes.

      This section gives additional explanation and examples for self-serving bias.

    2. The Actor-Observer Bias The fundamental attribution error involves a bias in how easily and frequently we make personal versus situational attributions about others. Another, similar way that we overemphasize the power of the person is that we tend to make more personal attributions for the behavior of others than we do for ourselves and to make more situational attributions for our own behavior than for the behavior of others. This is known as the actor-observer bias or difference (Nisbett, Caputo, Legant, & Marecek, 1973; Pronin, Lin, & Ross, 2002). When we are asked about the behavior of other people, we tend to quickly make trait attributions (“Oh, Sarah, she’s really shy”). On the other hand, when we think of ourselves, we are more likely to take the situation into account—we tend to say, “Well, I’m shy in my team at work, but with my close friends I’m not at all shy.” When a friend behaves in a helpful way, we naturally believe that he or she is a friendly person; when we behave in the same way, on the other hand, we realize that there may be a lot of other reasons why we did what we did.

      This section gives additional explanation and an example for actor-observer bias. The following paragraph lets you take a quiz to illustrate how it works.

    3. The tendency to overemphasize personal attributions in others versus ourselves seems to occur for several reasons. One is simply because other people are so salient in our social environments. When you look at someone’s behavior, you tend to focus on that person and are likely to make personal attributions about him or her. It’s just easy because you are looking right at the person. When you look at Cejay giving that big tip, you see him—and so you decide that he caused the action. In fact, research has shown that we tend to make more personal attributions for the people we are directly observing in our environments than for other people who are part of the situation but who we are not directly watching (Taylor & Fiske, 1975). When you think of your own behavior, however, you do not see yourself but are instead more focused on the situation. You also tend to have more memory for your own past situations than for others’. You come to realize that it is not only you but also the different situations that you are in that determine your behavior. Maybe you can remember the other times where you did not give a big tip, and so you conclude that your behavior is caused more by the situation than by your underlying personality. This greater access to evidence about our own past behaviors can lead us to realize that our conduct varies quite a lot across situations, whereas because we have more limited memory of the behavior of others, we may see them as less changeable. This in turn leads to another, related attributional tendency, namely the trait ascription bias, which defines a tendency for people to view their own personality, beliefs, and behaviors as more variable than those of others (Kammer, 1982). We are thus more likely to caricature the behaviors of others as just reflecting the type of people we think they are, whereas we tend to depict our own conduct as more nuanced, and socially flexible. A second reason for the tendency to make so many personal attributions is that they are simply easier to make than situational attributions. In fact, personal attributions seem to be made spontaneously, without any effort on our part, and even on the basis of only very limited behavior (Newman & Uleman, 1989; Uleman, Blader, & Todorov, 2005). Personal attributions just pop into mind before situational attributions do. One reason for this is that is cognitively demanding to try to process all the relevant factors in someone else’s situation and to consider how all these forces may be affecting that person’s conduct. It is much more straightforward to label a behavior in terms of a personality trait. Third, personal attributions also dominate because we need to make them in order to understand a situation. That is, we cannot make either a personal attribution (e.g., “Cejay is generous”) or a situational attribution (“Cejay is trying to impress his friends”) until we have first identified the behavior as being a generous behavior (“Leaving that big tip was a generous thing to do”). So we end up starting with the personal attribution (“generous”) and only later try to correct or adjust our judgment (“Oh,” we think, “perhaps it really was the situation that caused him to do that”). Adjusting our judgments generally takes more effort than does making the original judgment, and the adjustment is frequently not sufficient. We are more likely to commit attributional errors—for example quickly jumping to the conclusion that behavior is caused by underlying personality—when we are tired, distracted, or busy doing other things (Geeraert, Yzerbyt, Corneille, & Wigboldus, 2004; Gilbert, 1989; Trope & Alfieri, 1997).

      This section discusses possible reasons for the actor-observer effect.

    1. Those who will suffer when no sustainability is achieved are the beneficiaries of the sustainability concept!Beneficiaries = people + animals + plants

      I think this is what people forget. Our dependence on fossil fuels might power our lives now, but what about years from now? What will we do when there is nothing else left to mine? No trees left to cut down? No material left to burn? If we put the work in now to switch to renewable energy, our future generations may not feel the impact of our actions as heavily. They will have the chance to LEARN from our mistakes and not work to fix them when we could not.

    1. ince positionality is the multiple, unique experiences that situate each of us in relation to each other, no one student's perspective is privileged. Rather, all are privileged, and therefore all are empowered to speak: students from minor? ity and majority cultures can help teach each other in an atmosphere of mutual respect. When each student confronts his or her empowerment or disempower ment, privilege or lack thereof, no implicit or explicit judgment is leveled against them. No one student comes to embody the despised oppressor and no one student comes to embody the embattled oppressed. Rather, we encourage a scholarly contemplation and personal appreciation of all perspectives in a less politically loaded, less judgmental context. It is increasingly likely that students who would otherwise be marginalized will be heard, and less likely that they will be heard defensively. In my experience, if anger ensues, it is not likely to be directed at others in the class; rather, anger is channeled toward the forces of society that lead to oppression ? and hence that anger is more likely to result in deeper un? derstanding, and, I hope, informed action in the world.

      I see the relationship between our different experiences here and it's beautiful to understand it in the way it is written. I think peer groups, educators, communities everywhere, and the like should adopt this perspective of positionality and what it means for society.

      I think it makes room for tough conversations amongst students while forming a safe space. If I were working towards being a maladjusted educator I would draw some of my methods from here to encourage amongst my students. This section made me think about Martin Luther King Jr.'s mention of having no intentions of adjusting to segregation and discrimination. In one's efforts to maladjust to these factors I think they would be justified in doing so while I also can also see where it could stir up anger as they express themselves. Which brings me to conclude that in our efforts to be maladjusted educators, we must know in our disagreement with whatever we're maladjusting to, where that comes from and how to communicate that effectively without offending others or forming a defense wall when we may not have to. It's not the people we should be angry toward necessarily, rather, toward "the forces of society that lead to oppression - ".

    1. As humans we have the capacity to think about what we do and make conscious decisions—what may be termed ‘reflective motivation’. So, apart from wants and needs, there are thought processes that create and compare evaluations: beliefs about what is beneficial or harmful and right or wrong. These processes underlie our conscious decision-making, when we weigh up the costs and benefits of courses of action or work out solutions to problems. We also have the capacity to plan ahead, and these plans form much of the structure of our behaviour over the course of minutes, hours, days, weeks and years.

      İnsanlar olarak ne yaptığımız hakkında düşünme ve bilinçli kararlar verme kapasitesine sahibiz— buna 'yansıtıcı motivasyon' denebilir. Yani, istek ve ihtiyaçların dışında, değerlendirmeleri yaratan ve karşılaştıran düşünce süreçleri vardır: neyin faydalı, zararlı, neyin doğru ya da yanlış olduğuna dair inançlar. Bu süreçler, eylem kurslarının maliyetlerini ve faydalarını tartdığımız veya sorunlara çözüm çalıştığımızda bilinçli karar verme sürecimizin temelini oluşturur. Biz de önceden planlamak için kapasiteye sahip, ve bu planlar dakika, saat, gün, hafta ve yıl boyunca davranış yapısının çok oluşturur.

    1. ou are engaged whether you recognize it or not (apply what I am asking you to learn to do and you will understand what I mean).

      This is very true even though we may think we are engaged or not, most of the time we are because of course we vote for the things we want

    1. Note: This rebuttal was posted by the corresponding author to Review Commons. Content has not been altered except for formatting.

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      Reply to the reviewers

      We would like to thank the reviewers for taking the time to carefully evaluate our manuscript. The paper will be significantly improved by their suggestions, and we are grateful for their perspectives.

      To address the reviewers’ concerns, we will complete additional control experiments and revise the manuscript as detailed below.

      Reviewer #1 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)):

      In the present work Stumpff, Reinholdt and co-workers investigate the mechanism by which micronuclei contribute to tumorigenesis. Micronuclei are classic markers of genomic instability widely used in the diagnosis of cancer, but whether they work as drivers of the process has recently attracted significant attention due to their link with chromothripsis. Here, the Stumpff/Reinhold labs have explored an interesting model to test some ideas about the role of micronuclei as drivers of tumorigenesis, based on Kif18A/p53 double KO mice. They confirm the formation of micronuclei in these animals, but find no substantial increase in survival and tumor incidence relative to p53 KO animals, despite higher incidence of micronuclei in Kif18A/p53 KO tumors. They conclude that, per se, micronuclei do not have the capacity to form tumors, regardless of p53 status. This was surprising, given the well-established role of p53 in preventing the proliferation of micronucleated cells. To shed light into this apparent paradox, they compared micronuclei from Kif18A KO cells with micronuclei generated by a number of other experimental conditions that promote formation of anaphase lagging chromosomes or generates acentric fragments. They found that micronuclei derived from Kif18A are intrinsically different from micronuclei generated by those other means and essentially showed increased accumulation of lamin B, were more resistant to rupture and preserved the capacity to expand as cells exited mitosis. Of note, they find a correlation between chromosome proximity to the poles/main chromosome mass and the different features that characterize micronuclei from Kif18A KO cells, compared with the other experimental conditions in which late lagging chromosomes are more frequent. Overall, I find this study extremely interesting, well designed and executed in a rigorous way that characterizes the consistent solid work from these laboratories over the years. I have just few minor points that I recommend to be addressed prior to publication. 1-Abstract and main text lines 70 and 100: the authors indicate that Kif18A mutant mice produce micronuclei due to unaligned chromosomes. This is correct, but at the same time misleading. The authors should clarify that although micronuclei derive from compromised congression, I was convinced from previous works (Fonseca et al., JCB, 2019) that it was their asynchronous segregation in anaphase that led to micronuclei formation. As is, a less familiar reader may conceive that misaligned chromosomes directly result in micronuclei, for example by being detached from the main chromosome mass.

      We thank the reviewer for raising this point. We agree that micronuclei form in the absence of KIF18A due to chromosome alignment defects, which reduces interchromosomal compaction and leads to asynchronous arrival of chromosomes at spindle poles during anaphase. As the reviewer suggests, micronuclei form around chromosomes that travel longer distances and arrive late to the poles. We have revised the manuscript to clarify this (Lines 12-13, 72-73, 102).

      2-Page 2, line 59: "cells entering cell division...become fragmented". It is not the cells, but the chromosomes that fragment. Please correct.

      We have revised this wording to indicate it is the chromosomes within micronuclei which fragment (Line 60-63).

      3-Page 4, line 149: "reduced survival in the Kif18A null, p53 mice". P53 what? KO, WT? Please clarify.

      We have revised this wording as suggested, to read: “reduced survival in the Kif18agcd2/gcd2, p53-/- mice,” (Line 158).

      4-Page 5, line 212: the authors refer that micronuclei were scored for absence of lamin A/C, but previously they scored it as "continuous/discontinuous". Please clarify.

      Thank you for raising this question. When we scored lamin A/C, we noted cases where lamin A/C signal was incompletely present (not fully co-localizing with the micronuclear area, as indicated by DAPI). In these infrequent cases, micronuclei were identified as having “discontinuous” lamin A/C signal and were binned with those micronuclei lacking lamin A/C, for purposes of creating a binary readout of the micronuclear envelope: either 1) “intact” (having full, completely continuous lamin A/C signatures) or 2) “ruptured” (lacking a complete micronuclear signal of lamin A/C). We will update the text and the methods to more clearly reflect this categorization (Lines 221-225; 603-607).

      5-Page 6, line 243: "Kif18A is not required for micronuclear envelope rupture". Shouldn't it be micronuclear envelope "integrity"?

      We apologize for the confusion here. The experiment performed was designed to distinguish whether micronuclear envelopes are more stable in KIF18A KO cells or if KIF18A itself is somehow required for the rupture of all micronuclear envelopes to occur. Since nocodazole-induced micronuclei were able to rupture in KIF18A KO cells at similar frequencies to those seen in control cells, the data indicate that KIF18A is not required for the process of micronuclear envelope rupture. We modified the text to improve clarity (lines 252-253).

      6-One of the most interesting results of the paper is the correlation between envelope formation in micronuclei with their respective position relative to the poles/midzone. Could the authors try to investigate causality? For instance, the authors refer to works from other labs in which MT bundles and a midzone Aurora B activity gradient might play a role in the different features associated with micronuclei envelope formation, depending on their origin. Could the authors manipulate this gradient and investigate whether it changes the outcome in terms of nuclear envelope assembly properties on micronuclei? Are there any detectable features in midzone MT organization in Kif18A KO cells that would justify the observed differences?

      We agree that this result is very interesting. However, we feel the proposed experiments would repeat previous work and are somewhat outside the purview of the present study. Elegant experiments to address Aurora’s role in preventing micronucleus formation have already been performed using genetic approaches in Drosophila neuroblasts and small molecule inhibitors in mammalian cells and Drosophila S2 cells (PMIDs: 24925910, 25877868, and 29986897). Interpreting effects of Aurora B inhibition are complicated by the many critical roles Aurora B plays in ensuring proper and faithful chromosome segregation. Thus, experiments to precisely test Aurora’s effect on micronuclear envelope stability require addition of Aurora B inhibitors on a cell-by-cell basis, administered within a narrow window of minutes during anaphase. It would require significant effort to obtain enough cells from different experimental conditions to make a meaningful comparison.

      The suggestion to investigate detectable differences or features in midzone MT organization in KIF18A KO cells is also appreciated. We have not observed gross differences in midzone microtubules in KIF18A KO cells, but we will quantitatively evaluate this and add these results to the revised manuscript.

      Reviewer #1 (Significance (Required)):

      Kif18A plays a key role in chromosome alignment, without apparently affecting kinetochore-microtubule attachments in non-transformed cells. Because they cannot establish a proper metaphase plate Kif18A KO cells enter anaphase with highly asynchronous segregation due to non-uniform chromosome distribution along the spindle axis. Consequently, some "delayed" chromosomes form micronuclei, in cell culture and in vivo. Interestingly, prior art has failed to detect any increased signs of genomic instability in Kif18A KO cells and mice, and, contrary to what would be expected based on current trends, these mice do now show any signs of increased incidence of tumors, in fact they even show some protective effect to induced colitis-associated colorectal cancer. Noteworthy, all previous experimental works pointing to a role of micronuclei as key intermediates of genomic instability in cancer relied on models in which the tumor suppressor protein p53 had been inactivated. In the present work, the authors explore the relationship between micronuclei formation and p53 inactivation by investigating tumor formation in Kif18A/p53 double KO animals (1 or 2 alleles of p53 inactivated).The reported results are timely and will attract the interest of a broad readership, while decisively contributing to shed light into an ongoing debate. I am therefore all in favor for the publication of this work in any journal affiliated with review commons, pending some minor revisions.

      Reviewer #2 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)):

      Sepaniac and colleagues use in vivo and in vitro approaches to examine why micronuclei generated by lack of KIF18A activity do not promote tumorigenesis. The authors conclude that micronuclei in KIF18A depleted cells form stable micronuclear envelopes, which may be a result from lagging chromosomes being closer to the spindle pole when the micronuclear envelope forms. The authors further conclude that the stability of the micronuclei arising from lack of KIF18A can explain why Kif18a mutant mice do not develop tumors. These results also suggest that the consequences of micronuclei and their possible contribution to tumorigenesis depend on the context of their genesis. While the mouse model data and characterization of the stability of micronuclei generated by different insults support the conclusions, the lagging chromosome positioning data could be improved. Moreover, a number of other issues should be addressed prior to publication.

      **Major issues:**

      1.Line 153-155. The authors conclude that the slight reduction in overall survival is "due to a reduced ability of Kif18a mutants to cope with rapid tumorigenesis," but it is unclear why this would be the case. There is also an increase in micronucleated cells in thymic lymphomas from Kif18a/p53 homozygous mice (Fig. 2B)-could this not contribute? In Fig. 3C, the authors show that micronuclear rupture is similar in both Kif18a WT and mutant mice, so it seems possible that the increase in the frequency of micronuclei (Fig. 2B) coupled with a similar frequency of micronuclear rupture (Fig. 3C) could lead to the reduced survival. Then, in the discussion, the authors downplay this finding by saying (line 371) "loss of Kif18a had modest or no effect on survival of Trp53 homozygotes and heterozygotes." Why then speculate earlier in the text that loss of Kif18a reduces the ability to cope with tumorigenesis?

      We thank the reviewer for pointing out this issue. Our goal here was to try and explain why the Kif18a/p53 mutant homozygotes display a small but significant reduction in survival compared to p53 mutants, while the Kif18a mutation does not impact survival of p53 heterozygotes, which could be considered a more sensitive model for detecting decreased survival. Kif18a homozygous mutants do display a small reduction in survival shortly after birth compared to heterozygote and wild type littermates (PMID: 25824710). Thus, we can’t exclude the possibility that incompletely penetrant, postnatal lethality might be coincident with reduced fitness in surviving mutants, thus naming them more sensitive to loss of p53 loss of function. We have removed this statement form the revised text.

      However, the reviewer’s point that the combination of increased micronuclei in Kif18a/p53 homozygous mutants combined with a similar rupture rate seen in p53 mutants could also underlie or at least contribute to reduced survival is a good one. We have softened our conclusion in the Results section regarding the reduced survival of double homozygous mice (lines 158-164). We also agree that the way in which this point is addressed in the results and discussion sound contradictory. Thus, we have edited the language in the Discussion to improve consistency (lines 393-399).

      2.Related to the point above, the authors show in figure 3 that the micronuclei found in healthy tissues display infrequent membrane rupture (panel B). However, micronuclear membrane rupture in tumor tissues is much more frequent (panel C). How do the authors explain this? Do they hypothesize that the micronuclei in the tumors originate by mechanisms other than the misalignment caused by lack of KIF18A? Does KIF18A depletion cause aneuploidy due to segregation of two sisters to the same pole? If so, one could expect the tumors to be aneuploid (is this the case?) and aneuploidy has been shown by numerous groups to cause genomic instability. Such genomic instability could then explain the difference in membrane rupture.

      We agree that this is an interesting question. We plan to investigate several possible contributors to increased rupture in tumor cells in a separate study. As outlined in the Discussion (lines 443-458), we hypothesize that rupture could increase in tumor tissue due to changes in lamin expression or cytoskeletal forces in these cells. However, as the reviewer notes, differences in aneuploidy could also potentially explain the differences in membrane rupture observed in healthy (non-tumorous) and thymic lymphoma tissues. For example, an increase in chromosome number could lead to lagging chromosomes being positioned closer to the midzone in Kif18a mutant cells or, as the reviewer suggests, the micronuclei could occur in aneuploid tumors due mitotic defects other than misalignment. This may be difficult to determine unequivocally in primary cell or tissue samples. However, we do have a limited quantity of primary thymic lymphoma-derived cells and we will use these to initially investigate aneuploidy in the two genotypes. The results of these studies will be added to the final revised manuscript. In addition, we will incorporate a discussion of how aneuploidy may increase rupture frequency in tumors into the revised manuscript.

      3.The authors conclude that lagging chromosomes in KIF18A KO cells are found closer to the main chromatin mass. The Stumpff lab showed in a 2019 JCB paper that KIF18 KO cells have a chromosome alignment defect and as a result during anaphase the chromosomes can be scattered rather than forming the tight, uniform mass that is observed in WT cells. The scattering of kinetochores resulting from this phenotype could affect the value of "Avg Chromosomes Distances" in Fig 7B and the normalized distance in the KIF18A KO cells. Therefore, live-cell imaging experiments would be helpful to resolve this and possibly strengthen this conclusion. RPE1 cells with fluorescently tagged CENP-A and centrin could be used to ensure that the lagging chromosomes will not rejoin the main nucleus. Moreover, these cells could be used for correlative live-fixed cell experiments in which fixed cell analysis following micronucleus formation could be used to show that chromosomes that lag farther away from the spindle pole are more likely to have defective micronuclear envelopes.

      The reviewer’s concern that the unalignment phenotype, characteristic of KIF18A KO cells, may impact the value of average chromosome distances used to set a threshold for chromosomes meeting our definition of lagging is valid. To address this, we analyzed the standard deviations for chromosome-to-pole distances within half spindles of KIF18A KO and nocodazole-washout treated anaphase cells as a way to compare chromosome scattering in these two conditions. This analysis revealed no significant difference between the standard deviations of chromosome positions in the two groups, suggesting that scattering is similar in nocodazole treated and KIF18A KO cells. We have included these data in the manuscript (Line 351-356, and additional data added to Figure S2C).

      In order to further strengthen this conclusion, we are certainly willing to attempt the live cell imaging experiments suggested by the reviewer. We would like to point out that the frequency of micronucleus formation in the KIF18A KO cells is relatively low compared to the frequency seen after other experimental treatments (~7% of divisions result in a micronucleus). Thus, a large number of individual cells would need to be imaged with relatively high temporal resolution to make conclusions about the effects of chromosome position on micronuclear envelope formation (such analyses are not possible with the live data sets we currently have, where cells were imaged every 2 minutes). This difficulty led us to perform these measurements in synchronized and fixed cells to begin with.

      4.Based on the Fonseca et al. 2019 JCB paper (video 2), micronuclei from KIF18A KO do not exclusively arise from lagging chromosomes. Instead, chromosomes can also escape the main chromatin mass after segregation and subsequently be excluded from the main nucleus. It would be important to know what fraction of the micronuclei in KIF18A KO cells arise via lagging chromosomes. Since Aurora B and/or bundled microtubules at the spindle midzone are believed to prevent proper nuclear envelope formation, chromosomes that properly segregate but later become separated from the main nucleus would be more likely to form proper micronuclear envelopes than those arising from lagging chromosomes. The correlative microscopy experiment suggested in the previous point could allow differentiation between these two routes to micronucleus formation.

      The reviewer is correct that we did occasionally see chromosomes escape the main chromatin mass after segregation in the Fonseca et al., 2019 study referenced. We did not quantify the frequency of these events in that study, but they were rare. To address this quantitatively, we have measured the incidence of micronuclear formation around lagging chromosomes and chromosomes that escape the main chromatin mass after segregation in videos of KIF18A KO cells. We find that when micronuclei form in these cells, they form around lagging chromosomes 98% (46 out of 47 events) of the time. These data were derived from 4 live cell imaging experiments. This information has been added to the Results section (line 328-330).

      **Minor issues:**

      1.Some parts of the manuscript are excessively wordy and some sentences are unclear or convoluted (e.g., lines 148-153 and 238-239).

      Thank you for this feedback. We have revised the text in these two locations to improve clarity (lines 159-162 and 247-248 in the revised manuscript).

      2.Lines 59-61. This sentence is formulated incorrectly. First of all, the subject of the sentence is "cells" and the verb is "can become fragmented." However, the authors mean that the DNA in the micronucleus can become fragmented (not the cells). Moreover, the way the sentence is currently formulated seems to suggested that the fragmentation occurs during cell division. However, this is not the case. Please, revise the text to make it more accurate.

      We appreciate this point and have revised this text to reflect more precise language to describe this model. It is certainly the micronucleated chromatin which may become fragmented, and this fragmentation occurs as a result of replication stress, including replication fork collapse, after an existing micronucleated cell enters a subsequent round of S or G2 phase (PMIDs: 22258507, 26017310).

      3.Lines 114-115. Please, provide references in support of this statement.

      The statement in question: “This arrest was at least partially dependent on p53, consistent with other reports of cell cycle arrest following micronucleation,” shares the same references as the sentence that follows it (Sablina 1998, Thompson and Compton, 2010; Fonseca et al., 2019). We have updated the references to appear after the first statement to make this clear.

      4.Line 153. The authors refer to Fig. 1C, but I think they mean Fig. 1B.

      Thank you, we have updated the text to read Fig 1B.

      5.Line 324. the authors find that RPE1 KIF18A KO cells have lagging chromosomes in ana/telophase 9% of the time, then say that this shows that lagging chromosomes are rare in KIF18A KO cells. However, this is a large increase compared to normal RPE1 cells, which only have 1-2% frequency of lagging chromosomes. So, they should revise the text here to say that the rates of lagging chromosomes from KIF18A KO are lower compared to the rates induced by nocodazole washout.

      This is an important distinction. We have removed this confusing statement from the revised text (lines 336-338).

      6.Line 383. The references listed here should be moved earlier and specifically after the statement summarizing the results of the studies instead of being listed after the authors' conclusion/interpretation of the data. The same issue was noted in other parts of the manuscript.

      We have corrected this error (Lines 402-408). Before final submission, we will further amend the style of the manuscript throughout to cite relevant papers after the statement summarizing the results of those studies, rather than after our interpretation of the studies.

      7.Figure 1A. In the text, the authors say they cross a Kif18a heterozygous mutant mouse with a p53 heterozygous mutant mouse, but the two mice in this figure are already heterozygous for both. Please, revise the text or depict the previous additional cross necessary to obtain the double heterozygous.

      We thank the reviewer for catching this discrepancy. We have revised the text to describe the crosses necessary to obtain the double heterozygous mice shown in the figure (lines 121-123). The gcd2 mutation in Kif18a was named due to the “germ cell depleted” phenotype it causes. These homozygous mice are therefore infertile (Czechanski et al., 2015). For this reason, heterozygous mice for each gene were crossed to achieve the necessary homozygous progeny.

      8.Figure 3A. Arrows or dotted circles outlining the micronuclei in the insets of the middle and bottom rows would be helpful since the DAPI signal in the micronuclei is low and somewhat difficult to see.

      We have updated these figures as suggested to more clearly indicate the micronuclear area.

      9.Figure 3B. Error bars should be added to the graph. Moreover, the authors noted that the differences are not significant. However, this seems surprising, given that in some cases there is a three- to five-fold difference between certain pairs. Indeed, a chi-square test using the numbers from table S1 indicated p values We appreciate this feedback on the statistical tests and comparisons among these data. The main point of these analyses is to demonstrate that tissues other than blood form micronuclei in vivo in the absence of Kif18a function and that the majority of these micronuclear envelopes are completely surrounded by Lamin A/C. The data presented in Figure 3B were obtained by counting several tissue types from a single mouse of each genotype. Thus, we do not believe that error bars are appropriate in this context. To avoid confusion, we have also removed the statistical bars which had indicated no significant differences in rupture frequency among the genotypes in each sampled tissue, as these are also probably inappropriate.

      We understand the reviewer’s point that some pairwise comparisons of the data in Table S1 indicate that they are significantly different. We originally used a Chi-square test to compare the data from all three genotypes for each tissue. Because these data did not rise to the threshold of significance necessary to reject the null hypothesis across all three genotypes within each individual tissue type, we did not think performing pairwise comparisons between only two of those genotypes was appropriate (Whitlock and Schluter, The Analysis of Biological Data, 2009). Specifically, analyses of rupture frequency for spleen, liver, and thymus tissue gave p-values above 0.05 (spleen, p = 0.35; liver, p = 0.056; thymus, p = 0.052). Thus, we did not proceed with pairwise comparisons. In contrast, the analyses of p53 effects on micronucleus levels in peripheral blood in Fig 1D utilized samples from 8 individual mice for each genotype, and are therefore more amenable to statistical comparisons. If the reviewer believes any of the details of this approach are incorrect, we are happy to revise the analyses.

      10.Figure 5G. When referring to this figure (lines 292-294), the authors talk about correlation. However, the points in this graph seem to be scattered a bit randomly.

      To address this concern, we performed a Pearson’s correlation test on the data in Figure 5G. As suspected by the reviewer, this analysis did not indicate a significant correlation, and we have removed this plot from the manuscript.

      11.Figure 6B-D. The Y-axis titles of the three graphs are a bit confusing. Please, consider revising.

      We have updated the Y-axis titles for these graphs to more accurately represent what is displayed on each plot.

      12.In Figure 7 and the text, the authors use the terms "late-lagging" and "lagging" chromosomes interchangeably, which is somewhat confusing in this context because lagging chromosome distance from the main chromosome mass is thought to contribute to defective assembly of micronuclear envelopes. It is not clear whether the authors intend to indicate, with this term, that the lagging chromosome is farther away from the main chromosome mass or that the lagging chromosome is in a "late" anaphase cell. Because this is confusing, I suggest just using the term "lagging chromosome" consistently. It could be useful to include representative images of lagging chromosomes located at different distances from the main chromosome mass. And certainly, the authors should include an example of a lagging chromosome in the KIF18A KO cells.

      We agree with the reviewer’s concern regarding confusion of these terms. We have updated the text to use the term “lagging chromosome” consistently, as the reviewer suggests. We have also updated Figure 7A to include a representative image of a lagging chromosome in a KIF18A KO cell.

      13.Figure S2A. The example in the bottom right image looks more like a chromosome bridge than a lagging chromosomes. Kinetochore staining is necessary to unequivocally identify lagging chromosomes.

      We agree with the reviewer that kinetochore staining is necessary to precisely identify lagging chromosomes. We had used these images to quickly and crudely assess the presence and frequency of potentially lagging chromosomes, observed in late-anaphase cells by eye, and for subsequent experiments where lagging chromosomes were measured, repeated these experiments with proper staining of poles and kinetochores to make precise, quantifiable assessments. Reviewer #2 (Significance (Required)):

      Based on the previous knowledge on the factors that cause abnormal assembly of the micronuclear membrane, the results presented in this study were somewhat predictable. However, these findings will add to the knowledge of how micronuclei form and the potential factors that lead to micronuclear membrane rupture. Previous studies investigating micronucleus behavior have focused on micronuclei arising via merotelic kinetochore mis-attachments. These mis-attachments lead to formation of micronuclei close to the spindle midzone. In the present study, instead, the micronuclei arising from lack of KIF18A activity form farther away from the spindle midzone. The results presented here suggest that the positioning of these micronuclei farther away from the midzone enables assembly of a more stable micronuclear membrane that will be less likely to rupture during the following cell cycle. A recent study showed that the microtubule bundles in the spindle midzone interfere with micronuclear membrane assembly. Based on this, it is not surprising that micronuclei forming away from the spindle midzone (like those resulting from lack of KIF18A activity) assemble more normal membranes. Although somewhat expected, this study provides the actual data in support of this phenomenon. This study will be of interest to cell biologists interested in cell division and genomic instability. My research has focused on cell division, aneuploidy, and chromosomal instability for nearly thirty years. Therefore, I believe I am fully qualified to evaluate this manuscript.

      **Referees cross-commenting**

      My areas of expertise do not include nuclear membrane structure and function. Therefore, I encourage the authors to consider the comments of reviewer #3 for issues related to reliable quantification of micronuclear membrane rupture.

      Reviewer #3 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)):

      **Summary** Sepaniac et al demonstrate that loss of KIF18a, a motor protein required for proper chromosome congression and chromatin compaction during mitosis, is insufficient to drive tumor development in mice although it does increase the frequency of micronuclei (MN), nuclear compartments that form around broken or missegregated chromosomes, in both normal and tumor tissue. MN are thought to increase genome instability and metastasis by undergoing DNA damage and activating innate immune signaling after irreparable nuclear membrane rupture. The authors use a non-transformed human cell line, hTERT-RPE-1, with KIF18a knocked out to demonstrate that MN formed as a result of KIF18a loss have more stable nuclear membranes than MN generated by other methods. They go on to correlate this increased stability with increased chromosome proximity to the main chromatin mass during nuclear envelope assembly and increased chromatin decompaction by a combination of fixed and live cell imaging.

      **Major Comments**

      1.This study relies heavily on the use of lamin A loss or discontinuity to identify ruptured micronuclei. Although the authors validate this marker against "leakage" of the soluble nuclear protein mCherry-NLS, there are several lines of evidence suggesting that lamin A loss or disruption is not a reliable reporter. In figure S3C, the top two panels of intact MN in the KIF18KO appear ruptured based on the gH2AX labeling, yet have significant levels of lamin A and are labeled as intact. In figure 4D, the rate of MN rupture after nocodazole release (60% ruptured in 2 hours) is much faster than that reported in other papers (40-60% in 16-18 hours, Liu et al; 60% in 16 hours; Hatch et al). In addition, images in Hatch et al, 2013 show lamin A localizing to both intact and ruptured MN and anecdotal information in the field suggests that lamin A localization is not a reliable reporter.

      These discrepancies may be due to how the authors' define "mCherry-NLS leakage", which needs to be defined in the methods as previous studies have demonstrated that MN frequently have delayed or reduced nuclear import even though the membrane is intact. Regardless, the authors need to provide compelling independent evidence that lamin A loss and disruption faithfully recognize ruptured MN by either validating this marker against additional rupture reporters, such as Lap2, LBR, or emerin accumulation, or by repeating key experiments in cells expressing mCherry-NLS.

      Our decision to use lamin A/C as a reporter was based on its use as a marker for micronuclear envelope presence in prior studies (Hatch, 2013; Liu, 2018). We were unaware of anecdotal information in the field that suggests that lamin A localization may not be a reliable reporter.

      However, we think we understand the reviewer’s point to be that although it is clear from prior studies that gaps in the nuclear lamina are a known predictor of micronuclear rupture, these gaps can persist for some time before rupture has actually occurred. We agree that this is an important distinction and thank the reviewer for raising these questions.

      As the reviewer notes, we performed control experiments to address this issue and validate the use of lamin A/C as a marker of micronuclear envelope rupture. Our approach involved correlating lamin staining with the localization of mCherry-NLS signal to the micronucleus (Figure S1). We found that these signals correlated well. As the reviewer points out, this analysis in fixed cells could be misleading in cases where nuclear import is reduced, but the micronuclear envelope is intact. If this were a significant contributor, we may have expected to see greater instances of micronuclei that exhibit continuous lamin A/C signal but lack nuclear localization of mCherry-NLS. However, we found this combination was rare among the KIF18A and RPE1 nocodazole washout treated cells (2%, or 1 of 46 micronuclei had continuous lamin A/C while lacking mCherry-NLS). We admit that this assumption may be oversimplified though.

      The reviewer’s point about the timing of nocodazole treatment and washout something we have definitely considered. We note that prior studies have used differing time points after nocodazole treatment and release. For Hatch et al., 2013: U2OS cells were treated for 6 hours with nocodazole and then subjected to mitotic shakeoff, 48% of micronuclei were ruptured after 6 hours and ~60% were ruptured after 16 hours. Similarly, in Liu et al., 2018 60% of micronuclei were ruptured 16 hours post mitotic shake off and nocodazole release. While these results suggest that rupture increases with time after mitosis, it isn’t clear how early rupture may occur. In other words, does it take several hours in G2 before nearly half of micronuclei rupture or do many of these rupture shortly after cell division?

      We note that other explanations could also potentially contribute to the differences in rupture rates reported in our study compared to those in previous publications. For example, we used a short nocodazole treatment (2 hrs) compared to the longer treatments (6 hrs) used in previous studies. We did this originally in order to produce a similar percentage of micronucleated cells as is seen in KIF18A KO cell populations. However, the difference in nocadozole treatment length could potentially influence the types and frequencies of kinetochore microtubule attachments formed. For example, if centrosomes stay closer together in mitotic cells after short nocodazole treatments, this could increase the number of abnormal attachments (e.g. PMID: 22130796). Such an effect would be expected to increase the frequency of lagging chromosomes and/or potentially produce more lagging chromosomes within the anaphase midzone.

      The best way to address this issue would be to repeat our analyses of mcherry-NLS in live cells to track the formation and rupture of micronuclei. We did attempt these live imaging experiments previously and have found this experiment challenging due to: 1) the low frequency of micronuclear formation in KIF18A KO cell population; 2) a low transfection/expression efficiency for the mCherry-NLS plasmid in RPE1 cells, and 3) photobleaching of the mCherry-NLS plasmid. For these reasons, we transitioned into fixed cell experiments for the mCherry-NLS reporter. However, we propose to troubleshoot this assay and attempt to obtain the data necessary to determine when rupture is occurring. In addition, we will use additional markers to investigate micronuclear envelope stability, as the reviewer has suggested.

      Regardless of the outcome of these experiments, we have measured a clear difference between the lamin deposition within micronuclear envelopes of KIF18A KO cells compared to those formed following other insults. Lamin recruitment is well established as a predictor of nuclear envelope stability. If necessary, we could alter the text to indicate that the presence of lamin A/C and B within micronuclear envelopes of KIF18A KO cells are indicative of nuclear envelope stability, and that this is distinct from the lamin profiles of micronuclei in cells subjected to nocodazole-washout.

      2.Micronuclei in tumor sections and other dense tissues can appear very similar to other types of chromatin, including blebs from adjacent nuclei and dead cells. To verify that the quantified structures are bona fide micronuclei, the authors need to include a marker for the cell boundary. This is especially critical in the lamin a stained tumor sections with heterogenous lamin A protein expression.

      We appreciate the point this reviewer raises and we carefully considered accurate identification of micronuclei in tissues. Three optical sections were collected from each sample. During analyses, we scrolled through the ~2-micron thick sections to exclude chromatin bodies connected to an out-of-plane nucleus or nuclear bleb. We have a limited number of sectioned and preserved thymic lymphoma tissues remaining. We will use these samples to reassess micronuclear frequency in the presence of a cell boundary marker.

      3.Figure 4 compares MN rupture frequency between cells treated with different inducers of micronuclei - KIF18A KO, nocodazole release, and irradiation. These treatments have different effects on the cell cycle: KIF18A causes minor delays, nocodazole arrests cells in mitosis, and g-IR likely causes delays in S and G2. Since MN rupture frequency increases with the duration of interphase, the authors need to assess rupture frequency at similar time points after mitosis for all three conditions. One way to accomplish this would be to repeat this experiment and analyze cells collected by mitotic cells by shake-off prior to fixation and labeling.

      We appreciate this point regarding differences in mitotic timing. Since micronuclear rupture frequency increases with time in interphase, we would expect the MN in KIF18A KO cells to exhibit the highest level of rupture if cell cycle timing were the primary variable affecting stability in our experiments. KIF18A KO cells are asynchronously dividing, and the micronuclei examined in populations of those cells could have been generated at any time. We do not have the same type of temporal control of these events as we do with drug treatment. In contrast, the vast majority of the MN in nocodazole washout cells would not have been in interphase for more than 1.5 hours in our experiments, yet showed increased lamin A/C defects. RPE1 cells treated with MAD2 siRNA knockdown, which do not experience mitotic delays (PMID: 9606211; 15239953), also showed greater frequencies of micronuclear envelopes which lacked lamin A/C compared to those arising in KIF18A KO cells.

      To further address this question, we could attempt a mitotic shake-off assay, however, we believe that the formation of micronuclei, as a percentage in the population of KIF18A KO cells, will be limiting in these experiments.

      As an alternative, we propose to use live cell imaging to follow micronuclear formation and rupture, as described above in reference to point 1.

      **Minor Comments**

      1.In figure 6A, it is unclear when the videos start and how micronuclei are selected for analysis. Do the micronuclei have to be continuously visible from the time they missegregate? Do the videos all start at the same time point during mitosis or is it contingent on when the MN appears separated from the main nucleus? One concern is that a consistent delay in micronucleus appearance in the nocodazole treated cells could artificially decrease the amount of MN expansion observed.

      We thank the reviewer for these questions. The individual micronuclei did not need to be continuously visible from the time that they missegregated, though the majority were. When a micronucleus was not sufficiently in the plane of focus for an accurate area measurement, the individual measurement at that time point was not collected. In cases where one or more frames which were not measurable, a micronucleus was only included in the final data set if it was 1) the only micronucleus present in the daughter cell or 2) easily identifiable to be the same micronucleus. Measurements were taken until the micronuclear area reached an equilibrium for several frames. Final fold change in area was established by dividing final area measurements by initial measurements.

      The initial measurement for each micronucleus taken from the videos all start at the same relative point during mitosis, which is just after chromosome segregation has occurred.

      2.In figure 7A, it is difficult to identify the "lagging" chromosome in the top panel. It would be helpful to label the chromosome that becomes the MN, or ideally, to include a video or still images to demonstrate how micronuclei form in the KIF18A KO cells.

      We have updated the images in Figure 7A to include an example of a lagging chromosome in a KIF18A KO cell. We will also include a more explicit reference to our previous study (Fonseca et al., 2019), which described how micronuclei form around lagging chromosomes in KIF18A KO RPE1 cells.

      3.The two image panels in figure 7A are imaged at significantly different times during anaphase (early anaphase on bottom versus late anaphase/telophase on top). A better comparison would be between two cells at the same time point in anaphase.

      We have updated the images in Figure 7A to compare cells at similar stages of anaphase. In our quantification of lagging chromosomes, we also accounted for anaphase-timing differences by normalizing all measurements within each half-spindle.

      Reviewer #3 (Significance (Required)):

      In this study, the authors identify chromatin decondensation in micronuclei as a new predictor of membrane stability. Although these results are correlative, if their micronucleus rupture results can be validated as described in major comment 1, this study would advance our understanding of the micronucleus rupture mechanism by linking mitotic spindle location, chromatin decondensation, and lamin B1 protein recruitment. This would provide needed support to a current model in the field that micronucleus stability is largely determined during nuclear envelope assembly. In addition, if KIF18a loss generates stable micronuclei at high frequency, it will become a critical system for testing MN rupture hypotheses in the field. Thus, this work would be of significant interest to cell biologists working on nuclear envelope structure and function, chromosome organization, and mitosis. I include myself in this group as a cell biologist studying nuclear envelope structure and function with an expertise in membrane dynamics. The authors also find that mice mutant for KIF18a have increased micronucleation in normal tissues but not increased tumor initiation. They hypothesize that this is due to the low rupture frequency of KIF18a-induced MN, however their data cannot reject the null hypothesis that the small increase in MN they see in KIF18a mutant mice would be insufficient to induce tumorigenesis even if rupture frequency was high. Thus the significance of their finding that micronucleation is not sufficient for cancer progression is unclear. However, the thorough analysis of micronucleation and rupture in several healthy tissues as well as a tumor model in KIF18 mutant mice would be of interest to both pathologists and cancer researchers focused on mechanisms of genome instability. These types of experiments are critical to determine how micronuclei contribute to cancer progression and the quantifications presented in this paper are truly impressive.

      We appreciate this reviewer’s enthusiasm for our work and acknowledge that we cannot definitively conclude that micronuclear envelope stability explains why Kif18a mutant mice do not form tumors. However, it is interesting to note that the micronuclear loads measured using a peripheral erythrocyte assay are similar in Kif18agcd2/gcd2 mutant mice (0.6% micronucleated erythrocytes, of total erythrocytes) and ATMtm1 Awb/tm1 Awb mutant mice (0.6% of micronucleated erythrocytes, of total) (Fonseca et al., 2019). Yet, the tumor frequency in these two models is dramatically different: Kif18agcd2/gcd2 mutant mice do not spontaneously form tumors – while the majority of ATMtm1 Awb/tm1 Awb mutant mice do develop thymic lymphoma tumors between 2 and 4 months (Barlow, 1996). It is not clear how much micronuclei contribute to tumorigenesis in the ATM mutant model, but this comparison does suggest that the increase in MN seen in Kif18a mutants may be physiologically relevant. We have added this information to the revised text (lines 125-130).

      **Referees cross-commenting**

      I agree with the concerns raised by the other 2 reviewers, especially their comments about the need to clarify the mechanism of chromosome lagging versus chromosome congression and compaction. I think that all of these suggestions, though, are contingent on them being able to reproduce their micronucleus rupture results with a better marker of nucleus integrity. I strongly believe that additional validation of lamin A as a micronucleus rupture marker will demonstrate that it is unreliable, based both on our own observations in RPE-1 cells and the images they show

    1. Reviewer #3:

      Behaviours that are instrumental for producing reward can be either goal-directed or, after repeated practice, habitual. Tasks that dissociate these types of learning, notably outcome devaluation, are tricky to implement for studying intravenous drug delivery although there is great interest to understand the role of habits in controlling drug use and addiction and so this paper is important in that regard. This article takes a new approach analyzing response latencies to infer the types of decision-making process that underlies a reward-seeking behaviour. Goal-directed behaviours are argued to involve evaluation of the outcome of responding and/or deliberation between choices both of which should take time, and slow responding relative to an efficient but inflexible habit. So I think this approach is quite interesting. The paper is well written and the predictions are clear.

      My main issue in evaluating the current article is that while different predictions are made about when response latency should be relatively fast or slow, since the article is framed in terms of dissociating goal-directed and habitual processes, I feel there should be some independent evaluation of whether the target behaviour is in fact goal-directed or habitual. The authors rely on the amount of training as extended training has been shown to promote habitual control. However, exactly how much training is needed and how other parameters (type of reward, schedules of reinforcement, choice or single outcome) affect when habitual control may emerge varies widely in the literature and I don't think we can take for granted that after a certain amount of training responding will be habitual without testing that.

      It is also important to consider alternative explanations for differences in response latency. A behaviour that is well-practiced might well be expected to become more efficient and faster. This need not be due to habit formation. The authors acknowledge the possibility that responding could be at floor but don't really discuss it or whether it might apply more to the saccharin response.

    2. Reviewer #1:

      Vandaele et al. probe the mechanisms of decision making in rats when making a forced choice between drug and non-drug reward. The authors have led the field in this domain. In this manuscript, a retrospective analysis of choice response times from many rats in their past work is used to tease out potential decision-making mechanisms. We know already from decades of work that choice response times are almost always log-normally distributed (humans, non-human primates, rodents). The question here is whether differences in the mean and dispersion of these distributions can be used to derive insights into nature of the decision-making mechanism - a deliberative comparison versus a race model - and how this may differ for rats that prefer cocaine over saccharin and how this might be altered by more extended training. These questions are framed in terms of the differences between goal-directed and habitual behavior which, to be frank, I found less compelling (these response time data are of significant interest in their own right). I enjoyed reading this manuscript. It was thoughtful and well presented. I have only two comments.

      First, much, if not all, of the absolute differences between latencies in sample and choice phases appear to be carried by the sample rather than the choice phase. Choice latencies for cocaine preferring rats, saccharin preferring rats, and the indifferent rats are all very similar. In contrast, the sampling latencies for cocaine preferring rats and the indifferent rats are longer. I am not sure why this should be. My reading was that the authors were more concerned with the choice side of the experiment being different, not the sample phase. Is this predicted by the models being tested? I struggled to understand why an SCM-like model would predict the difference being in the sample phase. Either way, the authors could be clearer about where the difference is expected to lie and why the sample phase is so obviously different in some conditions and the choice phase so similar.

      Second, the main and real issue for me is whether the differences between response latencies in the sample versus choice phases plausibly reflect operation of different decision making mechanisms (race model versus deliberative processing) or different operation of the same decision-making mechanism. I don't know the answer, but I could not really derive the answer from the data and modelling provided. The authors frame the differences in response time as being uniquely predicted or explained by different forms of choice. The models that the authors are using are closely linked to, and intellectually derived from, models of human choice reaction time. The most successful of these models are the diffusion model (DDM) (Ratcliff, R., Smith, P.L., Brown, S.D., and McKoon, G. (2016). Diffusion Decision Model: Current Issues and History. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 20, 260-281) and the linear ballistic accumulator (LBA) (Brown, S.D., and Heathcote, A. (2008). The simplest complete model of choice response time: linear ballistic accumulation. Cognitive Psychology 57, 153-178.2008).

      Even though the DDM and LBA adopt different architectures to each other (but the same architectures as those in Supp Fig 1A), they are intended to explain the same data. Of relevance, the same model (a DDM or an LBA) can explain differences in both the response distribution and the mean response time via changes in the starting point of evidence accumulation, rate of evidence accumulation, and/or the boundary or threshold at which evidence is translated into choice behavior. So, for either a difference accumulator model (DDM) or a race model (LBA), the difference between sampling and choice performance could reflect changes in how the model is operating between these two phases, including a change in the starting point of the decision [bias], a change in rate of accumulation [evidence], a change in threshold [caution] or collapsing boundary scenario, rather than reflecting operation of a completely different decision-making mechanism.

      In thinking of a way forward I readily concede I could be wrong and the authors may effectively rebut this point. Another option could be to acknowledge this possibility and discuss it. E.g., does it really matter if it is a qualitatively different decision-making process or different operation of the same decision-making mechanism? I don't really think the action-habit distinction lives or dies by reaction/response time data, this distinction is almost certainly far less absolute than often portrayed in the addiction literature, and it is generally intended as an account of what is learned rather than an account of how that learning is translated into behaviour (even if an S-R mechanism provides an account of both). Response time data tell me, at least, something different about how what has been learned is translated into behaviour. The third, marginally more difficult but more interesting option, would be to explore these issues formally and to move beyond simple descriptive or LDA analyses of response time distributions. The LBA has a full analytical solution and there are reasonable approximations for the DDM. Formal modelling of choice response times (e.g., Bayesian parameter estimation for a race model or DDM) could indicate whether a single decision-making mechanism (LBA or DDM or something else) can explain response times under both sample and choice conditions or not. This is a standard approach in cognitive modelling. This would be compelling if it showed the dissociation the authors argue - i.e. one model cannot be fit to both sample and choice datasets for all animals. However, if one model can be fit to both, then formal modelling would show which decision making parameters change between the sample and choice conditions for cocaine v saccharin v individual animals to putatively cause the differences in response times observed. Either way, more formal modelling would provide a platform towards identification of those specific features of the decision-making mechanisms that are being affected.

    1. The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.

      The importance of interchangeable parts is underlined here. Before the mass production of parts, something that we do not even think about not working, like a lightbulb, would have taken possibly weeks for a craftsman to make. It may not have even been possible to have lightbulbs made if it was not for interchangeable parts.

    2. Machines with interchangeable parts can now be constructed with great economy of effort. In spite of much complexity, they perform reliably

      I would argue that quality and quality control diminishes heavily when interchangeable parts are produced cheaply and at high intervals. I understand that they perform reliably for a short period of time, but there is a reason we see older cars at a high volume, and its because they were built with higher quality materials and at a slower rate to ensure a quality product.

    1. If you do so, you will do well, and that which you are obliged to do to their Highnesses, and we in their name shall receive you in all love and charity, and shall leave you, your wives, and your children, and your lands, free without servitude, that you may do with them and with yourselves freely that which you like and think best, and they shall not compel you to turn Christians, unless you yourselves, when informed of the truth, should wish to be converted to our Holy Catholic Faith, as almost all the inhabitants of the rest of the islands have done. And, besides this, their Highnesses award you many privileges and exemptions and will grant you many benefits.

      This specific part shows the noble intentions Spain had towards the new people they had encounter in the new world. Unlike other empires such as the British or the French, the Spanish empire oficial position was to always pursue peace before war in the Americas, and always tried to unify with the natives, and saw them as equal as any other spanish in front of the crown.

      This was due (among other factors) to the fact that the queen Isabel "La Católica" was very catholic, and following the teachings she learned from catholicisim, she always ordered that the natives should be treated well and no harm should be done upon them. She even ordered Columbus to punish any man who would harm the natives (something Columbus later ignored).

    1. ome even refer to child care and early childhood programs as an industry, rather than as a service

      I cannot help but think about all children and educators may lose if we are thought of as an industry. You see this with many cookie-cutter, for profit centers that push fear to families, making them concerned about "readiness" and academics, without stressing the need and important developmental aspects of play or social-emotional needs for young children.

    1. ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS

      Are these based off of school curriculum or can they encompass what we think is important as well? How close do we need to follow a districts outline if we think things may be superfluous or unnecessary for understanding?

    1. Reviewer #2:

      The study investigates key components of the entorhinal circuits through which signals from the hippocampus are relayed to the neocortex. The question addressed is important but the stated claim that layer 5b (L5b) to layer 5a (L5a) connections mediate hippocampal-cortical outputs in LEC but not MEC appears to be an over-interpretation of the data. First, the experiments do not test hippocampal to L5a connections, but instead look at L5b to L5a connections. Second, the data provide evidence that there are L5b to L5a projections in LEC and MEC, which contradicts the claim made in the title. These projections do appear denser in LEC under the experimental conditions used, but possible technical explanations for the difference are not carefully addressed. If these technical concerns were addressed, and the conclusions modified appropriately, then I think this study could be very important for the field and would complement well recent work from several labs that collectively suggests that information processing in deep layers of MEC is more complex than has been appreciated (e.g. Sürmeli et al. 2015, Ohara et al. 2018, Wozny et al. 2018, Rozov et al. 2020). Major Concerns:

      1) An impressive component of the study is the introduction of a new mouse line that labels neurons in layer 5b of MEC and LEC. However, in each area the line appears to label only a subset (30-50%) of the principal cell population. It's unclear whether the unlabelled neurons have similar connectivity to the labelled neurons. If the unlabelled neurons are a distinct subpopulation then it's difficult to see how the experiments presented could support the conclusion that L5b does not project to L5a; perhaps there is a projection mediated by the unlabelled neurons? I don't think the authors need to include experiments to investigate the unlabelled population, but given that the labelling is incomplete they should be more cautious about generalising from data obtained with the line.

      2) For experiments using the AAV conditionally expressing oChIEF-citrine, the extent to which the injections are specific to LEC/MEC is unclear. This is a particular concern for injections into LEC where the possibility that perirhinal or postrhinal cortex are also labelled needs to be carefully considered. For example, in Figure 3D it appears the virus has spread to the perirhinal cortex. If this is the case then axonal projections/responses could originate there rather than from L5b of LEC. I suggest excluding any experiments where there is any suggestion of expression outside LEC/MEC or where this can not be ruled out through verification of the labelling. Alternatively, one might include control experiments in which the AAV is targeted to the perirhinal and postrhinal cortex. Similar concerns should be addressed for injections that target the MEC to rule out spread to the pre/parasubiculum.

      3) It appears likely from the biocytin fills shown that the apical dendrites of some of the recorded L5a neurons have been cut (e.g. Figure 4A, Figure 4-Supplement 1D, neuron v). Where the apical dendrite is clearly intact and undamaged synaptic responses to activation of L5b neurons are quite clear (e.g. Figure 4-Supplement 1D, neuron x). Given that axons of L5b cells branch extensively in L3, it is possible that any synapses they make with L5a neurons would be on their apical dendrites within L3. It therefore seems important to restrict the analysis only to L5a neurons with intact apical dendrites; a reasonable criteria would be that the dendrite extends through L3 at a reasonable distance (> 30 μm?) below the surface of the slice.

      4) Throughout the manuscript the data is over-interpreted. Here are some examples:

      • The title over-extrapolates from the results and should be changed. A more accurate title would be along the lines of "Evidence that L5b to L5a connections are more effective in lateral compared to medial entorhinal cortex".

      • "the conclusion that the dorsal parts of MEC lack the canonical hippocampal-cortical output system" seems over-stated given the evidence (see comments above).

      • Discussion, para 1, "Our key finding is that LEC and MEC are strikingly different with respect to the hippocampal-cortical pathway mediated by LV neurons, in that we obtained electrophysiological evidence for the presence of this postulated crucial circuit in LEC, but not in MEC". This is misleading as there is also evidence for L5b to L5a connections in MEC, although this projection may be relatively weak. Recent work by Rozov et al. demonstrating a projection from intermediate hippocampus to L5a provides good evidence for an alternative model in which MEC does relay hippocampal outputs. This needs to be considered.

      5) What proportion of responses are mono-synaptic? How was this tested?

    1. what the advantages might be in incorporating OER as a part of the regular or special needs classroom. Any disadvantages?

      Incorporating OER in the classroom has many advantages. OER allow students to learn not just by reading a textbook, but by interacting with resources in a variety of ways. OER can be videos, online books, games (to name just a few), and students often find them more engaging than traditional resources. OER allow for differentiated instruction as different resources may work better for some types of learners over others. If a student needs more of a challenge, there might be a more complicated game or activity that they can work on through OER. OER could be a big advantage in a SPED classroom. Some students might do better HEARING a lesson on a video as opposed to reading about a concept, for example. OER are also great because they can be changed/updated more regularly than a textbook. The video we watched talked about how math and sciences textbooks quickly go out-of-date. OER are free. I work at a university and I can tell you that the cost of traditional textbooks is often a burden to students. I think the one big disadvantage of OER is internet accessibility (especially during COVID). My son’s school district is doing a great job of getting access for students who do not have internet, but I could see in “regular” times, if this was not a priority, that students without computers or internet (or slow internet) would be at a disadvantage.

    1. not as a wellspringof truth but as a pool of imagination,

      We all have our own ideas and truths. We may think one way as we read through the stories, but hear a different thought of truth. They both should be treated as equal as there is no clear answer.

    1. Meanwhile, we are going to have to work actively so those systematically less pre-sent in printed sources do not fall out of view.

      I do wonder the impacts of what is lost to time. Obviously, we've already lost a bounty of information to time over the last thousands of years, but humans today (within the last several hundred years) also out-produce the humans of a thousand years ago. So while more may be saved as a %, that doesn't mean we aren't loosing so, so much (and how that shapes the history of.... history for the future). I think that's the point being made here.

    1. The "dialogical man" is critical and knows that although it is within the power of humans to create and transform, in a concrete situation of alienation individuals may be impaired in the use of that power.

      I chose this quote because I think there are multiple ways that one might interpret it. The message that I drew from this quote is that even the most grounded of humans must recognize that to be human alone, is to be far from perfect. The ;'dialogical man' that Freire refers to is supposed to be aware of how crucial the aspect of dialogue is to life and understand the immense power that humans hold, all while knowing how inferior they truly can be. In reading this quote I see how it can be connected to my father as although he is an extremely wise and balanced person he remains humble in the fact that he still has much to learn. I see how this relates to Angela Davis's work in the way that as a society we have all accepted that the prison system is the correct way to deal with crime, and we have accepted this for so long. It is shocking that humanity grows in so many ways year after year, yet we still believe that laws and systems we created decades ago remain just as effective. Angela Davis creates the dialogue that the prison system is obsolete, and it is up to humanity to further this dialogue and push for change.

    1. is the goal for patients to have more autonomy and self-determination when it comes to their care?

      Without giving too much detail, I just wanted to comment on how big of a difference it makes when a health care professional makes a conscious effort to include you and your input in on the course of your treatment. Of course it comes down to professional expertise, but dealing with doctors who discussed options with me and let me have as much control as possible/appropriate over changes to medications, for example, has routinely been profoundly less stressful than situations in which I was given no choice nor say. I also respect that sometimes what I want may not be what's best for me/most effective, and because of my doctor's history of including me and educating me on every choice he/we made, I am comfortable trusting his judgement in such scenarios. I think that's what it comes down to: mutual communication, respect, and trust.

    1. It might seem unfair to IVHS to consider it in light of all thisother accumulated information-but I think, on the contrary, that it isthe only way to see the threat accurately. The reason is this: We haveprivacy when we can keep personal things out of the public view.Information-gathering in any particular realm may not seem to pose avery grave threat precisely because it is' generally possible to preserveone's privacy by escaping into other realms. Consequently, as welook at each kind of information-gathering in isolation from the others,each may seem relatively benign.2 However, as each is put into prac-tice, its effect is to close off yet another escape route from public ac-cess, so that when the whole complex is in place, its overall effect onprivacy will be greater than the sum of the effects of the parts. Whatwe need to know is IVHS's role in bringing about this overall effect,and it plays that role by contributing to the establishment of the wholecomplex of information-gathering modalities.

      Reiman argues that we can typically achieve privacy by escaping into a different realm. We can avoid public eyes by retreating into our private houses. It seems we could avoid Facebook by, well, avoiding Facebook.

      If we treat each information-gather in one realm as separate, they may seem relatively benign.

      When these realms are connected, they close off our escape routes and the effect on privacy becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

    1. Reviewer #1:

      This study examines MEG activity in a picture categorization task (decide living or non-living) in a sample of 18 patients with semantic variant PPA, compared to 18 controls. As svPPA is a rare (but scientifically informative) disorder, the sample size is impressive, and given that relatively few MEG studies exist in PPA at all, this is an interesting dataset. The authors show differences in engagement of oscillatory activity, specifically increased low-gamma ERS in occipital cortex and increased beta ERD in the superior temporal gyrus. The authors interpret this as reflecting increased engagement of / reliance on early perceptual mechanisms for completing the task, as opposed to semantic identification of the picture.

      Major concerns:

      1) My biggest methodological issue with this paper relates to a very old debate in neuroimaging that still comes up all the time: the choice of statistical threshold. Using a high threshold prevents false positives, but may also lead to false negatives, and I fear that is the case here, with the high threshold contributing to an unrealistic impression of spatial specificity in MEG. It is obvious from the average responses in both groups that these oscillatory responses are widespread through the brain. Indeed the alpha and beta responses are significant in the majority of cortical voxels. This basic property of the responses should be presented clearly and prominently in the paper - I don't think it's appropriate to put it in supplementary information where only a minority of readers will even see it. The authors then use what I think is an extremely high and conservative statistical threshold to contrast differences between the two groups. P<.005 uncorrected is a highly conservative threshold already, even before cluster-thresholding is added (although with data as smooth as MEG beamforming solutions, cluster-thresholding is unlikely to change anything). Basically this makes the only the strongest part of the activation survive, and it is valid to conclude that a significant group difference exists there (protected from Type 1 error), but this can give a false impression of the difference is specific to that region. I think a more realistic characterization of the results would involve measuring differences in the strength of the responses between groups on a broader level, possibly the sensors or in large ROIs - and not ROIs pre-selected to show a dramatic difference by first searching the whole brain for the most significant effects - that is the classic "double-dipping" fallacy in neuroimaging.

      2) Similarly, the ERD/ERS in each frequency band is treated as a separate entity, ignoring the fact that these bands are arbitrary and frequency is a continuous quantity. This matters because much is made of the fact that PPA participants exhibited greater ERS in the low-gamma range, and that this was correlated with reaction time. Supplementary figure 1 shows that both groups had strong occipital ERS in the high-gamma range, but only PPA showed it in the low gamma range as well. This suggests that the ERS in the PPA group may simply have been shifted to a lower frequency range. A more fulsome characterization of these group differences via time-frequency analysis and/or power spectral analysis would help clarify what is going on here.

      3) It is surprising that PPA participants only exhibited increased MEG responses compared to controls - assuming that both gamma ERS and beta ERD can be interpreted as increased neural activation, which is a reasonable assumption based on the literature. No decreases in the PPA group are found, and thus the observed increases can be plausibly attributed to compensatory processes as framed by the authors. However, I am concerned about the role of certain analysis choices in producing this data pattern. In particular, the authors state (line 611): "To remove potential artifacts due to neurodegeneration or eye movement (lacking electrooculograms), we masked statistical maps using patients' ATL atrophy maps (see section MRI protocol and analyses), as well as a ventromedial frontal mask."

      It is not clear whether this masking was done in group space from average atrophy maps, or on an individual level. In either case, I don't think this is well justified. I don't know any physical mechanism by which tissue undergoing neurodegeneration can be said to generate an artifactual signal. Atrophied tissue still contains living neurons with ionic currents; these are real signals not artifacts, and furthermore, atrophy is a continuous process with tissue further from the epicenter also undergoing similar neurodegenerative mechanisms. Atrophied tissue may well generate electromagnetic signals that are different from healthy tissue, and such differences should be included in this paper. I think that there may be regions of hypoactivation as well as hyperactivation in this PPA group. If the hypoactivation localizes to atrophied tissue and the hyperactivation to other regions, that will bolster the case that we are seeing compensatory processes, but it isn't certain with half the story masked. I also don't really see statistical masking of the frontal region as a valid solution to eye movement artifacts. The authors would have to present evidence that the region that they masked corresponds to the region potentially affected by eye movements. However, many studies have found that beamforming already does a pretty good job of removing ocular artifacts from estimated brain signals, except for very close to the eyes.

      4) The correlation with reaction time in the occipital cortex is consistent with the idea that the ERS there may reflect compensatory overreliance on perceptual information, but it isn't conclusive. The authors suggest that PPA patients are able to categorize the stimuli correctly based on visual features, but are unable to name them. What about testing for correlations with the out-of-scanner behavioural measures that established that the patients have a naming deficit? It would strengthen the case if atrophy or hypoactivation (see comment above) correlated with the naming deficit.

    1. Reviewer #2:

      Overall I think the authors collected an interesting dataset. Analyses should be adjusted to include all cells rather than sub-selecting for stability. Additionally, the language needs to be adjusted to better reflect the data. I wish there was any behavioral data included, but if the authors compare their data to publicly available data in V1 for a single recording session during a visually guided task, these concerns could be quelled a bit.

      1) In general the language of this paper and title seem to mismatch the results. The fraction of cells that were 'stable' as the authors say on line 112 was very small, however the authors focus extensively on this small subset for the majority of analyses in the paper. Why ignore the bulk of data (line 119)? What happens if you repeat the same analysis and keep all cells in the dataset? The general language around stability of neural ensembles should be adjusted to better reflect the data (ex: lines 157, 225).

      2) There are claims in this paper about how ensembles 'implement long-term memories' in the introduction and conclusion and yet the authors never link the activity of ensembles to any behavioral or stimulus dependent feature. This language reaches far beyond the evidence provided in this paper. The introduction could provide some better framing for expectations of stability vs. drift in neural activity rather than focus on the link between ensembles and memory given that there isn't much focus on the ensembles' contribution to memory throughout. For example, the last sentence of the paper is not supported by data in the paper. Where is the link between ensembles and memory in the data? What is the evidence that transient ensembles are related to new or degraded memories? This reads as though it was the authors' hypothesis before doing the experiments and was not adjusted in light of the results.

      3) There is no discussion around the alternative to stability of neuronal ensembles. What are the current theories about representational drift? For example, in Line 34 the authors present an expectation for stability without any reasoning for why there need not be stability. This lack of framing makes their job of explaining results in line 217 more difficult. There is a possibility that the most stable cells aren't more important - what is the evidence that they are? Does an ensemble need a core? Would be interesting to include some discussion on the possibility of a drifting readout (Line 223). [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conb.2019.08.005]

      4) How do activations in V1 in this dataset compare to other data collected from V1 while the animal is performing a task (where for example the angle of the gradings is relevant to how the mouse should respond)? I would be interested to know if the authors compared statistics of their ensembles to publicly available data recorded in V1 during a visually guided behavior. Are the ensembles tuned to anything in particular? Could they be related to movement? [http://repository.cshl.edu/id/eprint/38599/]

      5) The authors provide some hypotheses as to why fewer cells are active in the later imaging sessions (dead/dying cells?). This is worrisome in regards to how much it might have affected the imaged area's biology. One alternative hypothesis is that the animal is more familiar with the environment/ not running as much etc. Have the authors collected any behavioral data to compare over time?

      6) How much do the results change when you vary the 50% threshold of preserved neurons within an ensemble (Line 146)? Does it make sense to call an ensemble stable when 50% of the cells change? Especially given that the cells analyzed as contributing to an ensemble are already sub-selected to be within the small population of stable cells (Line 119)?

      7) Cells are referred to as 'stable' when they're active on 3 different sessions that are separated in time. However, the authors find a smaller number of cells are stable over extended time (43-46 days later). If we extrapolate this over more time, would we expect these cells to continue to be stable? Given these concerns, it might make more sense to qualify the language around stability by the timespan over which these cells were studied.

      8) Filtering frames to only coactive neurons for ensemble identification seems strange to me. Authors may be overestimating the extent of coactivation. What happens when you don't do this? How much do the results change when you don't subselect for Jaccard similarity? I would be interested to see how the results vary as you vary this threshold (Line 136).

      9) The term 'evoked activity' is misleading because the authors don't link these activations to the visual stimulus. There's no task, so the mice could be paying little attention to the stimulus. Should we really consider this activity to be visually driven? Could the authors provide any evidence of this?

      10) A method like seqNMF could reveal ensembles that are offset in time. This looser temporal constraint could potentially reveal more structure. This should be run on the entire dataset (without stability sub-selection). I suggest this as a potential alternative or supplement to the method described by the authors. [https://elifesciences.org/articles/38471]

    1. A like reasoning will account for the idea of external existence. We may observe, that 'tis universally allow'd by philosophers, and is besides pretty obvious of itself, that nothing is ever really present with the mind but its perceptions or impressions and ideas, and that external objects become known to us only by those perceptions they occasion. To hate, to love, to think, to feel, to see; all this is nothing but to perceive. Now since nothing is ever present to the mind but perceptions, and since all ideas are deriv'd from something antecedently present to the mind; it follows, that 'tis impossible for us so much as to conceive or form an idea of any thing specifically different from ideas and impressions. Let us fix our attention out of ourselves as much as possible: Let us chace our imagination to the heavens, or to the utmost limits of the universe; we never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can conceive any kind of existence, but those perceptions, which have appear'd in that narrow compass. This is the universe of the imagination, nor have we any idea but what is there produc'd.

      there is not such a thing like existence outside perception

  4. Dec 2020
    1. The United States agrees, at its own proper expense, to construct, at some place on the Missouri river, near the centre of said reservation where timber and water may be convenient, the following buildings, to wit, a warehouse, a store-room for the use of the agent in storing goods belonging to the Indians, to cost not less than $2,500; an agency building, for the residence of the agent, to cost not exceeding $3,000; a residence for the physician, to cost not more than $3,000; and five other buildings, for a carpenter, farmer, blacksmith, miller, and engineer-each to cost not exceeding $2,000; also, a school-house, or mission building, so soon as a sufficient number of children can be induced by the agent to attend school, which shall not cost exceeding $5,000.

      If this promise can be done properly, I think it's going to change Native American's lives. However, based on what we have studied this quarter. I think it is not the case.

    1. Note: This rebuttal was posted by the corresponding author to Review Commons. Content has not been altered except for formatting.

      Learn more at Review Commons


      Reply to the reviewers

      We thank the reviewers for their constructive suggestions, which have substantially improved this work. We have comprehensively revised the manuscript, and detail individual responses below:

      Reviewer #1 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)):

      The study by Forbes et al describes and characterizes a 2nd generation peptide-based inhibitor of the MYB:CBP interaction, termed CRYBMIM, which they use to study MYB:cofactor interactions in leukemia cells. The CRYBMIM has improved properties relative to the MYBMIM peptide, and display more potency in biochemical and cell-based assays. Using a combination of epigenomics and biochemical screens, the authors define a list of candidate MYB cofactors whose functional significance as AML dependencies is supported by analysis of the DepMap database. Using genomewide profiling of TF and CBP occupancy, the authors provide evidence that CRYBMIM treatment reprograms the interactome of MYB in a manner that disproportionately changes specific cis-elements over others. Stated differently, the overall occupancy pattern of many TFs/cofactors shows gains and losses at specific cis elements, resulting in a complex modulation of MYB function and changes in transcription in leukemia cells. Overall, this is a strong, well-written study, with clear experimental results and relatively straightforward conclusions. The therapeutic potential of modulating MYB in cancer is enormous, and hence I believe this study will attract a broad interest in the cancer field and will likely be highly cited. I list below a few control experiments that would clarify the specificity of CRYBMIM. 1) Does CRYBMIM bind to other KIX domains, such as of MED15. It would be important to evaluate the specificity of this peptide for whether it binds to other KIX domains.

      Response: We analyzed all known human KIX domain sequences, and found that the most similar one to CBP/P300 is MED15 (38% identity), as shown in revised Supp. Fig. 2D. The sequence similarity of the remaining human KIX domains is substantially lower. To determine the specificity of CRYBMIM in binding the CBP/P300 versus MED15, we exposed human AML cell extracts to biotinylated CRYBMIM immobilized on streptavidin beads versus beads alone. Whereas CRYBMIM binds efficiently to CBP/P300, it does not exhibit any measurable binding to MED15 (even though MED15 is highly expressed), as shown in revised Supp. Fig. 2E, and reproduced for convenience below. While this does not exclude the possibility that CRYBMIM binds to other proteins, the biochemical specificity observed here, combined with the genetic requirement of CBP for cellular effects of CRYBMIM as shown by a genome-wide CRISPR screen (Fig. 1B and below), indicate that CRYBMIM is a specific ligand of CBP/P300. The manuscript has been revised on page 6 and 4-5 accordingly.

      2) Similarly, it would be useful to perform a mass spec analysis to all nuclear factors that associate with streptavidin-immobilized CRYBMIM. This again would be help the reader to understand the specificity of this peptide.

      Response: We agree with the reviewer that macromolecular ligands like CRYBMIM may interact with cellular proteins in complex ways. To define specific effects, we utilized four orthogonal strategies, explained below.

      First, we purified the CBP-containing nuclear complex using immunoprecipitation and determined its composition by mass spectrometry proteomics. This analysis revealed 833 proteins that are specifically associated with CBP (revised Table S6). Although technically feasible, the fact that CBP is associated with hundreds of proteins would make the experiment suggested by the reviewer difficult to interpret, because it would be a major challenge to distinguish proteins bound directly by the peptide versus proteins purified indirectly by virtue of the fact that CRYBMIM binds to CBP/P300, which in turn binds to many other proteins. While we recently developed improved methods for cross-linking mass spectrometry proteomics that permit the identification of direct protein-protein interactions (Ser, Cifani, Kentsis 2019, https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jproteome.9b00085), we believe that these experiments are beyond the scope of the current manuscript, which already includes 40 new figure panels as part of this revision.

      In lieu of this experiment, we purified the CBP-containing nuclear complex after treatment with CRYBMIM or control using immunoprecipitation and determined its composition by targeting Western blotting. This analysis revealed RUNX1, LYL1 and SATB1 are specifically associated with CBP (revised Fig. 14B), among which RUNX1 is specifically remodeled in the MYB:CBP/P300 complex upon CRYBMIM binding. This transcriptional factor recruitment and remodeling support the idea of CRYBMIM’s specificity for the MYB:CBP/P300 complex.

      Second, to define the specificity of CRYBMIM, we used glycine mutants of CRYBMIM and its parent MYBMIM, CG3 and TG3, respectively, in which residues that form key salt bridge and hydrophobic interactions with KIX are replaced with glycines, but otherwise retain all other features of the active probes. Both CG3 and TG3 exhibit significantly reduced effects on the viability of AML cell lines, consistent with the specific effects of CRYBMIM (Fig. 3D).

      To confirm that this is due to CBP binding, we purified cellular CBP/P300 by binding to biotinylated CRYBMIM, and observed that it can be efficiently competed by excess of free CRYBMIM, but not TAT (Fig. 2E).

      Finally, to establish definitively that cellular CBP is responsible for CRYBMIM effects, we generated isogenic cell lines that are either deficient or proficient for CBP using CRISPR genome editing. This experiment demonstrated that CBP deficiency confers significant resistance to CRYBMIM, indicating that CBP is required for CRYBMIM-mediated effects (revised Figure 4), and reproduced below. We revised the manuscript on pages 21, 8, 6 and 9 accordingly.

      3) The major limitation of this study which modestly lessens my enthusiasm of this work is that the mechanistic model of MYB-sequestered TFs proposed here is based on a face-value interpretation of IP-MS data coupled with ChIP-seq data. Normally, I would expect such a mechanism to be supported with some additional focused biochemical experiments of specific interactions, to complement all of the omics approaches. For example, can the authors evaluate and/or validate further how MYB physically interacts with LYL1, CEBPA, SPI1, or RUNX1. Are these interactions direct or indirect? Which domains of these proteins are involved? Does CRYBMIM treatment modulate the ability of these proteins to associate with one another in a co-IP? Do these interactions occur in normal hematopoietic cells? A claim is made throughout this study that these are aberrant TF complexes, but I believe more evidence is required to support this claim.

      Response: We appreciate the reviewer’s comment and totally agree with this point. To examine how MYB aberrantly assembles transcription factors in AML, we performed MYB co-immunoprecipitation (co-IP) in a panel of seven genetically diverse AML cell lines with varying susceptibility to CRYBMIM, chosen to represent the common and refractory forms of human AML. Here, we confirmed co-assembly of CBP/P300, LYL1, E2A, LMO2 in all AML cell lines tested, and cell type-specific co-assembly of SATB1 and CEBPA, as shown in revised Fig. 8A, which are in agreement with the IP-MS and ChIP-seq results. We further corroborated these findings by co-IP studies of CBP/P300, as shown in the revised Fig. 8B. We performed similar co-IP experiments in normal hematopoietic progenitor cells, and found most of the co-assembled factors in AML cells were not observed in normal cells except for CBP/P300 and LYL1, as shown in the revised Figure 9E. Combined with the apparently aberrant expression of E2A and SATB1 in AML cells but not normal blood cells, this leads us to conclude that MYB assembles aberrant transcription factor complexes in AML cells. These complexes can be remodeled by peptidomimetic inhibitors, leading to their redistribution on chromatin, suppression of oncogenic gene expression and induction of cellular differentiation. We confirmed this mechanism by direct biochemical experiments in AML cells, demonstrating disassembly and remodeling of CBP/P300 complexes, as shown in the revised Figure 14. At least some of these interactions are direct, given the known direct binding between MYB and CEBPA (Oelgeschläger, Nuchprayoon, Lüscher, Friedman 1996, https://doi.org/10.1128/mcb.16.9.4717). We revised the manuscript text on pages 13, 15 and 21 accordingly.

      Reviewer #1 (Significance (Required)):

      Overall, this is a strong, well-written study, with clear experimental results and relatively straightforward conclusions. The therapeutic potential of modulating MYB in cancer is enormous, and hence I believe this study will attract a broad interest in the cancer field and will likely be highly cited.

      Response: We appreciate this sentiment and completely agree with the reviewer. The phenomenon reported in this work represents the first of its kind demonstration of the aberrant organization of transcription factor control complexes in cancer, and its pharmacologic modulation. We believe that this concept will serve as a transformative paradigm for understanding oncogenic gene control and the development of effective therapies for its definitive treatment.

      Reviewer #2 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)):

      This manuscript reports the generation of a new and improved peptide mimetic inhibitor of the interaction between MYB and CBP/P300. The original MYBMIM inhibitor of this interaction, reported recently by the same laboratory, was modified by addition and substitution of peptide sequences from CREB, thus improving the affinity of the resulting CRYBMIM peptide to CBP/P300. The improved inhibitor profile results in increased anti-AML efficacy of CRYBMIM over MYBMIM. The authors go on to examine the mechanism underlying the anti-AML activity of CRYBMIM by integrating gene expression analysis, chromatin immunoprecipitation sequencing and mass spectrometric protein complex identification in human AML cells. I have some minor questions the authors may wish to comment on:

      1) The relocation of MYB, along with CBP/P300, to genes controlling myeloid differentiation (clusters 4 and 9) upon CRYBMIM treatment is reminiscent of the increased binding of MYB to myeloid pro-differentiation genes in AML cells following RUVBL2 silencing, recently reported in Armenteros-Monterroso et al. 2019 Leukemia 33:2817. Do the authors know if there is any overlap between genes in either of the clusters and the list reported in the latter study?

      Response: We thank the reviewer for making this suggestion. We also observe both RUVBL2 and RUVBL1 in the protein complex specifically associated with MYB (Fig. 7A and B). We compared the gene expression changes induced by CRYBMIM with those reported by Armenteros-Monterroso et al in 2019 (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41375-019-0495-8), and found that 37% of upregulated genes by RUVBL2 silencing were shared with genes induced by CRYBMIM treatment. In addition, upregulated genes in cluster 4 and 9 included myeloid differentiation-related genes, such as JUN, FOS and FOSB, which were also induced RUVBL2 silencing. We revised the manuscript to reflect this association on page 12.

      2) Could the authors comment on a possible mechanism to explain the co-localization of MYB and CBP/P300 to the loci in clusters 4 and 9 following CRYBMIM treatment? Is it possible that CBP/P300 is recruited by other transcription factors to these loci, independently of binding to MYB? Or is the binding of CBP/P300 to MYB at these loci somehow more resistant to disruption by CRYBMIM?

      Response: The reviewer has focused on an interesting point. At least for cluster 9, these genes exhibit gain of CBP/P300 in association with RUNX1 (Figure 12A), which we confirm by direct biochemical studies of MYB and CBP/P300 complexes immunoprecipitated from AML cells (revised Figure 14B-C). These experiments show that CRYBMIM treatment disrupts the MYB:CBP/P300 complexes, leading to the increased assembly of CBP/P300 with RUNX1. These findings are consistent with a dynamic competition mechanism that governs availability of CBP/P300 to transcriptional co-activation, in which distinct transcription factors compete for limiting amounts of CBP/P300. This possible mechanism is discussed in the revised manuscript (page 18-19 and 21).

      3) In the first paragraph of page 9, the text states: "Previously, we found that MYBMIM can suppress MYB:CBP/P300-dependent gene expression, leading to AML cell apoptosis that required MYB-mediated suppression of BCL2 (Ramaswamy et al., 2018)." I think this is a typo, since in this study, MYBMIM treatment results in loss of MYB binding to the BCL2 gene and consequent reduction in BCL2 expression. Do the authors mean 'MYBMIM-mediated suppression of BCl2' or 'loss of MYB-mediated activation of BCL2'?

      Response: We thank the reviewer and have corrected this typographic error in the text.

      4) The authors explain the failure of excess CREBMIM to displace CBP/P300 from immobilised CREBMIM (Figure 1E-F) by the nature of the CREB:CBP/P300 interaction. Does this imply that CREBMIM is unable to disrupt the interaction between CREB and CBP/P300 in living cells and that the CBP/P300 purified from native MV4;11 lysates by immobilised CREBMIM was from a pool not associated with CREB?

      Response: We thank the reviewer for making this point. Indeed, we reproducibly observe that CRYBMIM binding to CBP can be competed with excess free CRYBMIM, but CREBMIM binding cannot be competed by excess CREBMIM. This may be due to the different stabilities of the CBP complexes that are available for binding in cells. Alternatively, it is also possible that CREB binding to CBP, as reflected by CREBMIM, has a relatively slow dissociation rate, as compared to MYB, as reflected by CRYBMIM. We have begun to purify cellular CBP complexes (revised Fig 8. and response to comment 2 for Reviewer 1), and aim to define their determinants in future studies, as enabled by the introduction of CRYBMIM, CREBMIM and MLLMIM probes in the current work.

      Reviewer #2 (Significance (Required)):

      Based on this integrative analysis, the authors propose a convincing hypothesis, involving the assembly of aberrant transcription factor complexes and sequestration of P300/CBP from genes involved in normal myeloid development, for the oncogenic activity of MYB in AML. As well as the obvious therapeutic potential of the CRYBMIM inhibitor itself, the data reported here reveal multiple avenues for future investigation into novel anti-AML therapeutic strategies. This is an innovative and important study.

      This study will be of interest to scientists and clinicians involved in leukaemia research as well as cancer biology in general.

      My field of expertise: leukaemia biology, leukaemia models, aberrant transcription factor activity in leukaemia

      Response: We appreciate and agree with this assessment.

      Reviewer #3 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)):

      This manuscript describes an improved MYB-mimetic peptide (cf the group's earlier work published in Nature Communications, 2018) and its effects on AML cell lines. It also describes - and this constitutes the majority of the paper - the dynamics of chromatin occupancy by MYB and other associated transcription factors upon disruption of the MYB-CBP/P300 interaction. The authors suggest this represents a shift from an oncogenic program to a myeloid differentiation program. \*Major comments:***

      Regarding the improved affinity, and biological activity, of CRYBMIM:

      1.Improved affinity of CRYBMIM cf MYBMIM: clearly, it is improved, but not by a lot. By MST the increased affinity is about 3x. In terms of effects on AML cell viability: there is no direct comparison, and this should be included. In the group's previous paper there is no direct estimate for MYBMIM but it looks like the IC50 is between 10 and 20 micromolar so the effect is again around 2.5 fold. Also, the effects of the amino acid substitutions in CG3 are also very small (2.4x) given that 3 critical residues are altered. This is quite concerning.

      Response: As pointed out by the reviewer, CRYBMIM exhibits several fold increase in binding affinity, as measured using purified proteins in vitro. Similar increase in cellular potency is observed after short-term treatment of AML cells, as shown in revised Figure 3C, and reproduced below. However, increasing the duration of treatment to several days leads to substantial improvement in apparent cellular potency (Figure 3G). For example, while MYBMIM induces approximately 100-fold reduction in cell viability of MV411 cells, CRYBMIM induces more than 1,000-fold reduction. Similarly, whereas MYBMIM exhibited relatively modest effects on OCIAML3 and SKM1 cells, CRYBMIM induces more than 1,000-fold reduction in cell viability. As we show in the revised manuscript, this appears to be due to the combination of increased biochemical affinity and specific proteolysis of MYB, which cooperate to induce extensive remodeling of MYB transcriptional complexes and gene expression (revised Figure 11). In all, this exemplifies how pharmacologic modulators of protein interactions can achieve significantly improved biological potency from relatively modest affinity effects, a concept that recently has been successfully used to develop a variety of PROTACs that leverage this “event-driven” as opposed to occupancy-driven pharmacology. The manuscript has been revised on page 8 and 18 to clarify this point.

      2.Does CRYBMIM really "spare" normal hematopoietic cells? Not according to Fig 2E, where there is only a 2-fold difference in IC50.

      Response: To better define the relative toxicity of CRYBMIM and MYBMIM, we examined their effects on the growth and survival of normal hematopoietic progenitor cells as compared to AML cells using colony forming assays in methylcellulose under more physiologic conditions in the presence of human hematopoietic cytokines (revised Figure 3E, and reproduced below). While CRYBMIM significantly reduced the clonogenic capacity, growth and survival of MV411 AML cells, there were no significant effects on the total clonogenic activity of normal CD34+ human umbilical cord blood progenitor cells under these conditions. At the highest dose, CRYBMIM induced modest reduction in CFU-MG colony formation, and modest increase in BFU-E colony formation of normal hematopoietic progenitor cells. We revised the manuscript to indicate that CRYBMIM “relatively spares” normal blood progenitor cells on page 8.

      Response: We appreciate the attention to this issue. In the original manuscript, we showed dose-response curves of cord blood progenitor cells cultured in suspension supplemented with fetal bovine serum, a system that is known to induce in appropriate hematopoietic cell differentiation (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.molmed.2017.07.003). In the revised manuscript, we show results of colony formation assays of hematopoietic progenitor cells cultured in serum-free, semi-solid conditions supplemented with human hematopoietic cytokines (revised Figure 3E and 3F). This is a more physiologic system which more faithfully maintains normal hematopoietic cell differentiation, as compared to the cellular differentiation induced by fetal bovine serum-containing media lacking hematopoietic growth factors, as used in the experiments in our original manuscript. To establish a positive control, in addition to treating AML cells under the same condition, we used doxorubicin, which is part of current treatment of patients with AML, and which in our experiments, exhibits significant and pronounced reduction in the clonogenic capacity, growth and survival of normal blood progenitor cells (revised Figure S3B). The manuscript has been revised on page 8 accordingly.

      1. Fig 2F doesn't include any lines that express very low or undetectable levels of MYB. Some of these should be included to further examine specificity.

      Response: We have now tested CRYBMIM against a large panel of non-hematopoietic tumor and non-tumor cell lines, with varying degrees of MYB expression. Some of those cells exhibit high level of MYB gene expression and MYB genetic dependency, which is at least in part correlated with susceptibility to CRYBMIM. (revised Figure S4, and reproduced below). The manuscript has been revised on page 8 accordingly.

      Effects on gene expression and MYB binding:

      Data on MYB target gene expression and apoptosis/differentiation, and the conclusions drawn per se are sound, but:

      5.Fig S3 seems to show that MYB protein is lost on treatment with CRYBMIM. This isn't even mentioned in the text but raises a whole range of major questions eg why is this the case? Is this what is responsible for the loss of MYB-p300 interaction and/or biological effects on AML cells? Is this what is responsible for the effects on MYB target gene expression in Fig 3 and MYB binding to chromatin in Fig 4? This must be addressed.

      Response: We have revised the manuscript to include this discussion, and performed additional experiments to define this phenomenon. We confirmed rapid reduction in MYB protein levels upon CRYBMIM treatment on the time-scale of one to four hours in diverse AML cell lines (revised Figure 11), with the rate of MYB protein loss correlating to the cellular susceptibility to CRYBMIM (revised Figure 11, and reproduced below). The manuscript has been revised on page 18 accordingly.

      This is consistent with the specific proteolysis of MYB induced by the peptidomimetic remodeling of the MYB:CBP/P300 complex. We confirmed this by combined treatment with the proteosomal/protease inhibitor MG132 (revised Figure 11C, and reproduced below). This effect was specific because overexpression of BCL2, which blocks MYBMIM-induced apoptosis (Ramaswamy et al, Kentsis, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-02618-6), was unable to rescue CRYBMIM-induced proteolysis of MYB, arguing that MYB proteolysis is a specific effect of CRYBMIM rather than a non-specific consequence of apoptosis. The manuscript has been revised on page 18 accordingly.

      6.Fig 4 and the accompanying text are a bit hard to follow, but if I understood them correctly, I am surprised that the "gained MYB peaks" don't include the MYB binding motif itself? This at least deserves some comment. Also, there doesn't seem to have been any attempt to integrate the ChIP-Seq data with the expression data of Fig 3. This would provide clearer insights into the identities and types of MYB-regulated genes that are directly affected by suppression of CBP/p300 binding to MYB.

      Response: We thank the reviewer for this suggestion. The revised manuscript now includes a comprehensive and integrated analysis of chromatin and gene expression dynamics (revised Figures 13A and 13B). In contrast to the model in which blockade of MYB:CBP/P300 induces loss of gene expression and loss of transcription factor and CBP/P300 chromatin occupancy, we also observed a large number of genes with increased expression and gain of CBP/P300 occupancy (revised Figure 13A-B, and reproduced below). This includes numerous genes that control hematopoietic differentiation, such as FOS, JUN, and ATF3. As a representative example, in the case of FOS, we observed that CRYBMIM-induced accumulation of CBP/P300 was associated with increased binding of RUNX1, and eviction of CEBPA and LYL1 (revised Figure 13C). Thus, the absence of “gained MYB peaks” is due to the redistribution of CBP/P300 with alternative transcription factors, such as RUNX1. In all, these results support the model in which the core regulatory circuitry of AML cells is organized aberrantly by MYB and its associated co-factors including LYL1, CEBPA, E2A, SATB1 and LMO2, which co-operate in the induction and maintenance of oncogenic gene expression, as co-opted by distinct oncogenes in biologically diverse subtypes of AML (revised Figure 14). This involves apparent sequestration of CBP/P300 from genes controlling myeloid cell differentiation. Thus, oncogenic gene expression is associated with the assembly of aberrantly organized MYB transcriptional co-activator complexes, and their dynamic remodeling by selective blockade of protein interactions can induce AML cell differentiation. The manuscript has been revised on page 20-21 accordingly.

      7.The MS studies on MYB-interacting proteins seem very interesting and novel. I am not an expert on MS, though, so I'd suggest this section be reviewed by someone who is. Moreover, I was unable to see the actual data from this study because the material I was provided with didn't include Table S4 and S5.

      Response: We appreciate this point. For this reason, we have deposited all of our mass spectrometry data to be openly available via PRIDE (accession number PXD019708), and also openly provide all of the analyzed data via Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4321824), as additionally provided in the Supplementary Material for this manuscript.

      \Should the authors qualify some of their claims as preliminary or speculative, or remove them altogether?* 8.Claims regarding biological activity, specificity and improvements cf MYBMIM should be moderated given the small size of these effects as mentioned above (points 1 and 3).*

      Response: As explained in detail in response to comments 1-3 above (page 12-14 of this response), we have substantially revised the manuscript to incorporate both new experimental results and additional explanations (pages 6-8).

      9.I found the description of the studies related to Figs 5 and 6 somewhat difficult to follow and convoluted. While changes in MYB and CBP/p300 chromatin occupancy clearly occur on M CRYBMIM treatment, it is not clear that the complexes seen on genes prior to treatment represent "aberrant" complexes. These may just be characteristic of undifferentiated (myeloid) cells. The authors appear to argue that because some of the candidate co-factors show "apparently aberrant expression in AML cells" based on comparison of (presumably mRNA) expression data with normal cells, the presence of these factors in the complexes make them "aberrant" (moreover, the "aberrancy score" of Fig 5 C is not defined anywhere, as far as I can see). This inference is drawing a rather long bow, given that the AML-specific factors may not actually be absent from the complexes in normal cells. So this conclusion should be moderated if a more direct MS comparison cannot be provided (for which I understand the technical difficulties).

      Response: We have now measured protein abundance levels of key transcription factors assembled with MYB in AML cells in various normal human hematopoietic cells (revised Figure 9, and reproduced below). We found that most transcription factors that are assembled with MYB in diverse AML cell lines could be detected in one or more normal human blood cells, albeit with variable abundance, with the exception of CEBPA and SATB1 that were measurably expressed exclusively in AML cells (revised Figure 9A). Using unsupervised clustering and principal component analysis, we defined the combinations of transcription factors that are associated with aberrant functions of MYB:CBP/P300, as defined by their susceptibility to peptidomimetic remodeling (revised Figure 9B-D). In addition, we directly examined the physical assembly of MYB with key transcription factors in normal hematopoietic cells using co-immunoprecipitation studies (revised Figure 9E). In agreement with the physical association of MYB seen in AML cell lines, we observed association with CBP/P300 and LYL1 in normal hematopoietic cells. However, we did not observe physical association with E2A and SATB1 in normal cells, which indicates aberrant association of these in AML cell lines. This leads us to propose that these complexes are aberrantly assembled, at least in part due to the inappropriate transcription factor co-expression. The manuscript has been revised on page 15 accordingly.

      \Would additional experiments be essential to support the claims of the paper?*

      Response: As explained in detail in response to comment 5 above (page 16 of this response), we have carried out extensive studies of the specific proteolysis of MYB. We conclude that MYB transcription complexes are regulated both by MYB:CBP/P300 binding and by specific factor proteolysis, and can be induced by its peptidomimetic blockade in AML cells. Such “event-driven” pharmacology is emerging as a powerful tool to modulate protein function in cells, and studies reported in our work should enable its translation into improved therapies for patients, and improved probes for basic science.

      11.Provision of a positive control for the experiment of Fig S2.

      Response: As explained in detail in response to comment 2 above (page 13-14 of this response), we precisely defined the effects of CRYBMIM and MYBMIM on the clonogenic capacity, growth and survival of normal hematopoietic progenitor cells in serum-free, methylcellulose media supplemented with human hematopoietic cytokines. These experiments showed relatively modest effects (9.3 ± 3.8% reduction) of CRYBMIM on normal cells (Figure 3E), as compared to substantial inhibition (54 ± 2.4 % reduction) of the growth and survival of AML cells (Figures 3E). For comparison, doxorubicin led to more than 98 % reduction in clonogenic capacity (revised Figure S3B).

      12.\Are the data and the methods presented in such a way that they can be reproduced?**

      -Mostly yes

      Response: The revised manuscript includes a complete description of all methods, including a detailed supplement, listing technical details, with all analyzed data available openly via Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4321824).

      13.\Are the experiments adequately replicated and statistical analysis adequate?**

      -Mostly yes

      Response: All experiments were performed in at least three replicates, with all quantitative comparisons performed using appropriate statistical tests, as explained in the manuscript.

      **Minor comments:**

      *Specific experimental issues that are easily addressable.*

      -These are mostly indicated above.

      In addition:

      14.Why is BCL2 expression down-regulated by MYBMIM but not CRYMYB?

      Response: We made the same observation, and attribute this difference to the fact that BCL2 expression is regulated by several transcription factors, including CEBPA, which is affected by CRYBMIM but not MYBMIM. Similar to MYBMIM treatment, MYB occupancy at the BCL2 enhancer was reduced upon CRYBMIM treatment. However, new binding sites of other factors, such as CBP/P300 and RUNX1, appeared simultaneously, suggesting that redistribution of transcription factors following CRYBMIM treatment can affect transcriptional regulation of BCL2 expression (revised Figure S9 and shown below).

      *Are prior studies referenced appropriately?

      -Yes *Are the text and figures clear and accurate?*

      15.Generally, although some details are missing eg what aberrancy score in Fig 5C means.

      Response: Thank you for pointing this out. We have revised this figure to clarify this score, which is defined as the ratio of gene expression in AML cells relative to normal hematopoietic progenitor cells (revised Figure 7C).

      16.\Do you have suggestions that would help the authors improve the presentation of their data and conclusions?**

      -The title of this manuscript could and I think should be changed. The term "therapeutic", is not appropriate because no therapeutic agents are described in the m/s nor is any form of AML, even experimentally, treated. Also "CBP" should be replaced with CBP/P300, especially since most evidence suggests that P300 is the likely more important partner of MYB (eg Zhao et al 2011

      Response: We agree and have revised the title to clarify the significance of this work: “Convergent organization of aberrant MYB complexes controls oncogenic gene expression in acute myeloid leukemia.” We have revised the manuscript to indicate CBP/P300.

      17.-It would be worth discussing the core observation that disruption of the MYB-CBP/P300 interaction actually results in changes in MYB DNA binding. That this would occur is not at all obvious, because CBP/p300 doesn't interact with MYB's DNA binding domain nor does it have intrinsic DNA binding activity.

      Response: We thank the reviewer for this comment, and agree that remodeling of the MYB complex must affect the binding of MYB and other cofactors to DNA, at least in part mediated by potential acetylation by CBP/P300 (page 24).

      Reviewer #3 (Significance (Required)):

      **The Nature and Significance of the Advance**

      1) The major significance of this work lies in the chromatin occupancy and MYB complex studies. There are a number of very interesting findings including the apparent redistribution of MYB and/or CBP/P300 upon treatment with CRYBMIM. These suggest a series of changes in factors associated with particular gene sets involved in myeloid differentiation, although as mentioned above particular target genes are not specifically identified. However the pathways corresponding to these are listed in Table S6.

      Response: We have revised the manuscript to include the target genes in revised Supplemental Table 4 as well as DESeq2 tables (deposited in Zenodo, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4321824).

      2) The new peptide design (CRYBMIM) is interesting but its differences in binding and biological effects of MYBMIM are mostly incremental. See above.

      Response: We respectfully disagree and would like to explain how this work is significant both for conceptual and technical reasons. First, while the biochemical affinity of CRYBMIM is quantitatively increased compared with MYBMIM, this quantitatively increased affinity translates into qualitatively improved biological potency, as a result of “event-driven” pharmacology that characterizes pharmacologic protein interaction modulators (please also see response to Reviewer 3, comment 1, page 6 of this response). MYBMIM suppresses the growth and survival mostly of MLL-rearranged leukemias, whereas CRYBMIM does so for the vast majority (10 out of 11) of studied subtypes of AML. This now enables its therapeutic translation, as we are currently pursuing in collaboration with Novartis. Second, its improved biological activity led to the discovery of the previously unknown and unanticipated CBP/P300 sequestration mechanism of oncogenic gene control. We use this discovery to develop a precise model of aberrant gene control in AML that for the first time unifies previously disparate observations into a general mechanism. This is highly significant because it provides shared molecular dependencies for most subtypes of AML, a long-standing conundrum in cancer biology.

      *Place the work in the context of the existing literature (provide references, where appropriate).*

      -This m/s builds on and extends the report from the same group in Nature Communications (2018), which described the earlier peptide MYBMIM, some effects on MYB target genes and on AML cells. It and the previous paper also draw on the findings regarding the role of the MYB-CBP/P300 interaction in myeloid leukemogenesis (Pattabirman et al 2014) and on previous genome-wide studies of MYB target genes (Zhoa et al 2011; Zuber et al 2011).

      *State what audience might be interested in and influenced by the reported findings.*

      -This m/s will likely be of interest to scientists interested in MYB per se, in AML, in cancer genomics and transcriptional regulation.

      *Define your field of expertise with a few keywords to help the authors contextualize your point of view. Indicate if there are any parts of the paper that you do not have sufficient expertise to evaluate.* -My expertise: AML, experimental hematology, transcription, MYB, cancer genomics

      3) As mentioned above, I feel that additional expertise is required to review the MS studies.

      Response: We have deposited all raw data in PRIDE (accession number PXD019708) and all processed data in Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4321824), making it available for the community for further analysis.

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      Referee #2

      Evidence, reproducibility and clarity

      This manuscript reports the generation of a new and improved peptide mimetic inhibitor of the interaction between MYB and CBP/P300. The original MYBMIM inhibitor of this interaction, reported recently by the same laboratory, was modified by addition and substitution of peptide sequences from CREB, thus improving the affinity of the resulting CRYBMIM peptide to CBP/P300. The improved inhibitor profile results in increased anti-AML efficacy of CRYBMIM over MYBMIM. The authors go on to examine the mechanism underlying the anti-AML activity of CRYBMIM by integrating gene expression analysis, chromatin immunoprecipitation sequencing and mass spectrometric protein complex identification in human AML cells.

      I have some minor questions the authors may wish to comment on:

      1) The relocation of MYB, along with CBP/P300, to genes controlling myeloid differentiation (clusters 4 and 9) upon CRYBMIM treatment is reminiscent of the increased binding of MYB to myeloid pro-differentiation genes in AML cells following RUVBL2 silencing, recently reported in Armenteros-Monterroso et al. 2019 Leukemia 33:2817. Do the authors know if there is any overlap between genes in either of the clusters and the list reported in the latter study?

      2) Could the authors comment on a possible mechanism to explain the co-localization of MYB and CBP/P300 to the loci in clusters 4 and 9 following CRYBMIM treatment? Is it possible that CBP/P300 is recruited by other transcription factors to these loci, independently of binding to MYB? Or is the binding of CBP/P300 to MYB at these loci somehow more resistant to disruption by CRYBMIM?

      3) In the first paragraph of page 9, the text states: "Previously, we found that MYBMIM can suppress MYB:CBP/P300-dependent gene expression, leading to AML cell apoptosis that required MYB-mediated suppression of BCL2 (Ramaswamy et al., 2018)." I think this is a typo, since in this study, MYBMIM treatment results in loss of MYB binding to the BCL2 gene and consequent reduction in BCL2 expression. Do the authors mean 'MYBMIM-mediated suppression of BCl2' or 'loss of MYB-mediated activation of BCL2'?

      4) The authors explain the failure of excess CREBMIM to displace CBP/P300 from immobilised CREBMIM (Figure 1E-F) by the nature of the CREB:CBP/P300 interaction. Does this imply that CREBMIM is unable to disrupt the interaction between CREB and CBP/P300 in living cells and that the CBP/P300 purified from native MV4;11 lysates by immobilised CREBMIM was from a pool not associated with CREB?

      Significance

      Based on this integrative analysis, the authors propose a convincing hypothesis, involving the assembly of aberrant transcription factor complexes and sequestration of P300/CBP from genes involved in normal myeloid development, for the oncogenic activity of MYB in AML. As well as the obvious therapeutic potential of the CRYBMIM inhibitor itself, the data reported here reveal multiple avenues for future investigation into novel anti-AML therapeutic strategies. This is an innovative and important study.

      This study will be of interest to scientists and clinicians involved in leukaemia research as well as cancer biology in general.

      My field of expertise: leukaemia biology, leukaemia models, aberrant transcription factor activity in leukaemia

    1. In our pursuit for new friends in college, many students have chosen to interact with those they share surface level commonalities with because its comfortable, there is not as much stress to dive deeper into conversation. This is a faulty deal where we are selling ourselves short of growing as individuals. It is more valuable to learn about people’s thinking over their surface level groupings because this is to learn about the choices they have made in their life versus the choices that have been pre-determined for them by others.

      During my workshop feedback, a couple of my peers noted that they wanted me to expand on my conclusion-- specifically the context surrounding my last sentence. To their points, I recognized that my essay ended rather abruptly, but I liked leaving the reader with the thought of "choices that have been pre-determined for them by others" as a way to open up my essay to allow the reader to think how this may apply in their life. Instead, I discussed the effects for college students of only getting to know people on the surface level. This ties into my last sentence because it forces the reader to think beyond my narrative and into their own life or other's lives to see how diving deeper into conversation is or is not applied, all while highlighting what I have learned as takeaways. This, as well as my other revisions explained above, have helped me become lost in writing by creating an essay that interacts more with the reader and allows them to be present in my narrative through my thoughts and experiences.

    1. First, there is tremendous potential for our current version of AI. It will have enormous economic, cultural, and geopolitical impact. It will change life for ordinary people over the next many decades. It will create great riches for some. It will lead to different world views for many. Like heavier than air flight it will transform our world in ways in which we can not yet guess.

      Many people think that Brooks is opposed to AI because he takes a critical view of deep learning, and has more pessimistic (realistic?) timelines for when we may achieve general AI. But being critical isn't the same as being in opposition to.

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      Reply to the reviewers

      Reviewer #1 The authors study allostery with a beautiful genotype-phenotype experiment to study the fitness landscape of an allosteric lac repressor protein. The authors make a mutational library using error prone pcr and measure the impact on antibiotic resistance protein expression at varying levels of ligand, IPTG, expression. After measuring the impact of mutations authors fill-in the missing data using a neural net model. This type of dose response is not standard in the field, but the richness of their data and the discovery of the "band pass" phenomena prove its worth here splendidly. Using this mixed experimental/predicted data the authors explore how each mutation alters the different parameters of a hill equation fit of a dose response curve. Using higher order mutational space the authors look at how mutations can qualitatively switch phenotypes to inverted or band-stop dose-response curves. To validate and further explore a band-stop novel phenotype, the authors focused on a triple mutant and made all combinations of the 3 mutations. The authors find that only one mutation alone alters the dose-response and only in combination does a band-stop behavior present itself. Overall this paper is a fantastic data heavy dive into the allosteric fitness landscape of protein. Overall, the data presented in this paper is thoroughly collected and analyzed making the conclusions well-based. We do not think additional experiments nor substantial changes are needed apart from including basic experimental details and more biophysical rationale/speculation as discussed in further detail below.

      The authors do a genotype-phenotype experiment that requires extensive deep sequencing experiments. However, right now quite a bit of basic statistics on the sequencing is missing. Baseline library quality is somewhat shown in supplementary fig 2 but the figure is hard to interpret. It would be good to have a table that states how many of all possible mutations at different mutation depths (single, double, etc) there are. Similarly, sequencing statistics are missing- it would be useful to know how many reads were acquired and how much sequencing depth that corresponds to. This is particularly important for barcode assignment to phenotype in the long-read sequencing. In addition, a synonymous mutation comparison is mentioned but in my reading that data is not presented in the supplemental figures section.

      We thank the reviewer for this succinct summary of the manuscript and the results. We appreciate the reviewer identifying data of interest that were not included in the original manuscript. We agree that this information is necessary to consider the results. Specific changes are summarized in the comments below.

      The paper is very much written from an "old school" allostery perspective with static end point structures that are mutually exclusive - eg. p5l10 "relative ligand-binding affinity between the two conformations" - however, an ensemble of conformations is likely needed to explain their data. This is especially true for the bandpass and inverted phenotypes they observe. The work by Hilser et al is of particular importance in this area. We would invite the authors to speculate more freely about the molecular origins of their findings.

      We agree with the suggestions to adopt a modern allosteric perspective. We have changed the language throughout the manuscript to align with the ensemble model of allostery. We continue to frame results using the Monad-Wyman-Changeaux model, which reliably predicts LacI activity from biophysical parameters and is not exclusive of more modern models of allostery.

      **Minor** There are a number of small modifications. In general this paper is very technical and could use with some explanation and discussion for relevance to make the manuscript more approachable for a broader audience. P1L23: Ligand binding at one site causes a conformational change that affects the activity of another > not necessarily true - and related to using more "modern" statistical mechanical language for describing allostery.

      We agree with the reviewer’s comment. We have addressed this comment by adopting language in line with more modern view of allostery, for example:

      “With allosteric regulation, ligand binding at one site on a biomolecule changes the activity of another, often distal, site. Switching between active and inactive states provides a sense-and-response function that defines the allosteric phenotype.”

      P2L20: The core experiment of this paper is a selection using a mutational library. In the main body the authors mention the library was created using mutagenic pcr but leave it at that. More details on what sort of mutagenic pcr was used in the main body would be useful. According to the methods error prone pcr was used. Why use er-pcr vs deep point mutational libraries? Presumably to sample higher order phenotype? Rationale should be included. Were there preliminary experiments that helped calibrate the mutation level?

      We agree that justifying the decision to use error-prone PCR for library construction would be helpful. To explain this decision, we have added to the main text to explain this decision and to reflect on the consequences.

      “We used error-prone PCR across the full lacI CDS to investigate the effects of higher-order substitutions spread across the entire LacI sequence and structure.”

      And

      Novel phenotypes emerged at mutational distances greater than one amino acid substitution, highlighting the value in sampling a broader genotype space with higher-order mutations. Furthermore, the untargeted, random mutagenesis approach used here was critical for finding these novel phenotypes, as the genotypes required for these novel phenotypes were unpredictable.”

      P2L20: Baseline library statistics would be great in a table for coverage, diversity, etc especially as this was done by error prone pcr vs a more saturated library generation method. This is present in sup fig2 but it's a bit complicated.

      To more clearly convey the diversity within the library, we have included a heatmap of amino acid substitution counts found within the library (Supplementary Fig. 4). Additionally, we have added Supplementary Table 1, which lists the distribution of mutational distances of LacI variants found within the library, and the corresponding coverage of all possible mutations for each mutational distance.

      P2L26: How were FACS gates drawn? This is in support fig17 - should be pointed to here.

      We agree that a better description of the FACS process would be helpful. To address this we have included Supplementary Fig. 2, showing flow cytometry measurements of the library before and after FACS. Additionally, we have extended the description of the FACS process:

      “The initial library had a bimodal distribution of G__­0, as indicated by flow cytometry results, with a mode at low fluorescence (near G__­0 of wildtype LacI), and mode at higher gene expression. To generate a library in which most of the LacI variants could function as allosteric repressors, we used fluorescence activated cell sorting (FACS) to select the portion of the library with low fluorescence in the absence of ligand, gating at the bifurcation of the two modes (Sony SH800S Cell Sorter, Supplementary Fig. 2).”

      __

      P3L4: Where is the figure/data for the synonymous SNP mutations? This should be in the supplement.

      We agree this data is necessary to support the claim that LacI function was not impacted by synonymous mutations. We have included a new Supplementary Fig. 9, which shows the distribution of Hill equation parameters for LacI variants that code for the wild-type amino acid sequence, but with non-identical coding DNA sequences. Additionally, we included the results of a statistical analysis in the main text, this analysis compared all synonymous sequences in the library:

      “__We compared the distributions of the resulting Hill equation parameters between two sets of variants: 39 variants with exactly the wild-type coding DNA sequence for LacI (but with different DNA barcodes) and 310 variants with synonymous nucleotide changes (i.e. the wild-type amino acid sequence, but a non-wild-type DNA coding sequence). Using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, we found no significant differences between the two sets (p-values of 0.71, 0.40, 0.28, and 0.17 for G0, G∞, EC50, and n respectively, Supplementary Fig. 9).” __

      P3L20: The authors use a ML learning deep neural network to predict variant that were not covered in the screen. However, the library generation method is using error prone pcr meaning there could multiple mutations resulting in the same amino acid change. The models performance was determined by looking at withheld data however error prone pcr could result in multiple nonsynomymous mutations of the same amino acid. For testing were mutations truly withheld or was there overlap? Because several mutations are being represented by different codon combinations. Was the withheld data for the machine learning withholding specific substitutions?

      We thank the reviewer for identifying the need to clarify this critical data analysis. Data was held-out at the amino acid level, and so no overlap between the training and testing datasets occurred. We have clarified the description of the method in the main text:

      “We calculated RMSE using only held-out data not used in the model training, and the split between held-out data and training data was chosen so that all variants with a specific amino acid sequence appear in only one of the two sets.”


      In addition, higher order protein interactions are complicated and idiosyncratic. I am surprised how well the neural net performs on higher order substitutions. P4L4: Authors find mutations at the dimer/tetramer interfaces but don't mention whether polymerization is required. is dimerization required for dna binding? Tetramerization?

      We agree with the reviewer that, overall, a description of LacI structure and function would improve messaging the reported results. As such, we have added Supplementary Table 2, which defines the structural features discussed throughout the manuscript. Additionally, we have strived to describe the relevant structural and functional role of specific amino acids that are discussed in the text. Finally, we have also added a paragraph to the main text that summarizes the structure and function of LacI.

      “The LacI protein has 360 amino acids arranged into three structural domains__22–24__. The first 62 N-terminal amino acids form the DNA-binding domain, comprising a helix-turn-helix DNA-binding motif and a hinge that connects the DNA-binding motif and the core domain. The core domain, comprising amino acid positions 63-324, is divided into two structural subdomains: the N-terminal core and the C-terminal core. The full core domain forms the ligand-binding pocket, core-pivot region, and dimer interface. The tetramerization domain comprises the final 30 amino acids and includes a flexible linker and an 18 amino acid α-helix (Fig. 3, Supplementary Table 2). Naturally, LacI functions as a dimer of dimers: Two LacI monomers form a symmetric dimer that further assembles into a tetramer (a dimer of dimers).”

      P4L8: Substitutions near the dimer interface both impact g0 and ec50, which authors say is consistent with a change in the allosteric constant. Can authors explain their thinking more in the paper to make it easier to follow? Are the any mutations in this area that only impact g0 or ec50 alone? Why may these specific residues modify dimerization?

      We agree that a more in-depth discussion on the possible mechanisms behind these phenotypic changes would improve the manuscript. We have added discussion throughout the subsection “Effects of amino acid substitutions on LacI phenotype,” we believe this added discussion improve the manuscript and clarify the relationship between the observed allosteric phenotypes and the molecular mechanisms behind them. W

      Overall, we have made a number of changes in the manuscript that we hope will address these concerns.

      P4L8: The authors discuss the allosteric constant extensively within the paper but do not explain it. It would be helpful to have an explanation of this to improve readability. This explanation should include the statistical mechanical basis of it and some speculation about the ways it manifests biophysically.

      The allosteric constant is a critical concept, and we agree that it must be defined and discussed clearly throughout the manuscript. We have greatly expanded the discussion of the effects of single amino acid substitutions, and in the process we give examples of biochemical changes in the protein, and how they may affect the allosteric constant. We think this added text improves the manuscript and helps clarify the allosteric constant and the biomolecular processes that affect it.

      P4L1-16: Authors see mutations in the dimerization region that impact either G0 and Gsaturated in combination with Ec50 but not g0 and gsaturated together. Maybe we do not fully understand the hill equation but why are there no mutations that impact both g0 and gsaturated seen in support fig 13c? Why would mutations in the same region potentially impacting dimerization impact either g0 or gsaturated? What might be the mechanism behind divergent responses?

      It is important to recognize that the dimer interface does not just support the formation of dimers. There are many points of contact along the dimer interface that change when LacI switches between the active and inactive states. So, the dimer interface also helps regulate the balance between the active and inactive states. Our results show that different substitutions near the dimer interface can push this balance either toward the active or inactive states to varying degrees. We’ve added text throughout the description of single-substitutions effects to give specific examples and added a new paragraph at the end of that section to provide additional discussion and context. With regard to the more specific question of changes to both G0 and Ginf, the models indicate that simultaneous changes to those Hill Equation parameters requires an unusual combination of biophysical changes. To clarify this point, we added a short paragraph to the text:

      “None of the single amino substitutions measured in the library simultaneously decrease __G∞ and increase G0 (Supplementary Fig. 20c). This is not surprising, since substitutions that shift the biophysics to favor the active state tend to decrease G∞ while those that favor the inactive state tend to increase G0, and the biophysical models2,14,15 indicate that only a combination of parameter changes can cause both modifications to the dose-response. The library did, however, contain several multi-substitution variants with simultaneously decrease __G∞ and increase G0. These inverted variants, and their associated substitutions are discussed below.”


      P4L29: for interpretability it would be good to explain what log-additive effect means in the context of allostery.

      We agree that this information would be useful to the reader and have added additional text to explain log-additivity. We thank the reviewer for pointing out this oversight.

      “Combining multiple substitutions in a single protein almost always has a log-additive effect on EC50. That is, the proportional effects of two individual amino acid substitutions on the EC50 can be multiplied together. For example, if substitution A results in a 3-fold change, and substitution B results in a 2-fold change, the double substitution, AB, behaving log-additively, results in a 6-fold change__.”__

      P4L34-P5L19: This section is wonderful. Really cool results and interesting structural overlap! P5L34 Helix 9 of the protein is mentioned but it's functional relevance is not. This is common throughout the paper - it would be useful for there to be an overview somewhere to help the reader contextualize the results with known structural role of these elements.

      We agree with the reviewer that this information would help to contextualize the results. We have made a number of changes to address this. First, we have added Supplementary Table 2, which describes the structural features of LacI. Second, we have added a paragraph overviewing the structure and function of LacI. Third, we have expanded the section “the effects of individual amino acid substitutions on the function of LacI” to discuss the structural or biochemical impact of specific substitutions. We thank the reviewer for this suggestion.

      P5L39: The authors identified a triple mutant with the band-stop phenotype then made all combination of the triple mutant. Of particular interest is R195H/G265D which is nearly the same as the triple mutant. It would be nice if the positions of each of these mutations and have some discussion to begin to rationalize this phenotype, even if to point out how far apart they are and that there is no easy structural rationale!

      We appreciate the reviewer highlighting this area of interest. We have added structural information to Fig. 6, which indicates to position of the amino acid substitutions that result in the band-stop phenotype, as well as a small discussion in the main text:

      “To further investigate the band-stop phenotype, we chose a strong band-stop LacI variant with only three amino acid substitutions (R195H/G265D/A337D). These three positions are distributed distally on the periphery of the C-terminal core domain, and the role that each of these substitutions plays in the emergence of the band-stop phenotype is unclear.”

      P6L9: There should be more discussion of the significance of this work directly compared to what is known. For instance, negative cooperativity is mentioned as an explanation for bi-phasic dose response but this idea is not explained. Why would the relevant free energy changes be more entropic? Another example is the reverse-TetR phenotype observed by Hillen et al.

      We agree that more discussion is necessary to frame the results reported in the manuscript. To address this, we have added additional discussion throughout the manuscript that relates the results to the current understanding of allostery. Also, in the Conclusion, we added specific examples that lead us to link the ideas of bi-phasic dose response, negative cooperativity, and entropy/disorder. We believe these additions have improved the manuscript and we thank the reviewer for this suggestion.

      P6L28: The authors mention that phenotypes exist with genotypes that are discoverable with genotype-phenotype landscapes. This study due to the constraints of error prone pcr were somewhat limited. How big is the phenotypic landscape? Is it worth doing a more systematic study? What is the optimal experimental design: Single mutations, doubles, random - where is there the most information. How far can you drift before your machine learning model breaks down? How robust would it be to indels?

      The reviewer raises some excellent questions here, some of which are appropriate subjects for future work. The optimal experimental design depends on the objective: If the goal is to understand every possible mutation, a systematic site-saturation approach would be more appropriate. However, the landscape of a natural protein is limited by its wild-type DNA coding sequence, and so some substitutions are inaccessible (due to the arrangement of the codon table). The approach we took allowed to us characterize most of the accessible amino acid substitutions, while also allowing us to identify novel functions that would not have been identified with other approaches. We have added a little to the main text to discuss this (below). With regard to the DNN model, in the manuscript (SI Fig. 14), we show how the predictive accuracy degrades with mutational distance from the wild-type. It is possible that the type of DNN that we used could handle indels, since it effectively encodes each variant as a set of step-wise changes from the wild-type. But as with all machine-learning methods, it would require training with a dataset that included indels.

      “Novel phenotypes emerged at mutational distances greater than one amino acid substitution, highlighting the value in sampling a broader genotype space with higher-order mutations. Furthermore, the untargeted, random mutagenesis approach used here was critical for finding these novel phenotypes, as the genotypes required for these novel phenotypes were unpredictable.”

      Figures: Sup figs 3-7: The comparison of library-based results and single mutants is a great example of how to validate genotype-phenotype experiments!

      Thank you.

      Supp fig 5.: Missing figure number.

      We appreciate the reviewer catching this error and have attempted to properly label all figures and tables in this revision. Thank you.

      Supp fig7: G0 appears to have very poor fit between library vs single mutant version. Why might this be? R^2 would likely be better to report here as opposed to RMSE as RMSE is sensitize to the magnitude of the data such that you cannot directly compare RMSE of say 'n' to G0.

      We agree that these are important discussion points and have addressed this concern with an expanded discussion in the main text, as well as the addition of coefficient of correlation (R^2) in the caption for Figure 2 (previously supplementary figure 7). We believe these additions contribute meaningfully to the manuscript, and they address the concerns of the reviewer. The additional text reads:

      “We compared the Hill equation parameters from the library-scale measurement to those same parameters determined from flow cytometry measurements for each of the chemically synthesized LacI variants (Fig. 2). This served as a check of the new library-scale method’s overall ability to measure dose-response curves with quantitative accuracy. The accuracy for each Hill equation parameter in the library-scale measurement was: 4-fold for G0, 1.5-fold for G∞, 1.8-fold for EC50, and ± 0.28 for n. For G0, G∞, and EC50, we calculated the accuracy as: __, where __ is the root-mean-square difference between the logarithm of each parameter from the library-scale and cytometry measurements. For n, we calculated the accuracy simply as the root-mean-square difference between the library-scale and cytometry results. The accuracy for the gene expression levels (G0 and G∞) was better at higher gene expression levels (typical for G∞) than at low gene expression levels (typical for G0), which is expected based on the non-linearity of the fitness impact of tetracycline (Supplementary Figs. 10-11). Measurements of the Hill coefficient, n, had high relative uncertainties for both barcode-sequencing and flow cytometry, and so the parameter n was not used in any quantitative analysis.”

      Sup fig13c: it is somewhat surprising that mutations only appear to effect g0 and not gsaturated. This implies that basal and saturated activity are not coupled. Is this expected? Why or why not?

      This comment is partially addressed with a response above (P4L1-16). Coupled gene expression increases do occur, especially with substitutions at the start codon that result in fewer copies of LacI in the cell. In this instance, both G0 and G∞ are increased. Otherwise, changes to multiple biophysical parameters are required to increase both G0 and G∞.

      Reviewer #1 (Significance (Required)): Allostery is hard to comprehend because it involves many interacting residues propagating information across a protein. The Monod-Wyman-Changeux (MWC) and Koshland, Nemethy, and Filmer (KNF) models have been a long standing framework to explain much of allostery, however recent formulations have focused on the role of the conformational ensemble and a grounding in statistical mechanics. This manuscript focuses on the functional impact of mutations and therefore contribution of the amino acids to regulation. The authors unbiased approach of combining a dose-response curve and mutational library generation let them fit every mutant to a hill equation. This approach let the authors identify the allosteric phenotype of all measured mutations! The authors found inverted phenotypes which happen in homologs of this protein but most interesting is the strange and idiosyncratic 'Band-stop' phenotype. The band-stop phenotype is bi-phasic that will hopefully be followed up with further studies to explain the mechanism. This manuscript is a fascinating exploration of the adaptability of allosteric landscapes with just a handful of mutations. Genotype-phenotype experiments allow sampling immense mutational space to study complex phenotypes such as allostery. However, a challenge with these experiments is that allostery and other complicated phenomena come from immense fitness landscapes altering different parameters of the hill equation. The authors approach of using a simple error prone pcr library combined with many ligand concentrations allowed them to sample a very large space somewhat sparsely. However, they were able to predict this data by training and using a neural net model. I think this is a clever way to fill in the gaps that are inherent to somewhat sparse sampling from error prone pcr. The experimental design of the dose response is especially elegant and a great model for how to do these experiments. With some small improvements for readability, this manuscript will surely find broad interest to the genotype-phenotype, protein science, allostery, structural biology, and biophysics fields. We were prompted to do this by Review Commons and are posting our submitted review here: Willow Coyote-Maestas has relevant expertise in high throughput screening, protein engineering, genotype-phenotype experiments, protein allostery, dating mining, and machine learning. James Fraser has expertise in structural biology, genotype-phenotype experiments, protein allostery, protein dynamics, protein evolution, etc.

      Reviewer #2 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)): The authors use deep mutational scanning to infer the dose-response curves of ~60,000 variants of the LacI repressor and so provide an unprecedently systematic dataset of how mutations affect an allosteric protein. Overall this is an interesting dataset that highlights the potential of mutational scanning for rapidly identifying diverse variants of proteins with desired or unexpected activities for synthetic biology/bioengineering. The relatively common inverted phenotypes and their sequence diversity is interesting, as is the identification of several hundred genotypes with non-sigmoidal band-stop dose-response curves and their enrichment in specific protein regions. A weakness of the study is that some of the parameter estimates seem to have high uncertainty and this is not clearly presented or the impact on the conclusions analysed. A second shortcoming is that there is little mechanistic insight beyond the enrichments of mutations with different effects in different regions of the protein. But as a first overview of the diversity of mutational effects on the dose-response curve of an allosteric protein, this is an important dataset and analysis. **Comments** **Data quality and reproducibility** "The flow cytometry results confirmed both the qualitative and quantitative accuracy of the new method (Supplementary Figs. 3-7)"

      • There need to be quantitative measures of accuracy in the text here for the different parameters.

      We believe this comment is addressed along with the following two comments.

      • Sup fig 7 panels should be main text panels - they are vital for understanding the data quality In particular, the G0 parameter estimates from the library appear to have a lower bound ie they provide no information below a cytometry Go of ~10^4. This is an important caveat and needs to be highlighted in the main text. The Hill parameter (n) estimate for wt (dark gray) replicate barcodes is extremely variable - why is this?

      • In general there is not a clear enough presentation of the uncertainty and biases in the parameter estimations which seem to be rather different for the 4 parameters. Only the EC50 parameter seems to correlate very well with the independent measurements.

      We thank the reviewer for identifying a need for more information on the accuracy of this method. So, we have moved Supplementary Fig. 7 to the main text (Fig 2 in the revised manuscript) and have added coefficients of correlation to each Hill equation parameter in that figure caption. Furthermore, we have added new data (Supplementary Fig. 11), which shows the uncertainty associated with different gene expression levels. Finally, we have added a discussion on the accuracy of this method for each parameter of the Hill equation to the main text. Estimation of the Hill coefficient (n) from data is often highly uncertain and variable, because that parameter estimate can be highly sensitive to random measurement errors at a single point on the curve. The estimate for the wild type appears to be highly variable because the plot contains 53 replicate measurements. So, the plotted variability represents approximately 2 standard deviations. The spread of wild-type results in the plot is consistent with the stated RMSE for the Hill coefficient. Furthermore, the Hill coefficient is not used in any of the additional quantitative analysis in our manuscript, partially because of its relatively high measurement uncertainty, but also because, based on the biophysical models, it is not as informative of the underlying biophysical changes.

      “We compared the Hill equation parameters from the library-scale measurement to those same parameters determined from flow cytometry measurements for each of the chemically synthesized LacI variants (Fig. 2). This served as a check of the new library-scale method’s overall ability to measure dose-response curves with quantitative accuracy. The accuracy for each Hill equation parameter in the library-scale measurement was: 4-fold for G0, 1.5-fold for G∞, 1.8-fold for EC50, and ± 0.28 for n. For G0, G∞, and EC50, we calculated the accuracy as: "exp" ["RMSE" ("ln" ("x" ))], where "RMSE" ("ln" ("x" )) is the root-mean-square difference between the logarithm of each parameter from the library-scale and cytometry measurements. For n, we calculated the accuracy simply as the root-mean-square difference between the library-scale and cytometry results. The accuracy for the gene expression levels (G0 and G∞) was better at higher gene expression levels (typical for G∞) than at low gene expression levels (typical for G0), which is expected based on the non-linearity of the fitness impact of tetracycline (Supplementary Figs. 10-11). Measurements of the Hill coefficient, n, had high relative uncertainties for both barcode-sequencing and flow cytometry, and so the parameter n was not used in any quantitative analysis.”

      • The genotypes in the mutagenesis library contain a mean of 4.4 aa substitutions and the authors us a neural network to estimate 3 of the Hill equation parameters (with uncertainties) for the 1991/2110 of the single aa mutations. It would be useful to have an independent experimental evaluation of the reliability of these inferred single aa mutational effects by performing facs on a panel of single aa mutants (using single aa mutants in sup fig 3-7, if there are any, or newly constructed mutants).

      We agree that the predictive performance of the DNN requires experimental validation. We evaluated the performance by withholding data from 20% of the library, including nearly 200 variants with single amino acid substitutions, and then compared the predicted effect of those substitutions to the measured effect. The results of this test are reported in Supplementary Fig. 14. Additionally, we have adjusted the main text to more clearly explain the evaluation process.

      “To evaluate the accuracy of the model predictions, we used the root-mean-square error (RMSE) for the model predictions compared with the measurement results. We calculated RMSE using only held-out data not used in the model training, and the split between held-out data and training data was chosen so that all variants with a specific amino acid sequence appear in only one of the two sets.” __ __

      • fig3/"Combining multiple substitutions in a single protein almost always has a log-additive effect on EC50." How additive are the other 2 parameters? this analysis should also be presented in fig 3. If they are not as additive is it simply because of lower accuracy of the measurements? If the mutational effects are largely additive, then a simple linear model (rather than the DNN) could be used to estimate the single mutant effects from the multiple mutant genotypes.

      We agree with the reviewer that exploring the log-additivity of the Hill equation parameters is informative, and have included Supplementary Figure 21, which displays this information. Furthermore, we expanded the discussion of log-additivity on all three parameters in the main text:

      “Combining multiple substitutions in a single protein almost always has a log-additive effect on EC50. That is, the proportional effects of two individual amino acid substitutions on the EC50 can be multiplied together. For example, if substitution A results in a 3-fold change, and substitution B results in a 2-fold change, the double substitution, AB, behaving log-additively, results in a 6-fold change. Only 0.57% (12 of 2101) of double amino acid substitutions in the measured data have EC50 values that differ from the log-additive effects of the single substitutions by more than 2.5-fold (Fig. 4). This result, combined with the wide distribution of residues that affect EC50, reinforces the view that allostery is a distributed biophysical phenomenon controlled by a free energy balance with additive contributions from many residues and interactions, a mechanism proposed previously1,39 and supported by other recent studies17, rather than a process driven by the propagation of local, contiguous structural rearrangements along a defined pathway.

      A similar analysis of log-additivity for G0 and G∞ is complicated by the more limited range of measured values for those parameters, the smaller number of substitutions that cause large shifts in G0 or G∞, and the higher relative measurement uncertainty at low G(L). However, the effects of multiple substitutions on G0 and G∞ are also consistent with log-additivity for almost every measured double substitution variant (Supplementary Fig. 21).”

      **Presentation/clarity of text and figures**

      • The main text implies that the DNN is trained to predict 3 parameters of the Hill equation but not the Hill coefficient (n). This should be clarified / justified in the main text.

      We agree that the decision to exclude the parameter ‘n’ requires explanation in the main text. To address this, we have added to the main text:

      “Measurements of the Hill coefficient, n, had high relative uncertainties for both barcode-sequencing and flow cytometry, and so the parameter n was not used in any quantitative analysis.”

      and

      “We trained the model to predict the Hill equation parameters G0, G∞, and EC50 (Supplementary Fig. 13), the three Hill equation parameters that were determined with relatively low uncertainty by the library-scale measurement.”

      • The DNN needs to be better explained and justified in the main text for a general audience. How do simpler additive models perform for phenotypic prediction / parameter inference?

      We agree with the reviewer that the DNN needs to be justified in the main text. As part of the revision plan, we propose to compare the predictive performance of the DNN to an additive model.

      • Ref 14. analyses a much smaller set of mutants in the same protein but using an explicit biophysical model. It would be helpful to have a more extensive comparison with the approach and conclusions to this previous study.

      Throughout the manuscript, we frame the results and discussion in terms of the referenced biophysical model. Using the model, we describe the biophysical effects that a substitution may have on LacI, based on observed changes to function associated with that substitution. We also comment briefly on the limitations of this model when applied to the extensive dataset presented here.

      “Most of the non-silent substitutions discussed above are more likely to affect the allosteric constant than either the ligand or operator affinities. Within the biophysical model, those affinities are specific to either the active or inactive state of LacI, i.e. they are defined conditionally, assuming that the protein is in the appropriate state. So, almost by definition, substitutions that affect the ligand-binding or operator-binding affinities (as defined in the models) must be at positions that are close to the ligand-binding site or within the DNA-binding domain. Substitutions that modify the ability of the LacI protein to access either the active state or inactive state, by definition, affect the allosteric constant. This includes, for example, substitutions that disrupt dimer formation (dissociated monomers are in the inactive state), substitutions that lock the dimer rigidly into either the active or inactive state, or substitutions that more subtly affect the balance between the active and inactive states. Thus, because there are many more positions far from the ligand- and DNA- binding regions than close to those regions, there are many more opportunities for substitutions to affect the allosteric constant than the other biophysical parameters. Note that this analysis assumes that substitutions don’t perturb the LacI structure too much, so that the active and inactive states remain somehow similar to the wild-type states. Our results suggest that this is not always the case: consider, for example, the substitutions at positions __K84 and M98 discussed above and the substitutions resulting in the inverted and band-stop phenotypes discussed below.”__

      • Enrichments need statistical tests to know how unexpected that results are e.g. p5 line 12 "67% of strongly inverted variants have substitutions near the ligand-binding pocket"

      We agree that this information is necessary to interpret the results. We have included p-values (previously reported only in the Methods section) throughout the main text of the manuscript.

      The publication by Poelwijk et al. was considered extensively when planning this work, and failing to cite that manuscript would have been tremendously unjust. We have included it, as well as a few additional references that have identified and discussed inverted LacI variants. We sincerely thank the reviewer for identifying this oversight.

      • What mechanisms do the authors envisage that could produce the band-stop dose response curves? There is likely previous theoretical work that could be cited here. In general there is little discussion of the biophysical mechanisms that could underlie the various mutational effects.

      We agree with the reviewer, that discussing the biophysical mechanisms that underlie many of the reported mutations is important to understand the results. We have expanded the subsection “Effects of amino acid substitutions on LacI phenotype” to include discussion on several of the key substitutions (or groups of substitutions) and their potential biophysical effects. Additionally, we consider mechanism that may underlie the band-stop sensor, and propose one model that could explain the band-stop phenotype:

      “In particular, the biphasic dose-response of the band-stop variants suggests negative cooperativity: that is, successive ligand binding steps have reduced ligand binding affinity. Negative cooperativity has been shown to be required for biphasic dose-response curves__42,43. The biphasic dose-response and apparent negative cooperativity are also reminiscent of systems where protein disorder and dynamics have been shown to play an important role in allosteric function1, including catabolite activator protein (CAP)44,45 and the Doc/Phd toxin-antitoxin system46. This suggests that entropic changes may also be important for the band-stop phenotype. A potential mechanism is that band-stop LacI variants have two distinct inactive states: an inactive monomeric state and an inactive dimeric state. In the absence of ligand, inactive monomers may dominate the population. Then, at intermediate ligand concentrations, ligand binding stabilizes dimerization of LacI into an active state which can bind to the DNA operator and repress transcription. When a second ligand binds to the dimer, it returns to an inactive dimeric state, similar to wildtype LacI. This mechanism, and other possible mechanisms, do not match the MWC model of allostery or its extensions2,13–15__ and require a more comprehensive study and understanding of the ensemble of states in which these band-stop LacI variants exist.”

      • "This result, combined with the wide distribution of residues that affect EC50, suggests that LacI allostery is controlled by a free energy balance with additive contributions from many residues and interactions." 'additive contributions and interactions' covers all possible models of vastly different complexity i.e. this sentence is rather meaningless.

      We have attempted to contextualize this statement by adding additional discussion and references. We hope these additions give more meaning to this section.

      “__This result, combined with the wide distribution of residues that affect EC50, reinforces the view that allostery is a distributed biophysical phenomenon controlled by a free energy balance with additive contributions from many residues and interactions, a mechanism proposed previously1,39 and supported by other recent studies17, rather than a process driven by the propagation of local, contiguous structural rearrangements along a defined pathway.”__

      • fig 4 c and d compress a lot of information into one figure and I found this figure confusing. It may be clearer to have multiple panels with each panel presenting one aspect. It is also not clear to me what the small circular nodes exactly represent, especially when you have one smaller node connected to two polygonal nodes, and why they don't have the same colour scale as the polygonal nodes.

      We agree with the reviewer that figure 4 (or Figure 5 in the revised manuscript) contains a lot of information. The purpose of this figure is to convey the structural and genetic diversity among the sets of inverted variants and band-stop variants. We designed this figure to convey this point at two levels: a brief overview, where the diversity is apparent by quickly considering the figure, and at a more informative level, with some quantitative data and structurally relevant points highlighted. We have modified the caption slightly, in an effort to improve clarity.

      • line 25 - 'causes a conformational change' -> 'energetic change' (allostery does not always involve conformational change

      We thank the reviewer for this comment and have adopted a more modern language describe allostery throughout the manuscript.

      • sup fig 5 legend misses '5'

      We thank the reviewer for pointing this out, we have attempted to number all figures and tables more carefully.

      • sup fig 7. pls add correlation coefficients to these plots (and move to main text figures).

      We agree that this information is of interest and have included this data as main text Figure 2. In addition, we have included coefficients of correlation in the caption of this figure.

      • Reference 21 is just a title and pubmed link

      We thank the reviewer for identifying this error, we have corrected this in the references.

      • "fitness per hour" -> growth rate

      To ensure that this connection is clearly established, when we introduce fitness for the first time, we clarify that it relates to growth rate:

      “Consequently, in the presence of tetracycline, the LacI dose-response modulates cellular fitness (i.e. growth rate) based on the concentration of the input ligand isopropyl-β-D-thiogalactoside (IPTG).”

      Also, we define ‘fitness’ in the Methods section:

      “The experimental approach for this work was designed to maintain bacterial cultures in exponential growth phase for the full duration of the measurements. So, in all analysis, the Malthusian definition of fitness was used, i.e. fitness is the exponential growth rate__58__.”

      • page 6 line 28 - "discoverable only via large-scale landscape measurements" - directed evolution approaches can also discover such genotypes (see e.g. Poelwijk /Tans paper). Please re-phrase.

      We agree with the reviewer and have adjusted the main text accordingly.

      “__Overall, our findings suggest that a surprising diversity of useful and potentially novel allosteric phenotypes exist with genotypes that are readily discoverable via large-scale landscape measurements.”__

      • pls define jargon the first time it is used e.g. band-stop and band-pass

      We agree that all unconventional terms should be explicitly defined when used, and we have attempted to define the band-pass and band-stop dose-response curves more clearly in the main text:

      “These include examples of LacI variants with band-stop dose-response curves (i.e. variants with high-low-high gene expression; e.g. Fig. 1e, Supplementary Fig. 7), and LacI variants with band-pass dose-response curves (i.e. variants with low-high-low gene expression; e.g. Supplementary Fig. 8).”

      **Methods/data availability/ experimental and analysis reproducibility:** The way that growth rate is calculated on page 17 equation 1- This section is confusing. Please be explicit about how you accounted for the lag phase, what the lag phase was, and total population growth during this time. In addition, please report the growth curves from the wells of the four plates, the final OD600 of the pooled samples, and exact timings of when the samples were removed from 37 degree incubation in a table. These are critical for calculating growth rate in individual clones downstream.

      We thank the reviewer for identifying the need to clarify this section of text. The ‘lag’ in this section referred to a delay before tetracycline began impacting the growth rate of cells. To address this, we have changed ‘lag’ in this context to ‘delay.’ Furthermore, we have attempted to clarify precisely the cause of this delay, and how we accounted for it in calculating growth rates:

      For samples grown with tetracycline, the tetracycline was only added to the culture media for Growth Plates 2‑4. Because of the mode of action of tetracycline (inhibition of translation), there was a delay in its effect on cell fitness: Immediately after diluting cells into Growth Plate 2 (the first plate with tetracycline), the cells still had a normal level of proteins needed for growth and proliferation and they continued to grow at nearly the same rate as without tetracycline. Over time, as the level of proteins required for cell growth decreased due to tetracycline, the growth rate of the cells decreased. Accordingly, the analysis accounts for the variation in cell fitness (growth rate) as a function of time after the cells were exposed to tetracycline. With the assumption that the fitness is approximately proportional to the number of proteins needed for growth, the fitness as a function of time is taken to approach the new value with an exponential decay:

      (3)

      where μitet is the steady-state fitness with tetracycline, and α is a transition rate. The transition rate was kept fixed at α = log(5), determined from a small-scale calibration measurement. Note that at the tetracycline concentration used during the library-scale measurement (20 µg/mL), μitet was greater than zero even at the lowest G(L) levels (Supplementary Fig. 10). From Eq. (3), the number of cells in each Growth Plate for samples grown with tetracycline is:

      • What were the upper and lower bounds of the measurements? (LacI deletion vs Tet deletion / autofluoresence phenotype - true 100% and true 0% activity). Knowing and reporting these bounds will also allow easier comparison between datasets in the future.

      We agree that knowing the limitations of the measurement are important for contextualizing the results. To address this point, we have included Supplementary Fig. 11, which shows the uncertainty of the measurement across gene expression levels.

      Please clarify whether there was only 1 biological replicate (because the plates were pooled before sequencing)? Or if there were replicates present an analysis of reproducibility.

      We thank the reviewer for pointing out the ambiguity in the original manuscript. The library-scale measurement reported here was completed once, the 24 growth conditions were spread across 96 wells, so each condition occupied 4 wells. The 4 wells were combined prior to DNA extraction. We have clarified this process in the methods by removing ‘duplicate’:

      “Growth Plate 2 contained the same IPTG gradient as Growth Plate 1 with the addition of tetracycline (20 µg/mL) to alternating rows in the plate, resulting in 24 chemical environments, with each environment spread across 4 wells.”

      Despite there being only a single library-scale measurement, the accuracy and reliability of the results are supported by many distinct biological replicates within the library (i.e. LacI variants with the same amino acid sequence but with different barcodes, see new Supplementary Fig. 9), as well as over 100 orthogonal dose-response curve measurements completed with flow cytometry (Figure 2). We believe these support the reproducibility of the work and we have included statistical analysis on the accuracy of the library-scale measurement results.

      “To test the accuracy of the new method for library-scale dose-response curve measurements, we independently verified the results for over 100 LacI variants from the library. For each verification measurement, we chemically synthesized the coding DNA sequence for a single variant and inserted it into a plasmid where LacI regulates the expression of a fluorescent protein. We transformed the plasmid into E. coli and measured the resulting dose-response curve with flow cytometry (e.g. Fig. 1e). We compared the Hill equation parameters from the library-scale measurement to those same parameters determined from flow cytometry measurements for each of the chemically synthesized LacI variants (Fig. 2). This served as a check of the new library-scale method’s overall ability to measure dose-response curves with quantitative accuracy. The accuracy for each Hill equation parameter in the library-scale measurement was: 4-fold for G0, 1.5-fold for G∞, 1.8-fold for EC50, and ± 0.28 for n. For G0, G∞, and EC50, we calculated the accuracy as: "exp" ["RMSE" ("ln" ("x" ))], where "RMSE" ("ln" ("x" )) is the root-mean-square difference between the logarithm of each parameter from the library-scale and cytometry measurements. For n, we calculated the accuracy simply as the root-mean-square difference between the library-scale and cytometry results (Supplementary Fig. 7).”

      • Please provide supplementary tables of the data (in addition to the raw sequencing files). Both a table summarising the growth rates, inferred parameter values and uncertainties for genotypes and a second table with the barcode sequence counts across timepoints and associated experimental data.

      We agree that access to this information is critical. Due to the size of the associated data, we have made this data available for download in a public repository. We direct readers to the repository information in the “Data Availability” statement:

      “The raw sequence data for long-read and short-read DNA sequencing have been deposited in the NCBI Sequence Read Archive and are available under the project accession number PRJNA643436. Plasmid sequences have been deposited in the NCBI Genbank under accession codes MT702633, and MT702634, for pTY1 and pVER, respectively.

      The processed data table containing comprehensive data and information for each LacI variant in the library is publicly available via the NIST Science Data Portal, with the identifier ark:/88434/mds2-2259 (https://data.nist.gov/od/id/mds2-2259 or https://doi.org/10.18434/M32259). The data table includes the DNA barcode sequences, the barcode read counts, the time points used for the libarary-scale measurement, fitness estimates for each barcoded variant across the 24 chemical environments, the results of both Bayesian inference models (including posterior medians, covariances, and 0.05, 0.25, 0.75, and 0.95 posterior quantiles), the LacI CDS and amino acid sequence for each barcoded variant (as determined by long-read sequencing), the number of LacI CDS reads in the long-read sequencing dataset for each barcoded variant, and the number of unintended mutations in other regions of the plasmid (from the long-read sequencing data).

      Code Availability

      All custom data analysis code is available at https://github.com/djross22/nist_lacI_landscape_analysis.”

      Reviewer #2 (Significance (Required)): The authors present an unprecedently systematic dataset of how mutations affect an allosteric protein. This illustrates the potential of mutational scanning for rapidly identifying diverse variants of allosteric proteins / regulators with desired or unexpected activities for synthetic biology/bioengineering. Previous studies have identified inverted dose-response curve for a lacI phenotypes https://www.cell.com/fulltext/S0092-8674(11)00710-0 but using directed evolution i.e. they were not comprehensive in nature. The audience of this study would be protein engineers, the allostery field, synthetic biologists and the mutation scanning community and evolutionary biologists interested in fitness landscapes. My relevant expertise is in deep mutational scanning and genotype-phenotype landscapes, including work on allosteric proteins and computational methods. Reviewer #3 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)): In this interesting manuscript the authors developed in ingenious high throughput screening approach which utilizes DNA barcoding to select variants of LacI proteins with different allosteric profiles for IPTG control using E. coli fitness (growth rate) in a range of antibiotic concentrations as a readout thus providing a genotype-phenotype map for this enzyme. The authors used library of 10^5-10^ variants of LacI expressed from a plasmid and screened for distinct IPTG activation profiles under different conditions including several antibiotic stressors. As a result they identified various patterns of activation including normal (sigmoidal increase), inverted (decrease) and unusual stop-band where the dependence of growth on [IPTG] is non-monotonic. The study is well-conceived, well executed and provides statistically significant results. The key advance provided by this work is that it allows to identify specific mutations in LacI connected with one of three allosteric profiles. The paper is clearly written all protocols are explained and it can be reproduced in a lab that possesses proper expertise in genetics. Reviewer #3 (Significance (Required)): The significance of this work is that it discovered libraries of LacI variants which give rise to distinct profiles of allosteric control of activation of specific genes (in this case antibiotic resistance) by the Lac mechanism. The barcoding technology allowed to identify specific mutations which are (presumably) causal of changes in the way how allosteric activation of LacI by IPTG works. As such it provides a rich highly resolved dataset of LacI variants for further exploration and analysis. Alongside with these strengths several weaknesses should also be noted:

      1. First and foremost the paper does not provide any molecular-level biophysical insights into the impact of various types of mutations on molecular properties of LacI. Do the mutations change binding affinity to IPTG? Binding side? Communication dynamics? Stability? The diagrams of connectivity for the stop-band mutations (Fig.4) do not provide much help as they do not tell much which molecular properties of LacI are affected by mutations and why certain mutations have specific effect on allostery. A molecular level exploration would make this paper much stronger.

      We address this comment with comment (2), below.

      1. In the same vein a theoretical MD study would be quite illuminating in answering the key unanswered question of this work: Why do mutations have various and pronounced effects of allosteric regulation by LacI?. I think publication of this work should not be conditioned on such study but again adding would make the work much stronger.

      We appreciate the reviewer’s comments and agree that investigating the molecular mechanisms driving the phenotypic changes identified in this work is a compelling proposition. Throughout the manuscript, we identify positions and specific amino acid substitutions that affect the measurable function of LacI, and occasionally discuss the biophysical effects that may underly these changes. We have expanded the discussion to include possible molecular-level effects.

      The dataset reported here identifies many potential candidates for molecular-level study, either computationally or experimentally. However, this manuscript is scoped to report a large-scale method to measure the genotype-phenotype landscape of an allosteric protein, and a limited investigation into the emergence of novel phenotypes that are identified in the landscape.

      1. Lastly a recent study PNAS v.116 pp.11265-74 (2019) explored a library of variants of E. coli Adenylate Kinase and showed the relationship between allosteric effects due to substrate inhibition and stability of the protein. Perhaps a similar relationship can explored in this case of LacI.

      We thank the reviewer for highlighting this publication. We agree with the reviewer that similar effects may play a role in the activity of LacI. Establishing such a relationship would require additional experimentation, and, we think, is outside the scope of the submitted manuscript. Although, we hope follow-up studies using this dataset will investigate this phenomenon and other related mechanisms, that may underlie the band-stop phenotype and other observed effects.

    2. Note: This preprint has been reviewed by subject experts for Review Commons. Content has not been altered except for formatting.

      Learn more at Review Commons


      Referee #1

      Evidence, reproducibility and clarity

      The authors study allostery with a beautiful genotype-phenotype experiment to study the fitness landscape of an allosteric lac repressor protein. The authors make a mutational library using error prone pcr and measure the impact on antibiotic resistance protein expression at varying levels of ligand, IPTG, expression. After measuring the impact of mutations authors fill-in the missing data using a neural net model. This type of dose response is not standard in the field, but the richness of their data and the discovery of the "band pass" phenomena prove its worth here splendidly.

      Using this mixed experimental/predicted data the authors explore how each mutation alters the different parameters of a hill equation fit of a dose response curve. Using higher order mutational space the authors look at how mutations can qualitatively switch phenotypes to inverted or band-stop dose-response curves. To validate and further explore a band-stop novel phenotype, the authors focused on a triple mutant and made all combinations of the 3 mutations. The authors find that only one mutation alone alters the dose-response and only in combination does a band-stop behavior present itself. Overall this paper is a fantastic data heavy dive into the allosteric fitness landscape of protein.

      Major

      Overall, the data presented in this paper is thoroughly collected and analyzed making the conclusions well-based. We do not think additional experiments nor substantial changes are needed apart from including basic experimental details and more biophysical rationale/speculation as discussed in further detail below.

      The authors do a genotype-phenotype experiment that requires extensive deep sequencing experiments. However, right now quite a bit of basic statistics on the sequencing is missing. Baseline library quality is somewhat shown in supplementary fig 2 but the figure is hard to interpret. It would be good to have a table that states how many of all possible mutations at different mutation depths (single, double, etc) there are. Similarly, sequencing statistics are missing- it would be useful to know how many reads were acquired and how much sequencing depth that corresponds to. This is particularly important for barcode assignment to phenotype in the long-read sequencing. In addition, a synonymous mutation comparison is mentioned but in my reading that data is not presented in the supplemental figures section.

      The paper is very much written from an "old school" allostery perspective with static end point structures that are mutually exclusive - eg. p5l10 "relative ligand-binding affinity between the two conformations" - however, an ensemble of conformations is likely needed to explain their data. This is especially true for the bandpass and inverted phenotypes they observe. The work by Hilser et al is of particular importance in this area. We would invite the authors to speculate more freely about the molecular origins of their findings.

      Minor

      There are a number of small modifications. In general this paper is very technical and could use with some explanation and discussion for relevance to make the manuscript more approachable for a broader audience.

      P1L23: Ligand binding at one site causes a conformational changes that affects the activity of another > not necessarily true - and related to using more "modern" statistical mechanical language for describing allostery.

      P2L20: The core experiment of this paper is a selection using a mutational library. In the main body the authors mention the library was created using mutagenic pcr but leave it at that. More details on what sort of mutagenic pcr was used in the main body would be useful. According to the methods error prone pcr was used. Why use er-pcr vs deep point mutational libraries? Presumably to sample higher order phenotype? Rationale should be included. Were there preliminary experiments that helped calibrate the mutation level?

      P2L20: Baseline library statistics would be great in a table for coverage, diversity, etc especially as this was done by error prone pcr vs a more saturated library generation method. This is present in sup fig2 but it's a bit complicated.

      P2L26: How were FACS gates drawn? This is in support fig17 - should be pointed to here.

      P3L4: Where is the figure/data for the synonymous SNP mutations? This should be in the supplement.

      P3L20: The authors use a ML learning deep neural network to predict variant that were not covered in the screen. However, the library generation method is using error prone pcr meaning there could multiple mutations resulting in the same amino acid change. The models performance was determined by looking at withheld data however error prone pcr could result in multiple nonsynomymous mutations of the same amino acid. For testing were mutations truly withheld or was there overlap? Because several mutations are being represented by different codon combinations. Was the withheld data for the machine learning withholding specific substitutions?

      In addition, higher order protein interactions are complicated and idiosyncratic. I am surprised how well the neural net performs on higher order substitutions.

      P4L4: Authors find mutations at the dimer/tetramer interfaces but don't mention whether polymerization is required. is dimerization required for dna binding? Tetramerization?

      P4L8: Substitutions near the dimer interface both impact g0 and ec50, which authors say is consistent with a change in the allosteric constant. Can authors explain their thinking more in the paper to make it easier to follow? Are the any mutations in this area that only impact g0 or ec50 alone? Why may these specific residues modify dimerization?

      P4L8: The authors discuss the allosteric constant extensively within the paper but do not explain it. It would be helpful to have an explanation of this to improve readability. This explanation should include the statistical mechanical basis of it and some speculation about the ways it manifests biophysically.

      P4L1-16: Authors see mutations in the dimerization region that impact either G0 and Gsaturated in combination with Ec50 but not g0 and gsaturated together. Maybe we do not fully understand the hill equation but why are there no mutations that impact both g0 and gsaturated seen in support fig 13c? Why would mutations in the same region potentially impacting dimerization impact either g0 or gsaturated? What might be the mechanism behind divergent responses?

      P4L29: for interpretability it would be good to explain what log-additive effect means in the context of allostery.

      P4L34-P5L19: This section is wonderful. Really cool results and interesting structural overlap!

      P5L34 Helix 9 of the protein is mentioned but it's functional relevance is not. This is common throughout the paper - it would be useful for there to be an overview somewhere to help the reader contextualize the results with known structural role of these elements.

      P5L39: The authors identified a triple mutant with the band-stop phenotype then made all combination of the triple mutant. Of particular interest is R195H/G265D which is nearly the same as the triple mutant. It would be nice if the positions of each of these mutations and have some discussion to begin to rationalize this phenotype, even if to point out how far apart they are and that there is no easy structural rationale!

      P6L9: There should be more discussion of the significance of this work directly compared to what is known. For instance negative cooperativity is mentioned as an explanation for bi-phasic dose response but this idea is not explained. Why would the relevant free energy changes be more entropic? Another example is the reverse-TetR phenotype observed by Hillen et al.

      P6L28: The authors mention that phenotypes exist with genotypes that are discoverable with genotype-phenotype landscapes. This study due to the constraints of error prone pcr were somewhat limited. How big is the phenotypic landscape? Is it worth doing a more systematic study? What is the optimal experimental design: Single mutations, doubles, random - where is there the most information. How far can you drift before your machine learning model breaks down? How robust would it be to indels?

      Figures:

      Sup figs 3-7: The comparison of library-based results and single mutants is a great example of how to validate genotype-phenotype experiments!

      Supp fig 5.: Missing figure number.

      Supp fig7: G0 appears to have very poor fit between library vs single mutant version. Why might this be? R^2 would likely be better to report here as opposed to RMSE as RMSE is sensitize to the magnitude of the data such that you cannot directly compare RMSE of say 'n' to G0.

      Sup fig13c: it is somewhat surprising that mutations only appear to effect g0 and not gsaturated. This implies that basal and saturated activity are not coupled. Is this expected? Why or why not?

      Significance

      Allostery is hard to comprehend because it involves many interacting residues propagating information across a protein. The Monod-Wyman-Changeux (MWC) and Koshland, Nemethy, and Filmer (KNF) models have been a long standing framework to explain much of allostery, however recent formulations have focused on the role of the conformational ensemble and a grounding in statistical mechanics. This manuscript focuses on the functional impact of mutations and therefore contribution of the amino acids to regulation. The authors unbiased approach of combining a dose-response curve and mutational library generation let them fit every mutant to a hill equation. This approach let the authors identify the allosteric phenotype of all measured mutations! The authors found inverted phenotypes which happen in homologs of this protein but most interesting is the strange and idiosyncratic 'Band-stop' phenotype. The band-stop phenotype is bi-phasic that will hopefully be followed up with further studies to explain the mechanism. This manuscript is a fascinating exploration of the adaptability of allosteric landscapes with just a handful of mutations.

      Genotype-phenotype experiments allow sampling immense mutational space to study complex phenotypes such as allostery. However, a challenge with these experiments is that allostery and other complicated phenomena come from immense fitness landscapes altering different parameters of the hill equation. The authors approach of using a simple error prone pcr library combined with many ligand concentrations allowed them to sample a very large space somewhat sparsely. However, they were able to predict this data by training and using a neural net model. I think this is a clever way to fill in the gaps that are inherent to somewhat sparse sampling from error prone pcr. The experimental design of the dose response is especially elegant and a great model for how to do these experiments.

      With some small improvements for readability, this manuscript will surely find broad interest to the genotype-phenotype, protein science, allostery, structural biology, and biophysics fields.

      We were prompted to do this by Review Commons and are posting our submitted review here:

      Willow Coyote-Maestas has relevant expertise in high throughput screening, protein engineering, genotype-phenotype experiments, protein allostery, dating mining, and machine learning.

      James Fraser has expertise in structural biology, genotype-phenotype experiments, protein allostery, protein dynamics, protein evolution, etc.

      Referees cross-commenting

      Seems like our biggest issues are: better uncertainty estimates of the parameters and more biophysical/mechanistic explanation/speculation. The uncertainty estimates might be tricky with the deep learning approach. The more biophysical speculation will require some re-writing around an ensemble rather than a static structure perspective.

    1. Author Response:

      This response corresponds to the essential revisions sent to the authors after review.


      1) Further characterization and clarification are needed regarding the sensor properties. This is crucial for the potential users in the field to judge and use the sensor, and for interpretation of the biology results using the sensor.

      We are grateful to the reviewers and editors to raise such important questions regarding the characterization of sensor properties. The feedback surely contributes to clarify important aspects of the sensor.

      i) Clear statement in prominent places about the improvement of the sensor and new potential for its biologic applications separating from the authors' 2015 paper.

      Previous enzyme-based biosensor designs, including the ChOx biosensor described in our publication on 2015 (Santos et al, 2015), were based on the differential coating of electrode sites with matrices containing or lacking ChOx. This modifications render the sites Ch- sensitive or insensitive, respectively. The latter have been termed “sentinel” sites, as they are designed to respond to any perturbation except to the analyte of interest (Ch in this case). By subtracting the sentinel from the Ch-measuring site, this approach has been useful to decrease the contribution of interferent signals, namely caused by electrochemical oxidation of electroactive compounds or by voltage fluctuations associated with LFP. However, cross- talk caused by H2O2 diffusion from enzyme-coated to sentinel sites poses important constraints on this design. The inter-site spacing required to avoid diffusional cross-talk leads, for example, to uncontrolled differences in the amplitude and phase of LFP across sites, compromising common-mode rejection.

      In the current study, we have circumvented diffusional cross-talk-related limitations by implementing a novel sensing approach. Rather than changing the coating composition across recording sites, we have differentially modified their electrocatalytic properties towards H2O2, resulting in Ch-sensitive and pseudo-sentinel sites. As Ch responses depended solely on the intrinsic properties of the metal surface, we could dramatically reduce the size and increase the spatial density of recording sites by using tetrode configuration. Tetrodes, a bundle of four twisted wires glued together, are conventionally used for separating single neuron action potentials based on the spatial structure of their action potentials across wires. Here, the spatial structure of the electrochemical signal is created by electrochemical modification of wires. Importantly this design allows the unbiased measurement of ChOx activity and O2 in the same brain spot by using a tetrode site to directly measure the latter. This has not been possible to achieve with conventional enzyme-based biosensor designs, including our own previous stereotrode design.

      We acknowledge that the improvements of the TACO sensor over our previous stereotrode design, published in 2015 (as well as other conventional enzyme-based biosensors in general), were not clearly emphasized in the manuscript. We added new paragraphs/sentences in the introduction and results of the revised manuscript (page 4 lines 10-16, page 5 lines 6-15 and page 6 line 8) highlighting the main difference between the two sensors and advantages of the new design for the unbiased measurement of the signals derived from ChOx activity (COA) and O2.

      ii) Regarding the choline responses: characterizing the linearity of choline response is important for users to understand the sensor properties.

      Responses to choline were highly linear within the concentration range tested (up to 30 μM). This information was added to Table 1 and mentioned in the text (page 7, line 18) of the revised manuscript.

      Related, demonstration how to calibrate moving artificial signals in freely-moving rodents will be useful for the future applications.

      Movement can cause electromagnetic or mechanical perturbations (movement artifacts) that are expected to scale with the impedance of individual recording sites. As the same applies for LFP-related currents, it is not trivial to discriminate both confounds. Nevertheless, our common-mode rejection approach, which is optimized by a frequency-domain correction of electrode impedances (please check Methods section, page 40, for detailed explanation), is designed to optimally remove both LFP- and movement-related artifacts.

      In our freely-moving recordings we did not have prominent movement-related perturbations, probably due to the proximity of the head-stage to the sensor and the shielding effect of the grounded copper mesh that covers the implant. Nevertheless, candidate events likely caused by movement consisted in current deflections aligned to locomotion bouts, which were completely removed by common-mode rejection. In the revised manuscript we added the average raw traces triggered on locomotion bouts in Figure 2D, highlighting the usefulness of our method to remove putative movement-related artifacts in addition to LFP and other interferents. We have also added a brief mention to this issue in page 10, lines 32-35 and page 11, lines 1-2.

      Further, since the COA signal is confounded by phasic O2 fluctuations, the authentic changes in COA are potentially interfered by O2-evoked enzymatic responses. The interpretation of the signal interference needs to be clearly discussed, including O2-evoked changes, and other related signaling changes, like DA.

      The main focus of our study was to investigate the effect of physiological O2 fluctuations on the ChOx biosensor signal, which is given by the activity of immobilized ChOx, which we abbreviate as COA across the manuscript. In order to address this issue in an unbiased manner it is essential to clean artifacts that directly generate currents on the electrode surface (please see response to point 1vi for details). Our TACO sensor was designed to optimize the removal of such confounds, resulting in a clean COA signal. As this signal reflects the activity of immobilized enzyme, it is sensitive to changes in O2, not only Choline. Thus, the COA signal is not confounded, but rather modulated by changes in O2. Our main finding was that phasic O2 modulation of COA is a major confound of phasic Ch dynamics measurements using ChOx sensors in vivo in the brain. In this sense, the central tenet of the paper is that COA is not reflecting an authentic choline concentration dynamics, but rather a nonlinear function of Ch and O2 dynamics, with no feasible analytical approach to separate the two.

      We recognize that, in the Methods section, the description of how the COA signal was computed could lead to confusion between authentic COA and authentic Ch measurement. In the revised manuscript we have changed the terms used in the signal cleaning procedure (page 40-41).

      Regarding neurochemical confounds (e. g. ascorbate or dopamine and other monoamines), we acknowledge that the description of multichannel sensor properties in Table 1 could be confusing to readers. The table was also not conveying the important information on how sensitive is our COA measurement to these artifacts. In the revised manuscript we have removed the information about selectivity ratios for individual sites. Instead, the table section now called “Analytical properties for COA measurement” was expanded and now shows DA and AA sensitivities and selectivity ratios for the COA signal, computed from the difference between Au/Pt/m-PD and Au/m-PD sites.

      Additionally, we added a column in the color plot in Figure 1E describing the relative responses of the COA measurement to the different factors. This addition highlights the high selectivity of the COA signal for Ch, as compared with individual sites.

      Finally, we have detailed the interpretation of the freely-moving signals triggered on SWRs and locomotion bouts. In the Methods section of the revise manuscript (page 41, lines 4-11), we clarify how the differential signals COAnon-mPD and NCC (neurochemical confounds) presented in Figure 2 (revised version) were computed. In the description of these results, we also explain how the response patterns of raw and cleaned signals can be used to infer the contribution of different sorts of artifacts, including movement- and LFP-related and those caused by neurochemicals (page 10 lines 26-35, page 11 lines 1-5).

      iii) The dimensions of the sensor head need to be specified and spelled out clearly. It seems to be around 50 um, but the text seems to suggest 150 um. The individual sensing elements are 17 um in diameter. If this is true, it is very exciting because it exhibits hemispherical diffusion yielding higher response and enhanced sensitivity. This may improve spatial and temporal resolution if this is in indeed a much smaller sensor as a disk-shaped one.

      We thank the reviewers for referring to this point. It is an important detail that was not clearly stated in the manuscript. In the Methods section (page 34 of original manuscript), the description of the insertion of the tetrode inside a silica tube might have been misleading. In fact, the tetrode actually protrudes 1-2 cm out of the silica tube. This distance assures that the latter is not in contact with the brain in in vivo recordings. The cutting of the twisted ending of the tetrode results in four disc-shaped sensing elements with 17 μm diameter. The total diameter of the tetrode is approximately 60 μm. In the revised manuscript we have clarified and emphasized these details in the Methods section (page 36 lines 10, 15-16), in the results (page 6, lines 3-5) and with an additional cartoon in Figure 1A.

      iv) The role of the sentinels with differential plating is very interesting, but the function of the sentinels is not clear (p. 4 "canceling LFP-related currents"). They consume oxygen. Why does this not result in overlap of the diffusion layer for the choline sensor and therefore affect choline response? Please explain why differential electroplating was employed.

      We further clarified the role of the pseudo-sentinel sites on the removal of LFP-related currents and neurochemical artifacts and expanded the reasoning behind this approach. Please check the Introduction of the revised manuscript (page 4 lines 4-18, page 5 lines 6- 15).

      When polarized at +0.6 V vs. Ag/AgCl, the pseudo-sentinel channels display a residual activity towards electrochemical oxidation of H2O2. This electrochemical reaction generates O2, but the effect on the local O2 concentration is negligible due to the poor sensitivity and very small electrode surface area (17 μm diameter disc). We measured O2 (head-fixed mice and in vitro) by electrochemical reduction at -0.2 V vs. Ag/AgCl at a pseudo-sentinel site (gold-plated without m-PD). In this case O2 is consumed, but at a very limited extent that does not affect the local O2 level in the sensor. In accordance with the expected lack of effect on O2 levels, we have confirmed that switching the applied potential on a gold-plated site between +0.6 V and -0.2 V vs. Ag/AgCl has no effect on the COA signal. In the revised manuscript we added a supplementary figure (Figure S4) describing this observation. Accordingly, we extended the discussion of this topic in the results section (page 13, lines 17-18).

      v). Please explain how time-dependent behavior of the sensor was measured. This process typically leads to the formation of a film on this electrode surface which can affect sensitivity. According the authors' 2015 paper, the method for measuring the response time seems rather crude, and may overestimate the response time which is related to the mixing of the solution. This needs to be discussed.

      The sensor response times were estimated from the rise of the current in response to analyte additions in a stirred buffer solution, as described in the Methods section (page 40, lines 9-10 of revised manuscript). In the revised manuscript, we added a sentence to further clarify the use of this setup to estimate response times (page 37, line 29). Indeed, this setup is not the most appropriate to precisely determine response times due to the bias introduced by the analyte mixing time after its addition to the buffer. Our previous study (Santos et al, 2015) suggests however that the biggest contribution to the estimated response time is due to diffusion of Ch in the sensor coating. Besides the fact that we cannot precisely determine response times, it is noteworthy that real response times are faster than the values we report. This further highlights the high temporal resolution of the TACO sensor. We added a paragraph discussing this topic in the revised manuscript (page 7, lines 19-21).

      vi). The effect of LFP and other perturbations of sensor responses need to be more clearly explained.

      Two main types of artifacts affect the response of enzyme-based electrochemical biosensors: electromagnetic or electrochemical sources that directly generate currents at the electrode surface and biochemical factors that affect the activity of the immobilized enzyme. The first group can be sub-divided into: a) artifacts that generate faradaic currents, arising from oxidation/reduction of electrochemically active molecules, such as ascorbate or dopamine; b) artifacts that change the charge distributions at the electrode surface, generating capacitive currents, which in the brain are mainly caused by local fluctuations in field potentials (LFP) generated by the transmemberane current sources of the surrounding neural tissue. Effectively, LFP causes potential changes at the electrode surface who’s voltage is clamped by the potentiostat circuit, giving rise to apparent current, similar to voltage clamp measurement of the intracellular current. The second group, consisting in biochemical artifacts, comprises mainly the effect of oxygen on enzymatic activity (although other factors such as temperature and pH might have a minor effect, as discussed in the manuscript, page 34, lines 16-20).

      Importantly, the strategies devised to reduce artifacts that directly generate electrochemical currents (chemical surface modifications or common-mode rejection) do not control for factors influencing immobilized ChOx activity.

      Since O2 interference was the main focus of the paper and is thoroughly described throughout the manuscript, in the Introduction of revised manuscript we extended the description of the factors directly generating currents on the electrode surface (page 4, lines 4-18).

      2) Re-organization of the manuscript to improve the readability. This manuscript contains the characterization of the TACO sensor and application of this sensor to monitor real-time behavior in freely moving rodents. The design and characterization of the sensor is intermingled with the application of studying the choline biology with the sensor, making the logic flow hard to follow. The arrangement and presentation of the figures need to be improved so readers can appreciate both characterization and applications aspects and how they are tightly linked. This might also involves properly arrange main figures and associated supplementary figures.

      We believe this suggestion stems from the expectation that we may have conveyed to the readers regarding the possibility of measuring authentic Ch dynamics in behaving animals with our TACO sensor. Indeed the TACO sensor design makes it ideally suited for the unbiased measurement of brain Ch dynamics based on ChOx, while controlling for O2 changes that might modulate immobilized enzyme activity. However, our data shows that phasic ChOx activity (COA) is dominated by O2 fluctuations in the brain of behaving animals. The complexity of the nonlinear interplay between COA and O2, which depends on multiple time-scale concentration dynamics of both enzyme substrates made it impossible to extract authentic Ch from the in vivo COA signal.

      Following the logic of data presentation in our manuscript, the initial description of TACO sensor design and properties towards COA measurement was followed by its in vivo application in freely-moving and head-fixed rodents, which led to the discovery of the possible O2 confound. This, in turn, prompted the next in vivo experiments with causal manipulations to prove the hypothetical confound effect. Next, in vitro experiments were used for more systematic investigation of the details of the confound and its underlying causes guided by the prior in vivo observations. Finally, we used a detailed mathematical model to quantitatively uncover the mechanism of the oxygen confound of the choline-oxidase-based biosensor.

      We think this logic of exposition is guiding the reader through our thought process and progresses consistently from the development of novel methodology to evaluation and identification of the confound, and then to unraveling the mechanism in vivo, in vitro and in the model. Reversing the order of presentation would break this logic and hurt the presentation of the story.

      We would like to ask the editor for her consent not to follow the suggested major reorganization. Instead, we clarified the internal logic at the end of the introduction section (page 5, lines 16-23), as well as throughout exposition of the results. Morevover, throughout the revised manuscript we emphasize the focus of our study on phasic COA dynamics instead of putative Ch by replacing terms alluding to the latter by “COA”. Accordingly, we better articulated the motivation for assessing SWR- and locomotion-related signals in freely- moving animals (Figure 2) and the interpretation of these results to avoid a biased expectation of the reader that COA signals provide authentic Ch readout. The revised manuscript now provides an unbiased perspective on motivation and interpretation of the in vivo experiments (page 10 lines 19-22, page 11 lines 5-12). The bias of COA by O2 and the issues associated with derivation of authentic Ch dynamics from our measurements were also further explained in the discussion (page 34, lines 35-37). Along the same lines, we have trimmed Figure 2 in order to keep the focus of the paper on phasic dynamics of the COA signal. Namely, we moved panels B and C describing tonic COA dynamics in the original manuscript to a supplementary figure in the revised version (Figure S3).

  5. multidimensional.link multidimensional.link
    1. I generally have four or five books open around the house—I live alone; I can do this—and they are not books on the same subject. They don’t relate to each other in any particular way, and the ideas they present bounce off one another. And I like this effect. I also listen to audio-books, and I’ll go out for my morning walk with tapes from two very different audio-books, and let those ideas bounce off each other, simmer, reproduce in some odd way, so that I come up with ideas that I might not have come up with if I had simply stuck to one book until I was done with it and then gone and picked up another. So, I guess, in that way, I’m using a kind of primitive hypertext. I am not a solitary thinker, or solitary learner, or solitary channel of these universal wisdoms and universal truths. I’m constantly learning from other people. I weave. We all weave in different ways. What is the tapestry of lessons and wisdom that are unique for me? Each person ends up with a different tapestry, but you start to see patterns amongst them. As masks are the sign that there are faces, words are the sign that there are things. And these things are the sign of the incomprehensible. Mutation occurs in the present, both flattening and warp occur in the immediate. The liminal period ends with another submersion in liquid that evokes the water of rebirth. From the wind, I learned a syntax for forwardness, how to move through obstacles by wrapping myself around them. To let meaning come from an accumulation of feeling. An experience when an unanticipated and spontaneous idea suddenly pops up into the head from nowhere. An unnerving sensation that, rather than us making something happen, something is happening to us. How such connections spring to mind are guesswork but they seem to favor those who have a promiscuous curiosity and chronic attraction to problems. As Nietzsche put it: “A thought comes as it wills, not when I will it.” A transformer is a device by which the voltage of an alternating current system may be changed. Slowly, the giant hand that has been crushing you relaxes its grip. The gilt lettering on the cover, the well-rubbed yellow-gray pages, the bugle notes of the title page, the orderly chapter headings, the finality of the last page—all these assured him of something sensible in the world. Naivety toward the full complexity of a situation, its effects and affects, but also its potential vulnerabilities, can be an asset rather than a hindrance. It frees you to fully think the situation anew. void setup() { size(200,200); } void draw() { background(200); fill(0); int i, j; for(i=1; i <= 10; i++) { for(j=1; j <= i; j++) { text(""*"", i*10, j*10); } } } “Folk” is an unstable term that immediately embodies a tension between self and other, us and them, past and present, here and there, urban and rural, high and low, tradition and innovation, individual and anonymous/communal. In tracing out these tensions, our research counters that the received idea that danced “folk” movements are simple, natural, local, uncodified - their meanings entirely transparent or self-evident - and suggests instead that, rather than affirming hierarchies or “backdating” aspects of culture, “folk” movement comprises a set of conventions that have been deployed as an aesthetic and political strategy to persuade and make arguments and to mobilize affect in service of various projects at different historical moments and in different cultural contexts. In short, “folk” has been used by dancers and choreographers as a tactic to reconfigure the present and reshape the future. 1. [Pera pera]. Describes chattering away frivolously, glibly. Describes speaking fluently in a foreign language. Describes leafing through a book, thumbing through. Describes cloth or wooden boards that are thin and cheap-looking. 2. By which force does one single mutated cell, in turn, change the entire body? The world we want is one where many worlds fit. Often we arbitrarily designate moments, points along the way, as “finished” or complete. But when does something’s destiny finally come to fruition? How do I listen to others? As if everyone were my Teacher, speaking to me (Her) cherished last words. The universe of possible worlds is constantly expanding and diversifying thanks to the incessant world-constructing activity of human minds and hands. We live amidst and, however unconsciously, partake in constellations of the real that cultural standards, narrative givens, etc. can’t make sense of, or even perceive. Simply to realize they are here, emitting flickers from the feathery increments of their iridescent half-lives, requires the kinds of time that we are rarely, if ever, permitted to have. Reading can be freefall. You are reading about a poem comprised of a thousand wayward looks. Dear navigator, in this highly-controlled environment without any natural climate, temperature, or humidity, my writing letters to you according to the rhythm of the seasons and the twenty-four solar terms is in itself a little silly, with a hint of obsessive-compulsiveness, but for me this is the only way to preserve my fundamental sense of earth time, so that when I step back on land, I won’t be overwhelmed by that fierce sense of strangeness. Each of these spaces is perceived at a different moment—a book is also a sequence of moments.  It should not be permanent, it should be very impermanent. It should aspire to the interminably pure moment of an interlude. Lila’s and Lenu’s obsessive relations to both physical order and to specifically writerly order make better sense when considering the original language that Ferrante uses to describe Lila’s experience. What translator Ann Goldstein describes so evocatively as “dissolving margins” or “dissolving boundaries” is smarginare (verb) or la smarginatura (noun), a peculiarly untranslatable and double-edged typographical term. Smarginare, oddly, indicates both excess (as when an image bleeds across its boundary, or the margin of the page), and boundedness (as in the cropping or cutting of the image to size), both the breakdown and strict maintenance of margins. Translator’s sons and daughters, or more redundantly, the translator’s translators. The source keeps shifting. It is It that travels. It is also I who carry a few fragments of it. In front of the simple question of where to bury her, it suddenly became frighteningly clear to me—to me, the free, the liberated, artist—whose head was full of freedom—how deep the hidden ties between us went, how strong they were, and how my world could be destroyed in a moment if theirs caved in. The coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision. I believe in radical softness and I enact it as I feel able , allowing myself the opportunity to embrace thew vulnerability in queer existence as a source of strength. Vamos pensar no espaço não como um lugar confinado, mas como o cosmos onde a gente pode despencar em paraquedas coloridos. Entre a oração e a ereção / Ora são, ora não são / Unção / Bênção / Sem nação / Mesmo que não nasçam / Mas vivem e vivem / E vem. MATRIARCHY [IS DEFINED]BY AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT CONCEPTION OF LIFE, NOT BASED ON DOMINATION AND HIERARCHIES, AND RESPECTFUL OF THE RELATIONAL FABRIC OF ALL LIFE. a monster of energy... that does not expend itself but only transforms itself... [A] play pf forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many...; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing..., with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms towards the hottest, most turbulent..., and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord. 1. Make something invisible for a camera,

      https://multidimensional.link/static/audio/noise.m4a

    1. Of the first, the two Consuls of Rome may serve as an example

      I find it interesting that Ancient Rome is used as an example. It is strange to think that we both look back on the same people and still today have a lot to learn.

    1. To Janie’s strange eyes, everything in the Everglades was big and new.

      https://youtu.be/Gb4skfRHV5M

      Now, I know that The Muck sounds and looks to be a place that isn’t desirable, but through this photo and video montage, I wanted to show the other side of it that maybe not everyone would see. Of course, it is hard to view it in this way, but I think that anything involving nature is a beautiful thing, and when imagination is brought into it, can open up a door of things we as humans don’t even care to imagine, such as the magic of forests and trees, whatever that may be. That is why I included the gif of the sparkles. I tried to not include any pictures that could provide a negative connotation because the whole point of my montage was to see the beautiful side of it. I used pictures of foliage to show the foliage one might see in the Muck, and showed clouds to show the depth of the Muck and what it might have to offer.

    1. Note: This rebuttal was posted by the corresponding author to Review Commons. Content has not been altered except for formatting.

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      Reply to the reviewers

      We thank the reviewers for carefully reading our manuscript. We found their comments to be incredibly thoughtful and constructive and greatly appreciate their feedback. We are confident that addressing the reviewers’ concerns will strengthen our manuscript.

      Reviewer #1 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)):

      In this manuscript entitled 'Combinatorial patterns of graded RhoA activation and uniform F-actin depletion promote tissue curvature' by Denk-Lobnig et al. the authors study the organisation of junctional F-actin during the process of mesoderm invagination during gastrulation in the model Drosophila. Following on from previous work by the same lab that identified and analysed a multicellular myosin II gradient across the mesoderm important for apical constriction and tissue bending, the authors now turn their attention to actin. Using imaging of live and fixed samples, they identify a patterning of F-actin intensity/density at apical junctions that they show is dynamically changing going into mesoderm invagination and is set up by the upstream transcription factors driving this process, Twist and Snail. They go on to show, using genetic perturbations, that both actin and the previously described myosin gradient are downstream of regulation and activation by RhoA, that in turn is controlled by a balance of RhoGEF2 activation and RhoGAP C-GAP inactivation. The authors conclude that the intricate expression patterns of all involved players, that all slightly vary from one another, is what drives the wild-type distinctive cell shape changes in particular rows of cells of the presumptive mesoderm and surrounding epidermis.

      This is a very interesting study analysing complex and large-scale cell and tissue shape changes in the early embryo. Much has been learned over the last decade and more about many of the molecular players and their particular behaviours that drive the process, but how all upstream regulators work together to achieve a coordinated tissue-scale behaviours is still not very well understood, and this study add important insights into this.

      The experiments seem well executed and support the conclusion drawn, but I have a few comments and questions that I feel the authors should address to strengthen their argument.

      We thank the reviewer for their interest in the paper and their helpful comments.

      **General points:**

      1. The authors state early on that they chose to focus on junctional rather than apical medial F-actin, but it is unclear to me really what the rationale behind that is. In much of the authors earlier work, they study the very dynamic behaviour of the apical-medial actomyosin that drives the apical cell area reduction in mesodermal cells required for folding. They have previously analysed F-actin in the constricting cells, but have only focused on the most constricting central cell rows (Coravos, J. S., & Martin, A. C. (2016). Developmental Cell, 1-14). The role of junctional F-actin compared to the apical-medial network on which the myosin works to drive constriction is much less clear, it could stabilize overall cell shape or modulate physical malleability or compliance of cells, or it could more actively be involved in implementing the 'ratchet' that needs to engage to stabilise a shrunken apical surface. I would appreciate more explanation or guidance on why the authors chose not to investigate apical-medial F-actin across the whole mesoderm and adjacent ectoderm, but rather focused in junctional F-actin, especially explaining better throughout what they think the role of the junctional F-actin they measure is.

      We focused on the junctional/lateral F-actin pool because this is where tissue-wide patterns in intensity variation are observed, especially when looking across the mesoderm-ectoderm boundary. Indeed, when we compare the apical-medial F-actin of marginal mesoderm cells to ectoderm cells in cross sections, we find no apparent difference, whereas there is a striking difference in junctional/lateral F-actin density (Fig. 1B, C; Supplemental Fig. 1A, D). We provide some preliminary en face views of the medial-apical surface in our response to Point 2, and we will obtain higher resolution images from live and fixed embryos to better show the network organization. We agree with the reviewer that this requires added justification. Therefore, we will: 1) Provide higher resolution images of apical-medial F-actin comparing different regions of mesoderm and ectoderm, and 2) revise the text to better justify why we chose junctional/lateral F-actin to focus our tissue-level analysis and to elaborate more on what we think the role of junctional/lateral F-actin in this process may be.

      Comparing the F-actin labeling in the above previous paper to the stainings/live images shown here, they look quite different. This is most likely due to the authors here not showing the whole apical area but focusing on junctional, i.e. below the most apical region. It is not completely clear to me from the paper at what level along the apical-basal axis the authors are analysing the junctional F-actin. Supplemental Figure 2 seems to suggest about half-way down the cell, which would be below junctional levels. Could the authors indicate this more clearly, please? Overall, I would appreciate if the authors could supply some more high-resolution images of F-actin from fixed samples (which I assume will give the better resolution) of how F-actin actually looks in the different cells with differing levels. Is there for instance a visible change to F-actin organisation? And could this help explain the observed changes in intensity and their function?

      We apologize for the confusion, we were referring to ‘junctions’ as the lateral contacts between cells, as opposed to the adherens junctions at the apical surface. We have modified the text to use the term ‘lateral’ rather than ‘junctional’ F-actin, so as to avoid this confusion. The difference in cortical F-actin staining is not restricted to a particular apical-basal position, but extends along the length of the lateral domain (Fig. 1B, C). As far as we can tell the actin is bundled and underlies the entire cell circumference. We will: 1) better define the apical-basal position within the cell that we are showing, and 2) show high-resolution en face images of F-actin at different apical-basal positions, across different cell positions, in live and fixed embryos to better justify our focus on lateral F-actin (similar orientation, but higher resolution/quality than preliminary live data below).

      Along the same lines of thought as in point 2): Dehapiot et al. (Dehapiot, B., ... & Lecuit, T. (2020). Assembly of a persistent apical actin network by the formin Frl/Fmnl tunes epithelial cell deformability. Nature Cell Biology, 1-21) have recently shown for the process of germband extension and amnioserosa contraction that two pools of F-actin can be observed, a persistent pool not dependent on Rho[GTP] and a Rho-[GTP] dependent one. Could the authors comment on what they think might occur in the mesoderm, are similar pools present here as well?

      1. As the authoirs state themselves, Rho does not only affect actin via diaphanous, but of course also myosin via Rock. So it would be good to refelect this more in the interpretation and discussion of data, as the causal timeline could be complex.

      We thank the reviewer for reminding us to address this point and to discuss this excellent recent paper. We have not observed a persistent medial actin network in mesoderm cells or ectoderm cells at this stage (i.e. prior to germband extension). It was previously shown in mesoderm cells that pulsed myosin contractions condense the medio-apical F-actin network, but that this is often followed by F-actin network remodeling and that total F-actin levels decrease during apical constriction (Mason et al., 2013). Furthermore, Rho-kinase inhibition in mesoderm cells significantly disrupts this network, but does not inhibit the rapid assembly and disassembly of apical F-actin cables, which could reflect elevated actin turnover (Mason et al., 2013; Jodoin et al., 2015). To address the reviewer’s points, we 1) now include a paragraph in the Discussion to discuss the Dehapiot et al. paper (Comment 3) and the possible roles of various pools of F-actin and Rock/myosin shape the tissue (Comment 4) (lines 404-408), and 2) will image the apical surface of mesoderm and ectoderm at this stage and also germband extension (as a positive control) in order to determine whether there is a persistent network.

      **More specific comments to experiments and figures:**

      1. Reduction of junction function by alpha-catenin-RNAi: how strong is the reduction in catenin? Could they label a-catenin in fixed embryos? The authors conclude the original pre-constriction patterning of F-actin intensity is not dependent on intact junctions, but they show that the increase in F-actin in the mesodermal cells concomitant with apical constriction is in fact impaired in the RNAi. Thus, the authors can also not conclude whether the continued accumulation of myosin and its persistence depend on intact junctions. The initial set-up of the myosin gradient in terms of intensity distribution is unaffected, but clearly dynamics, subcellular pattern, interconnectivity etc. of myosin are affected and thus may well depend on some mechanical feed-back. I find this section of the manuscript slightly overstated and feel the conclusion should be more cautious.

      We thank the reviewer for pointing this out; we completely agree that we should have been more precise with our language. Our main conclusion was that myosin accumulation in a gradient does not require ‘sustained mechanical connectivity’. We felt it was important, given our model of transcriptional patterning, to show that some patterns did not result from mechanics or even apical constriction. Alpha-catenin knock-down provides the cleanest and most severe disruption of adhesion that we can accomplish at this developmental stage. We showed that alpha-catenin-RNAi resulted in: a) almost no intercellular connectivity in myosin structures (Yevick et al., 2019), and b) no apical constriction (this study, Fig. 3B).

      We: 1) revised the text in this section, clarifying that we are only referring to the gradient and that other myosin properties clearly do depend on mechanics, 2) will include data better showing the extent of the alpha-catenin knockdown and its effects on junctions and actomyosin.

      Figure 1 versus Figure 2: Why do the Utrophin-ABD virtual cross-sections look so fuzzy and bad in comparison to phalloidin labelled F-actin in the virtual cross-section in Fig. 1B and C? The labelling shown in 2B and D does not even look very junctional...

      We apologize that we did not explain the difference in visualization methods more clearly. For live images (Figure 2), we used a projection of cross-sections, which includes 20 µm length along the anterior-posterior (AP) axis. This projection method is less dependent on the specific AP position of the cross-section and the specific cells being shown. We did this because the projection helps to visualize the tissue pattern in live images where fluorescence images are noisier than fixed images, which exhibit cleaner labeling (Fig. 1). To address this point, we plan to: 1) Edit the text to make the method of visualization clearer, and 2) fix snail and twist mutant embryos and also provide thin cross-sections analogous to Fig. 1.

      Figure 5 C and D: the control gradients for myosin shown in C and D are completely different, for C the half-way height cell row is deduced as 5 whereas the (in theory identical) control measure in D has row 3 at halfway height! Why is this? Putting all curves together in the same panel would suggest that that C control curve is very similar to RhoGEF2-OE! This can't be right.

      The reason for the different width of the gradients in these controls is the Sqh::GFP copy number. All of our experiments perturbing Rho were carefully controlled so as to ensure the same copy number of the fluorescent marker that we were visualizing. For technical reasons, we were only able to get 1 copy of the Sqh::GFP into the RhoGEF2-OE background. Having two copies of the Sqh::GFP appears to have a slightly activating effect; in fact, the reviewer might have noticed that ventral furrows with 2 copies Sqh::GFP (and a wider gradient) have lower curvature, consistent with our main conclusion (Fig. 7 C). The effects of fluorescently tagged markers were a concern for us and so we were careful to show that the effects of changing RhoA activity on tissue curvature occur regardless of the fluorescent marker (i.e., Sqh::GFP or Utr::GFP, Fig. 7 and Sup. Fig. 7).

      Still in Figure 5: Panels C and D again, but for apical area: are the control and C-GAP-RNAi or RhoGEF2-OE curves significantly different? What statistics were used on this?

      We thank the reviewer for this point. We did not include statistical comparisons of the gradient width originally, because we felt that it does not completely capture the difference between the two curves and that presenting the curves instead lets readers examine the intricacies of the data as a whole. However, to address the reviewer’s point, we will add statistical comparisons for apical area as well as myosin and actin patterns.

      Supplemental Figure 1: Panels in D: I appreciate this control, but would really also like to see the same control at a stage when folding has commenced and stretched cells are present at the margin of the mesoderm. How homogenous does the GAP43 label look in those?

      We will add a more apical projection (with quantification) of this embryo, in which folding has already commenced, to the revised manuscript, so its stage is clearer.

      Supplemental Figure 5: Panel 5 B: the authors conclude that the myosin gradient under RhoGEF2 RNAi is not smaller, but looking at the curves it in fact looks wilder. They also mention that the overall level of myosin in this condition is lower than the control...

      We will include quantification of absolute levels in Supplemental Figure 5 to compare overall levels. We will also statistically compare RhoGEF2 RNAi and control gradients and update our conclusions accordingly.

      Following on from the above, a comment of Figure 7: - The authors use RhoGEF2 RNAi stating that it affects the actin pattern, but the myosin pattern also seems affected. In line 318 the authors state that they use this condition to look at how junctional actin density affects curvature. I find this phrase misleading as It might lead the readers to think that RHoGEF2 RNAi only affects junctional F-actin, although it also affects myosin patterning.

      We thank the reviewer for catching this, that’s a good point. We have revised the text in lines 317-326 to more accurately describe the effect of RhoGEF2-RNAi on actin and myosin patterning, and to connect this to the effect on curvature.

      • Line 311: confusingly, the authors state that an increase in the actomyosin gradient affects curvature. But it is only the myosin gradient that is increased, while the junctional actin gradient is flatter than the control in both C-GAP RNAi and RhoGEF2 OE (the distinction is even made by authors line 243). Could this be clarified?

      We thank the reviewer for pointing out this imprecision on our part and have revised Line 311 to more precisely describe the individual effects on myosin and F-actin pattern changes upon RhoA perturbation.

      Reviewer #2 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)):

      Mesoderm invagination during Drosophila gastrulation has been a paradigm for how regionally restricted gene expression locally activates Rho signalling and for how subsequently activated acto-myosin drives cell shape changes which in turn lead to a change in tissue morphology. Despite the numerous studies on this subject and a good understanding of the overall process, several important aspects have remained elusive so far. Among these is the dynamics of cortical and junctional F-actin and its contribution to the shape changes of cells and tissue. Previous studies have focused on MyoII, the „active" component of the actin cytoskeleton. The dynamics of the „passive" counterpart, namely actin filaments, has been neglected, although it is clear that Rho signalling controls both branches.

      We thank the reviewer for the tough questions. The reviewer raises important points that, even if not all feasible to address experimentally, can be addressed by being more precise with our language__ and conclusions.__

      1. Although I clearly acknowledge the efforts taken by the authors to define a function of cortical (junctional) F-actin in apical constriction and furrow formation, several central aspects of the study are not sufficiently resolved and conclusive. Rho signalling controls MyoII via Rok and F-actin via forming/dia, among other less defined targets. The role of MyoII and cortical contraction could be conclusively sorted out, since inhibition of Rok affects the MyoII branch but not the other branches. A similar approach, i. e. a specific inhibition/depletion without affecting the other branch, has not been taken yet for the F-actin branch. The authors have not resolved this issue. When analysing the mutants, the authors cannot distinguish the effect of Rho signalling on the MyoII and F-actin branch. For this reason the changes in F-actin distribution in the mutants are linked to changes in Myo activity and thus a function cannot be assigned to F-actin. In order to derive a specific role of F-actin distribution for furrow formation, the authors need to find experimental ways to affect F-actin levels without affecting MyoII, for example by analysing mutants for dia or other formins.

      The reviewer’s assertion that Rok and Diaphanous only affect myosin and actin, respectively, is oversimplified. For example, in mammals, Rok regulates the Lim-Kinase/Cofilin pathway and thus F-actin (Geneste et al., JCB, 2002). The ‘F-actin branch’ of the RhoA pathway has been examined in multiple previous studies of mesoderm invagination (Fox and Peifer, 2007; Homem et al., 2008; Mason et al., 2013). We did not include diaphanous mutants in this tissue-level study because diaphanous mutants and actin drugs: a) affect RhoA signaling (Munjal et al., 2015; Coravos et al., 2016; Michaux et al., 2018), b) disrupt adherens junctions and tissue integrity (Homem et al, 2008; Mason et al., 2013), and c) have a preponderance of cellularization defects (Afshar et al., 2000). However, we agree with the reviewer that this could potentially be interesting, and so we 1) will look at the tissue-level pattern in Diaphanous-depleted embryos, 2) will analyze tissue-level actomyosin patterns in Rok inhibitor-injected embryos, and 3) have added a section to the Discussion (lines 418-432) explaining past work in this area and why we did not provide data on diaphanous mutants. A caveat of the proposed experiments is that actin and myosin ‘branches’ may be too interconnected to be conclusively separated.

      The authors employ a discontinuous spatial axis by the cell number. Although there are good arguments to understand and treat the cells as units, there are also good arguments for using a scale with absolute distance. I have doubts that the graded distributions presented by the authors are a result of this scaling with cell units. When looking at panel B of Fig 1 or Fig. 2A,B, for example, a sharp step like distribution is visible at the boundary between mesoderm and ectoderm anlage. In contrast a F-actin intensity distribution is graded after quantification. The graded distribution appears not to be a consequence of averaging because an even sharper step is very obvious in a projection along the embryonic axis as shown in panel B and D of Fig. 2, for example. The difference of a sharp step in the images and graded distribution after quantification with a spatial axis in cell number, is obvious for a-catenin in Fig. 3D and Rho signalling in Fig. 4 B. As the authors base their central conclusion (see headline) on the graded distribution, resolving the issue of spatial scale is a prerequisite of publication.

      We thank the reviewer for their point. It is an excellent idea and we have included representative plots with a continuous spatial scale in addition to our cell-based analysis (see below, each trace is average line intensity for 1 embryo). The spatially resolved analysis shows similar patterns for F-actin, myosin and RhoA pathway components as the cell-based metric and we plan to include this data as Supplemental Fig. 3 and 4 in a revised version of the manuscript.

      The authors put the spatial distribution of Rho signalling and F-actin into the center of their conclusion. They do so by affecting the pattern with mutants in twist/snail and varying upstream factors of Rho signalling. With respect to myo activation this have been done previously although possibly with less detail and it is no new insight that the width of the mesoderm anlage and corresponding Rho signalling domain has a consequence on the shape of the groove and furrow. To maintain the conclusion of the manuscript that spatially graded Rho signalling is contributes to tissue curvature, more convincing ways to change the pattern of Rho signalling are needed. Changing the balance of GEF and GAP shows the importance of Rho signalling and possibly signalling levels but not the contribution of its spatial distribution.

      A strength of our study was that we were able to stably ‘tune’ Rho signaling pattern and then follow tissue shape at later stages to determine the connection between the two. We respectfully disagree with the statement that, “with respect to myosin activation this has been done previously”. In past work, we expanded myosin activation by modifying embryonic cell fate, including changes in dorsal cell fates (Heer et al. 2017; Chanet et al., 2017). Here, we directly manipulate RhoA signaling, maintaining the width of the mesoderm anlage (see images below).

      A central conclusion of our study is that RhoA activation level determines the width of myosin activation within a normally sized mesoderm anlage, which has not been done before. The genetic approach presented in the paper was the best way we found to manipulate the spatial pattern of myosin/actin in a stable manner that lasts through invagination. It is worth noting that this approach allowed us to carefully ‘tune’ the level of RhoA activation so as to avoid elevating RhoA levels to the point that it disrupts signaling polarity within the cell (Mason et al., 2016). In our hands, optogenetic manipulation of RhoA, which requires continuous optical input, was less robust because: a) 2D tissue flow precludes delivering a consistent level of activation to given cells over the time course of invagination, b) tissue folding (i.e. 3D deformation) dramatically alters how much light is delivered to the mesoderm cells.

      To address the reviewer’s point, we: 1) edited the Discussion to explicitly state that we did not alter the pattern of RhoA activation without altering RhoA signaling levels and (lines 339-343), 2) plan to include Snail or Twist stainings showing that the width of the mesoderm anlage is not altered by changes in RhoA signaling so there is no confusion about this point, and 3) plan to include a mechanical model that compares how altering signaling levels vs. altering the spatial distribution of signaling affect fold curvature, respectively.

      Reviewer #2 (Significance (Required)):

      The question of a contribution of F-actin is addressed in this manuscript. The authors quantify F-actin in fixed and living embryos at two prominent steps in ventral furrow formation, (1) shortly prior to onset of apical constrictions and (2) when the groove has formed. They distinguish junctional and „medial" cortical F-actin. They employ a discontinuous spatial axis, the number of cells away from the ventral midline but not an absolute scale (see my notes below). The measurements are applied to wild type and mutant embryos affecting the transcriptional patterning (twist, snail), adherens junctions, and Rho signalling. The authors claim to reveal by their measurements a graded distribution of F-actin intensities with a peak at the ventral midline and a second peak at the boundary between mesoderm and ectoderm with a low point in the stretching cells of the mesectoderm. The authors further claim to reveal a graded distribution of Rho signalling components within the mesoderm anlage. Based on these data the authors conclude that graded Rho signalling and depletion of F-actin promote tissue curvature.

      Reviewer #3 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)):

      Previous work has shown that mesoderm invagination at the ventral midline of the Drosophila embryo requires precise spatial regulation of actomyosin levels in order to fold the tissue. In this work, Denk-Lobnig and colleagues further investigate the spatial distribution of myosin and F-actin in the mesoderm and how these patterns are established. The authors identify an F-actin pattern at the apical cell junctions that emerges upon folding, with elevated levels in the cells around the ventral midline, a decrease in junctional F-actin in the marginal mesoderm, and then an increase at the mesoderm-ectoderm border. They identify Snail and Twist as regulating different aspects of establishing this F-actin pattern. Additionally, by modulating RhoA activity (downstream of Twist) the authors are able to alter the width of the actomyosin pattern without affecting the width of the mesoderm tissue, which in turn affects the curvature of the tissue fold and the post-fold lumen size.

      The authors have conducted an elegant quantitative analysis of the distribution of actin, myosin and several of their regulators across the tissue. The study makes an attempt at integrating a large amount of information into a model of tissue folding, and the concept of mechanical gradients is exciting and still underexplored. I am concerned that the interpretation of some results focuses on specific details but ignores larger scale effects (e.g. potential effects of some of the manipulations on the ectoderm, and the impact that that could have on tissue folding are largely ignored). The statistical analysis of several results should also be improved. I suggest to address the following points.

      We thank the reviewer for their interest in our work and their important suggestions.

      **MAJOR**

      1. Line 127 and Figure 1E: The authors argue that there is an anticorrelation between F-actin distribution and cell areas. However, an R-squared value of 0.1083 rather suggests little-to-no correlation. The authors should evaluate the statistical significance of that correlation.

      To indicate whether the relationship between F-actin distribution and cell areas is significant, we will report the p-value for the F-test for overall significance for our regression analysis, as well as sample size, of this data in the revised manuscript. The F-statistic for this analysis is __F = 89.2, p-value = 4.7e-20.__

      Figure 5: claims that the width of the actomyosin gradient is affected by the various perturbations should be supported with statistical analysis. For example, the half-maximal gradient position for each individual myosin trace could be calculated (instead of using the mean trace), displayed using a box plot, and tested for significance using the Mann-Whitney U test, as in Figure 7. This is slightly complicated by the fact that the control group in Figure 5C is the same as the control group in Figure 3E, which needs to be carefully considered. Also, similar calculations should be made for the F-actin data in Fig 5E-G since throughout the rest of the paper, the authors refer to the width of the "actomyosin gradient" which implicates both myosin and actin.

      We thank the reviewer for this point We will include statistical comparisons for myosin gradients in the revised manuscript. To allow for multiple comparisons using the same control, we plan to use Kruskal-Wallis testing, which is analogous to one-way ANOVA for non-parametric data, and a post-hoc test to determine which pairs have significantly different distributions.

      We will update the language in the manuscript to distinguish between actin and myosin patterns. As our main conclusion is that F-actin depletion levels are changed by RhoA in marginal mesoderm cells, we will statistically compare this between groups.

      Line 142 and Figure 2B-C: I was confused by the description of the snail phenotype: - a. the claim that in snail mutants actin levels are uniform: based on Figure 2C, I'd say that F-actin levels decrease across the mesoderm moving away from the ventral midline, and that the main issue is with the accumulation of actin in the distal end of the mesoderm. The authors should better justify the claim that F-actin levels are uniform in snail mutants (or remove it). Maybe comparing F-actin levels in the first four or five rows of the mesoderm? - b. how about the increase of F-actin in the distal mesoderm, just adjacent to the ectoderm boundary? Why is it gone in snail mutants?

      1. We agree that the intensity in all embryos appears to decrease on the sides of the embryos when imaged in this way, but it is also clear that there is no abrupt increase in F-actin density going into the ectoderm. In our experience, the edge effect is due to the distance of the side of the embryo from the coverslip rather than actual lower F-actin density. This is suggested by: a) the fact that all snail mutant embryos peak at the center of the image even though they are not all oriented with the ventral side perfectly on top, and b) all embryos exhibit an intensity decrease within the ectoderm toward the edges of the image that are further away from the coverslip (Fig. 2 C, E, F). We will: 1) modify the text to include an explanation, and 2) fix and stain snail and twist mutant cross-sections that will not exhibit this effect of imaging depth, for comparison.
      2. We show in Figure S1C that in wild-type, F-actin does not actually increase in cells at the ectoderm boundary, but merely decreases in lateral mesoderm cells. Thus, it is likely that snail mutant embryos are merely lacking patterning in the mesoderm, where snail is active.
      3. With alpha-catenin-RNAi, F-actin depletion across the mesoderm still occurs, but junctional F-actin levels are not increased around the midline. While some explanations are offered in the text, the reason for this phenotype seems important for the story. The text in lines 204-205 suggests that F-actin that would normally be localized to the apical junctions is instead being drawn into medioapical actomyosin foci. Is this idea supported by evidence that medioapical F-actin in control embryos is lower than in alpha-catenin RNAi?

      We appreciate the reviewer’s suggestion to explain this more thoroughly. We find that in alpha-catenin-RNAi and even arm (β-catenin) mutant embryos, junctional complexes (i.e., E-cadherin) are drawn into the myosin spot through continuous contractile flow (see below and Martin et al., 2010 for arm). To make this clear in the manuscript, we plan to: 1) include data showing the effects of alpha-catenin RNAi on F-actin and E-cadherin localization in fixed embryos, which is now included in Supplemental Figure S3, and 2)

      include live imaging of UtrGFP-labeled alpha-catenin RNAi embryos.

      Figure 6A: there is a correlation between cell position and the productivity of myosin pulses, which the authors attribute to the RhoA gradient. This should be more definitively demonstrated by:

      • a. Plot and calculate the correlation between RhoA levels (measured with the RhoA probe) and the change in cell area caused by a contraction pulse. Is this a significant correlation?

      • b. How does myosin persistence change when RhoA is manipulated, e.g. in RhoA overexpressing embryos or in RhoA RNAi?

      It has already been shown that there is a correlation between myosin amplitude and apical constriction amplitude (Xie et al., 2015).__ Apical myosin and Rho-kinase localization depends entirely on RhoA activity (Mason et al., 2016) and Rho-kinase co-localizes precisely with myosin in both space and time (Vasquez et al., 2014). Changing levels of the RhoA regulator C-GAP has been shown to affect myosin persistence and the productivity of apical constriction, with higher C-GAP causing less productive constriction (Mason et al., 2016). We plan to update the text to connect the observation with what has been shown in previous studies and to make statements regarding causality on the tissue-level more cautious. However, our observation further shows how cytoskeletal activity is patterned across the mesoderm, so we think it has value and that it should be included in this paper. An in depth study of the connection between RhoA regulators and myosin persistence/pulsing is beyond the scope of the present study, especially considering possible COVID-19 restrictions. Making these connections will require substantial effort in the future.__

      **MINOR**

      1. The authors should indicate if the myosin shown in Figure 1A is junctional or medioapical. If it is junctional, does medioapical myosin better match junctional F-actin and cell areas? Similarly, if they are showing medioapical myosin, how does junctional myosin compare to junctional actin? It seems to me that consistently comparing the patterns of junctional F-actin and medioapical myosin (and RhoGEF2, RhoA, and ROCK in Figure 4) could be somewhat misleading, as the pools compared localize in different subcellular compartments.

      The myosin images shown throughout the paper are medioapical myosin. Junctional myosin in mesoderm cells is lower in intensity and cannot easily be seen by live imaging. We agree that it is important for the reader to see all pools of these proteins. Therefore, we will include in a supplemental figure high resolution images of actin and myosin at both apical and subapical positions for midline mesoderm, marginal mesoderm, and ectoderm cells at the time of folding. We will also justify why the analyzed pools were chosen, respectively.

      Most of the intensity traces for myosin and F-actin are presented as normalized intensity, relative to the highest intensity in the trace. However, there are claims throughout the text about the relative levels of myosin (ex. Line 241) and F-actin (conclusions based on Fig. 2B-D) that should be supported by quantification. It seems that changes in intensity for both F-actin and myosin, in addition to shape of the gradient, would contribute to the understanding of actomyosin regulation in this tissue. However, if intensities cannot be directly compared between groups due to variation in imaging settings or staining protocols, there should be no claims made about changes in overall F-actin or myosin intensity.

      We appreciate the point made by the reviewer here. To address this point, we will provide data for absolute levels in relevant cases and be more precise in our conclusions.

      The significance of the correlation in Figure 7E should be quantified.

      We will report the p-value for the F-test for overall significance for our regression analysis of this data. The F-statistic for this analysis is F = __15.6, p-value = 0.00103.__

      Supplemental Figure 2: does the segmentation image match the second Z reslice immediately above? It does not appear so, or perhaps they are just not aligned. Having the two match would be more convincing of the segmentation technique.

      We will ensure that matching images are used for this figure.

      Reviewer #3 (Significance (Required)):

      The authors have conducted an elegant quantitative analysis of the distribution of actin, myosin and several of their regulators across the tissue. The study makes an attempt at integrating a large amount of information into a model of tissue folding, and the concept of mechanical gradients is exciting and still underexplored. I am concerned that the interpretation of some results focuses on specific details but ignores larger scale effects (e.g. potential effects of some of the manipulations on the ectoderm, and the impact that that could have on tissue folding are largely ignored). The statistical analysis of several results should also be improved.

      This is a great point. It is important to note that our conclusions required us to ‘tune’ the expression of GEF and the depletion of GAP with GAL4 drivers to get expression levels that do not dramatically affect RhoA polarity within mesoderm cells, but that alter the tissue level pattern within the mesoderm. Furthermore, we were cautious in making sure that our perturbations that elevate RhoA activation level did not lead to elevated myosin in the ectoderm (Fig. 5A and B). It is worth noting that RhoGEF2 is still full-length in all cases and has all of the normal regulatory domains that allow its activity to be restricted to the mesoderm at this stage. To more explicitly show the effect of our perturbations on ectoderm cells, we plan to include higher resolution images comparing myosin and F-actin organization/levels in the ectoderm for our manipulations of RhoA signaling.

    1. This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother,Which thou takest from me. When thou camest first,

      I think in these quotes we can see a little bit of background to Caliban's behavior. No matter what, attempting to rape Miranda is not justified, but to him it does not seem like a big deal or problem. In this quote he reminds us that the island originally belongs to him and his mother, suggesting that he is the one that shall pass judgment on its grounds. We also know from other parts of the book, they were cruel to the spirits that also inhabited the island with them, which may also impact why he is okay with cruelly treating others. These quotes also give the impression that even after death, Syncorax is able to influence and control Caliban, as he is unable to think of the island without mentioning her. He thinks ruling the island is his birthright and the constant reminder of his mother could be a large factor in his complex of not seeing himself in the wrong.

    2. I rememberYou did supplant your brother Prospero. ANTONIO True:And look how well my garments sit upon me;Much feater than before: my brother's servantsWere then my fellows; now they are my men.

      This actually corroborates Prospero's previous story that he told to Miranda. Initially I wasn't sure if we could trust the word of Prospero due to his control issues and him causing the storm. Based on much of Shakespeare I wasn't sure if Prospero's story could even be trusted. It felt like something Mother Gothel would tell Rapunzel. Now we have Antonio admit to it so we can assume Prospero is being honest. Also He uses garments as a stand in for status and power like we discussed in Much Ado About Nothing. Its interesting to see that analogy between the position he stole from Prospero and wearing his clothes. His claim to power is that, " Well it fits me better" and thats really the same way that Prospero described in his story. It shows that Prospero is rather good at understanding how people think as well as their motivations for behaving in certain ways. He may be a bit of a recluse, but Prospero has quite a bit of people skills and social intelligence.

    1. These general observations will enable you to discern what I intend by different classes, and the general scope of my ideas, when I contend for uniting and balancing their interests, feelings, opinions, and views in the legislature. We may not only so unite and balance these as to prevent a change in the government by the gradual exaltation of one part to the depression of others, but we may derive many other advantages from the combination and full representation.

      The author's purpose is depicted perfectly in these couple sentences. Instead of just speaking of or about these worries (balancing interests, feelings, etc..) he names them outright in a list. This compels the audience to think over the list and realize whether or not they have the same end goal as the author. He is portraying himself as a true man of the people, someone to depend on .

    1. Author Response:

      We would like to thank the reviewers for taking the time review our manuscript. The comments below have been thought-provoking and will inspire several new analyses that we hope address concerns. In particular, we will carefully reappraisal the framing of the results, shifting away from a false dichotomy of “this is perception” and “this is binding”, and towards more restraint terminology that discusses the shift in balance between perception and binding. Moreover, we will expand our analysis of theta-gamma phase-amplitude coupling beyond the hippocampus and to the whole brain.

      We answered each comment in turn, first by providing a general response to the comment and then by providing an outline of the explicit action we will take to address this issue.

      Reviewer #1:

      This MEG study by Griffiths and colleagues used a sequence learning paradigm which separates information encoding and binding in time to investigate the role of two neural indexes - neocortical alpha/beta desynchronization and hippocampal theta/gamma oscillation - in human episodic memory formation. They employed a linear regression approach to examine the behavioral correlates of the two neural indexes in the two phases, respectively and demonstrated an interesting dissociation, i.e., decreased alpha/beta power only during the "sequence perception" epoch and increased hippocampal theta/gamma coupling only during the "mnemonic binding" phase. Based on the results, they propose that the two neural mechanisms separately mediate two processes - information representation and mnemonic binding. Overall, this is an interesting study using a state-of-art approach to address an important question. Meanwhile, I have several major concerns that need more analysis and clarifications.

      Major comments:

      1) The lack of theta-gamma coupling during stimulus encoding period is possibly due to the presentation of figure stimulus, which would elicit strong sensory responses that mask the hippocampus activity. How could the author exclude the possibility? In other words, the dissociated results might derive from different sensory inputs during the two phases.

      Response: The reviewer raises a good point; However, we feel this is already addressed by our use of memory-related contrasts. The masking of an effect that arises due to stimulus presentation would be consistent across all memory conditions, and therefore subtracted out in any contrast between these conditions. The analyses in our original submission use this approach to avoid such a confound. Furthermore, previous studies (e.g. Heusser et al., 2016, Nat. Neuro.) have demonstrated that hippocampal theta-gamma coupling can arise during stimulus presentation, suggesting strong sensory responses do not, generally speaking, mask measures of theta-gamma coupling.

      Action: We will explain the potential concern about masking in the main text, and also explain how we have addressed such a concern with the use of contrasts.

      2) About the hippocampal theta/gamma phase-power coupling analysis. I understand that this hypothesis derives from previous research (e.g., Heusser et al., 2018) as well as the group itself (Griffiths et al., PNAS, 2019). Meanwhile, MEG recording, especially the gradiometer, is known to be relatively insensitive to deep sources. Therefore, the authors should provide more direct evidence to support this approach. For instance, the theta/gamma analysis relies on the presence of theta-band and gamma-band peak in each subject. Although the authors have provided two representative examples (Figure 3A), it remains unknown how stable the theta-band and gamma-band peak exist in individual subject.

      Action: We will plot the data for all participants to demonstrate the stability of the theta/gamma band peaks.

      Additional response: In regards to the concerns to the MEG gradiometers being relatively insensitive to deep sources, we feel it is worth noting that a recent review (Ruzich et al., 2019, Human Brain Mapping) identified 29 studies that had reported successful hippocampal measurements when only using gradiometers, suggesting our use of gradiometers is not unprecedented nor unjustified. Furthermore, in their recommendations for optimising hippocampal recordings with MEG, the old wisdom of using magnetometers rather than gradiometers is conspicuous in its absence in the review – perhaps because while magnetometers have a greater theoretical potential to detect deep signal, they also have greater theoretical potential to pick up noise, so the signal-to-noise ratio (which, arguably, is key here) for deep sources may not differ so much between gradiometers and magnetometers.

      3) Related to the above comment, the theta-gamma coupling is a brain-wide phenomenon including both cortical and subcortical areas and not limited to just hippocampus. Although the authors have performed a control analysis to assess the behavioral correlates of the coupling in other regions, the division of brain region is too coarse and I am not convinced that this is a fair comparison, since they differ from hippocampus at least in terms of area size in the source space. The authors could consider plotting the power-phase coupling distribution in the source space and then assessing their behavioral correlates, rather than just showing results from hippocampus. This result would be important to confirm the uniqueness of the hippocampus in this binding process.

      Response: We concur that the plots currently do not demonstrate the specificity of the hippocampus, and whole brain images would better demonstrate the effect.

      Action: As suggested by the reviewer, we will plot theta-gamma coupling across the brain.

      4) About behavioral correlates. The current behavioral index confounds encoding and binding processes. Is there any way to seperate the encoding and binding performance from the overall behavioral measurements? It would be more convincing for me to find the two neural indexes at two phases predict the two behavioral indexes, respectively.

      Response: This is a really interesting idea, but one which perhaps requires a different experiment paradigm. For associative memory, we would argue that binding is an essential step for the successful encoding of a memory, so it would quite possibly be impossible to separate the two processes in the paradigm used here. That said, a different paradigm that compared associative memory to, say, item memory, may be able to answer such a question.

      Action: We will discuss this as an avenue of future research within the discussion.

      5) The author's previous works have elegantly shown the two neural indexes during fMRI and intracranial recording in episodic memory. The current work, although providing an interesting view about their possible dissociated functions, only focuses on the memory formation period (information encoding and binding). Given previous works showing an interesting relationship between encoding and retrieval (Griffith et al., PNAS, 2019), I would recommend the authors to also analyze the retrieval period and see whether the two indexes show consistent dissociated function as well.

      Response: Yes, we completely agree. We had included this in a previous draft of the manuscript, and found a consistent dissociation here, where alpha/beta power decreases accompanied retrieval (perhaps linked to the representation of retrieved information) and theta-gamma coupling did not (perhaps due to the absence of a need to bind stimuli together in order to complete the retrieval task). We had cut this section to make a more streamlined manuscript, but have no qualms adding this back in.

      Action: We will include the same central analyses, this time conducted at retrieval.

      Reviewer #2:

      In this manuscript, the authors examine the neural correlates of perception and memory in the human brain. One issue that has plagued the field of memory is whether the neural processes that underlie perception can be dissociated from those that underlie memory formation. Here the authors directly test this question by introducing a behavioral paradigm designed to dissociate perception from mnemonic binding. In brief, while recording MEG data, they present subjects with a sequence of visual stimuli. Following the sequence, the subjects are instructed to bind the three stimuli together into a cohesive memory, and then are tested on their memory for which pattern was associated with an object, and which scene. The authors investigate changes in alpha/beta power and theta/gamma phase amplitude coupling during two separate epochs - perceptual processing and mnemonic binding. Overall, this is a well written and clear manuscript, with a clear hypothesis to be tested. Using MEG data enables the authors to draw conclusions about the neurophysiological changes underlying both perception and memory, and establishing this dissociation would be an important contribution to the field. I think the conclusions are justified, but there are several issues that should be addressed to improve the strength and clarity of the work.

      The fundamental premise of the task design is that subjects view a sequence of stimuli, and then separately at a later time actively try to bind those visual stimuli together as a memory. However, it is entirely possible, and even likely, that memories are being formed and even bound together as the subjects are still viewing the sequences of objects. How would the authors account for this possibility? One possible way would be if there were a control task where subjects were just asked to view items and not remember them.

      Response: Indeed, it is impossible to be certain that no binding is occurring during sequence presentation, and the terminology used in the original submission is ill-fitting as a result. However, we would argue that there is a shift in the ratio between perception and binding across the encoding task, with greater perceptual processes arising during the presentation of the sequence relative to the “associate” cue (as this is when the items are presented), and greater associative processes arising during the “associate” cue (as this is when all items are available for binding). To suggest that the two processes can be completely separated would be erroneous, but we feel it is also difficult to argue that there is no shift in balance between the two processes over the course of the encoding task. Importantly, linking a shift in balance between the two processes (binding/perception) with neurophysiological correlates (alpha-beta/theta-gamma) is sufficient for our main conclusion.

      Action: We will carefully rephrase the manuscript in such a way that it no longer implies that there is a perfect separation of perception and binding, but rather a shift in the balance between the two processes.

      Note on a “control” task: In our view, the control task proposed by the reviewer is captured by the “forgotten” condition – participants view the items, but do not subsequently remember them.

      Another possibility would be to examine the trials that the participants failed to remember correctly. Presumably, one would still see the same decreases in alpha power. Yet it seems from the data, and the correlations, that during those trials that were not remembered properly, alpha power changed very little. Of course, it is unclear in these trials if failed memory is due to failed perception, but one concern would be that this would imply that decreases in alpha power are relevant for memory too. It would be helpful to see how changes in alpha power break down as a function of the number of actual items remembered. It would also be helpful to know how strong these correlations actually are.

      Note: We are a little unsure of what the reviewer is suggesting here, as we feel that most of these analyses were included in the main text. The response below re-cap of the results and how they link to our interpretation of the reviewer’s comment, but if we have misunderstood the point, we would be willing to re-address it in a subsequent revision.

      Response: In the original submission, we had focused solely on the memory-related change in alpha/beta power (that is: the contrast “2 items recalled” > “1 item recalled” > “no items recalled”). Therefore, the inferential statistics allow us to conclude that a relative decrease in alpha/beta power correlates with an increase in number of items recalled. What the analyses in the original submission do not show is that alpha/beta power changes from baseline (that is, are all items perceived [i.e. as indexed by a power decrease], or just the remembered items?). This is something we’d be happy to address in the revision

      Action: We will probe the change in alpha/beta power following stimulus presentation, and ask whether alpha/beta power decreases are present for all memory conditions, or only when the items are subsequently remembered.

      A related issue is with respect to hippocampal PAC. The authors investigate this during the mnemonic binding period. Yet they also raise the possibility in discussion that this could also be happening during perception, which goes back to the point above. Did they analyze these data during perception, and are there changes with perception that correlate with memory? This would suggest that binding is actually occurring during this sequence of visual stimuli.

      Response: We did indeed analyse the data during perception in the original submission (see lines 127-128; figure 3d) and found no evidence to suggest that memory-related PAC varied during perception. In an additional analysis, we also examined with PAC varied as the sequence progressed (that is, does PAC change from the first item to the second, and from the second to the third?), but found no evidence to suggest it does. Together, these results would suggest that putative binding mechanisms are not dominating the sequence perception phase of encoding.

      Action: We will supplement the original analyses of PAC during sequence perception (collapsed over the three epochs) with additional analyses investigating PAC fluctuations over the course of the presentation of the sequence.

      The authors perform a whole brain analysis examining the correlation between alpha power and memory to identify cluster corrected regions of significant. However, the PAC analysis focuses only on the hippocampus, raising the question of whether these results can account for the possible comparisons one could make in the whole brain. They do look at four other brain regions for PAC, which it would be helpful to account for. In addition, are there other measures of mnemonic binding that are significant? For example, theta power, or even gamma power?

      Response: We had focused our PAC analyses on the hippocampus because of our a priori hypotheses but appreciate that only showing data from the hippocampus would obscure the whole picture. Our analyses did not uncover convincing evidence for changes in theta or gamma power, but we will report these in the main text.

      Action: We will present the PAC results across the whole brain. We will add analyses into theta and gamma power.

      The authors note in the discussion that the magnitude of hippocampal gamma synchrony has been shown to be related to the decreases in alpha power. Is this also true in their data?

      Action: We will include an additional analysis probing the correlation between hippocampus theta/gamma activity and neocortical alpha/beta power

      Reviewer #3:

      The authors report results of an MEG analysis deploying a cognitive paradigm in which participants engage in a source memory task characterized by the appearance of three images in succession and are then tested via a cue (the first of the three images) followed by a choice of responses for a two dimensional pattern and then a choice (out of three images) of a photographic scene.

      The principal finding is that (via MEG sensor level data) there is a widespread 8-15 Hz power decrease that is correlated with the number of recalled items (from 0 to 2) on a given trial. In the hippocampus (via MEG source reconstruction), the magnitude of phase amplitude coupling observed as participants are told to associate the items is correlated with memory performance. The 8-15 Hz power decrease/memory correlation (as estimated by beta coefficients in a model described in Figure 1) is larger (across individuals) during moments when subjects are viewing the stimulus items as opposed to during the "associate" period. The novelty in the result is related to the experimental task that attempts to dissociate memory-related effects related to perception from those related to binding which putatively occurs when subjects are given the "associate" instruction.

      My main conceptual concern is related to the design of the experimental task. I am not sure that the perception/binding framing is appropriate, since there is no reason to think that subjects are not associating/binding items during the periods when the items are being shown on the screen. I suppose this may partly explain the lack of a significant difference in PAC/memory beta coefficients observed in the hippocampus when contrasting these two epochs (Figure 4). But the corollary is that the alpha power-related beta coefficients are observed while binding is likely also occurring within the paradigm (esp since each image is shown for 1.5 seconds it would seem). Is the alpha power effect seen in the hippocampus? The plots in 3a suggest there is an oscillation present in the relevant frequency range, and the time course of alpha power differences seen in Figure 2 suggests that they occur relatively late after onset of the images, which may fit better with some contribution for this pattern to the forming of associations rather than perception.

      Response to comments on task: We agree that the task does not unequivocally separate the two cognitive tasks, and any statement to suggest that the does is erroneous. That said, we would argue that, on a balance of probability, there is likely to be more information processing going on during sequence perception relative to the associate cue. This is because the participant is still being exposed to rich stimuli during sequence presentation, while only being presented with a simple cue during the association phase. Similarly, there is likely to be more binding during the associate cue than during sequence presentation. This is because participants have greater cognitive resources available for binding during the associate cue relative to during sequence perception. Now, neither of these reasons are sufficient to argue that “association” does not occur during sequence perception. However, we feel that these reasons are sufficient to suggest we expect to see a shift in the balance of “association” between the sequence perception and the binding window, where “association” is more easily executed during the binding window. Indeed, we feel it would be difficult to argue that there is no shift in the balance between these processes at any point. Importantly, linking such a shift in balance between the two processes (binding/perception) with neurophysiological correlates (alpha-beta/theta-gamma) is sufficient for our main conclusion. As such, we feel a careful rephrasing can address these concerns, where portions of the text referring to a separation of perception and binding are rephrased as a “shift in the balance in perception and binding” – the latter phrasing allows for the possibility that there is some small mixing of the two tasks.

      Action to comments on task: We will carefully rephrase the manuscript such that the text does not suggest that perception and binding are perfectly separated, but rather that the balance between the two processes shift during the encoding task.

      Response to comments on hippocampal alpha: We agree that there appears to be an alpha peak in the hippocampus, but as this plot is across all trials, it remains unclear whether this alpha oscillation is linked to memory. This is, of course, something we can investigate in revisions.

      Action: We will investigate whether hippocampal alpha power demonstrates a memory-related effect during perception and/or binding.

      I understand that the paradigm was constructed in an attempt to temporally dissociate memory effects attributable to perception versus those attributable to binding. But given the temporal resolution available using EEG, I would imagine that the authors could differentiate an earlier perception-related effect from a later PAC binding effect in the time series if the associated images were presented in conjunction. Is it correct to frame the alpha results as related to "perception?" The beta coefficients used for analysis reflect a "memory related effect observed when visual stimuli are present on the screen," but not necessarily improved memory predicated on more accurate perception to my interpretation. I would think that a perception/binding distinction requires operationalizing perception as activity that doesn't vary with later associative memory success, and binding as activity that does. The notion of perception used by the authors here seems slightly different. The authors can perhaps comment on this concern.

      Response: This is a very interesting point. A hallmark of visual perception is a reduction in alpha/beta power (e.g. Pfurtscheller et al., 1994, Int. J. Psychophysiology), regardless of whether it is remembered or not. As such, we would expect alpha/beta power to decrease following stimulus onset even if a memory is not formed. This could be directly tested by examining the stimulus-evoked power decrease in all conditions, with the expectation that alpha/beta power drops from baseline in all conditions.

      Action: We will contrast of pre-stimulus and post-stimulus power investigate whether alpha/beta power decreases accompany visual perception regardless of successful memory encoding.

      The authors report PAC results for other regions on page 6, but claiming that PAC is a hippocampal-specific effect would require showing that the PAC-related beta coefficients are significantly greater than the other regions, rather than simply the absence of a significant effect in these regions. The authors should also clarify if they combined locally measured PAC over several ROIs into an average for these other regions? It seems unlikely to detect PAC if a single theta/gamma time series were extracted over such a large area of cortex.

      Response: We agree with the principle that the PAC results should be probed further, though would argue against the use of inter-region contrasts here as they will not provide evidence that PAC is specific to a single region. Take, for example, an effect where there is a significant memory-related increase in PAC in region A, but there is a significantly larger memory-related increase in region B. In a direct contrast, PAC in B will be significantly greater than A, but clearly PAC is not specific to B. Therefore, an inter-region contrast is not a means to irrefutably demonstrate regional specificity. While there has been a call for direct comparisons between experimental contrasts (see Nieuwenhuis et al., 2011), this is specifically for cases where individuals wish to make the claim that “A is significantly greater than B”, which was a claim that we never made here. Rather, we asked whether there is a memory-related difference in PAC within the hippocampus, and then followed this up by confirming that this effect was not a “bleed-in” from PAC in another neighbouring region (i.e. the cortical ROI analyses; where the absence of a significant difference would suggest that memory-related hippocampal PAC is not attributable to memory-related PAC in another region). We will, however, better visualise the PAC results to further rule out the risk of a “bleed-in” effect (see response to Reviewer 1, point 3).

      Action: We will visualise PAC across the cortex.

      Response to ROI-based contrasts: We had originally collapsed PAC measures over the ROI for the sake of simplicity, but the reviewer makes a good point for a more focal analysis.

      Action for ROI-based contrasts: We will run a voxel-wise analysis of PAC to compliment the ROI-based approach

      The interaction effect reported at the end of the results (ANOVA model) is interpreted such that the cortical alpha effect is stronger when the visual items are presented, while the hippocampal PAC effect is stronger when no items appear on the screen, but these recordings are made in different regions (hippocampus versus the entire cortex). If my understanding is correct, a result in line with the model the authors suggest (cortical alpha power decrease/hippocampal PAC) would show a region (hipp v cortex) x task (images on screen vs "associate" command) x metric (PAC vs alpha) interaction. Can the authors clarify if the cortical data entered into this model includes only those regions that showed a significant effect initially, or just all the sensors? The former would seem to introduce bias.

      Response: We had originally collapsed metric and region into a single factor (hippocampal PAC vs. cortical alpha), but the reviewer makes a very good point here – a better way to probe this interaction via a 3-factor ANOVA (using “region”, “epoch” and “metric”).

      Action: We will revise the ANOVA in such a way that we can probe a three-way interaction (location vs. time vs. measure).

      Similarly, the different visual classes are always presented in the same order, which may give rise to the strong disparity in recall fraction between the pattern and scene images. I understand the linear model incorporates predictor variables for scene/pattern recall, but given that scene recall is driving a significant amount of the overall recall number observed as the main variable of interest, I would wonder if the alpha/beta power effects are related to the relative complexity of the scene images as compared to the patterns. Given the analysis schematic the authors report, I assume the authors have analyzed whether the same effects occur when contrasting scene versus no recollection and pattern vs no recollection. If the same effects are observed regardless of type of image (when compared with no recollection) this may help address this concern.

      Action: We will include supplementary analyses that ask whether alpha/beta power decreases vary as a function of stimulus type.

      Additional note: the scene and pattern stimuli were not always presented in the same order, but rather counterbalanced across blocks to avoid order effects.

      My second conceptual question is related to MEG data. It appears to me that the authors use MEG sensor-level data for the alpha-related effect in the cortex (Figure 2), but MEG beamformer reconstructed data (localized to the hippocampus) for the PAC effect. Is there a reason the authors did not use MEG data localized to specific cortical regions rather than sensor data? This may reflect confusion on my part, but I don't understand why they would use qualitatively different types of data for these two aspects of the analysis that are then combined (in the ANOVA, for example).

      Response to questions on source-reconstructed alpha power: We had not included source-reconstructed analysis of the alpha power effect here because, in an earlier draft, extensive analysis (e.g. the reporting of both sensor-level and source-reconstructed alpha power effects) drew criticism from reviewers for a lack of conciseness. That said, as such analyses have already been conducted, it is relatively easy to add these back in.

      Action: We will include source-reconstructed alpha-band effects.

      The authors should also engage with concerns regarding the validity of localizing MEG signals (especially for an analysis such as PAC) to deep mesial temporal structures such as the hippocampus. I understand that MEG systems with greater than 300 sensors are more reliable for this purpose, but I think a number of readers would still have doubts about MTL localization of signal. Also, my understanding is that such deep source localization requires around 100 trials per class, which I think fits with what the subjects completed, but the authors may include references related to this issue.

      Response: In recent years, there has been a growing list of studies that have reported successful localisation of hippocampal signals using MEG (for review of 37 of these studies, see Ruzich et al., 2019, Human Brain Mapping). Generally speaking, our experimental paradigm and analysis pipeline show large overlap with these previous successes (e.g. use of beamformers, gradiometers, co-registered MRI-to-MEG head position), meaning our results are not completely out of line with what could be expected. Nonetheless, it would be beneficial to explicit state this in the manuscript.

      Action: We will explicitly address the historic difficulties of localising hippocampal MEG signals, and highlight how our approach fits with a growing consensus on how to successfully localise such signals (e.g. Ruzich et al., 2019, Human Brain Mapping).

      I think the signal processing steps are overall quite reasonable. I would ask the authors to clarify if they limited their analysis of cortical alpha/beta oscillations to those in which a peak exceeded the 1/f background, as they report for the PAC analysis on page 5. Also, it would be helpful to show that the magnitude of the MI values in the hippocampus exceed those observed by chance (using a shuffle procedure) in addition to showing that there is a memory-related association reflected in the beta coefficients.

      Response: We had not limited the analysis to peak alpha/beta oscillations in the original submission, but have no qualms about doing so – indeed, such an analytical approach may better substantiate the claim that we are probing oscillatory activity as opposed to non-oscillatory fluctuations.

      Action: We will restrict alpha/beta power analysis to the peak oscillation. We will add supplementary analysis contrasting measures of hippocampal PAC to a shuffled baseline.

    1. Scientists may think they have good reasons for believing thatliving organisms evolved naturally from nonliving chemicals, or thatcomplex organs evolved by the accumulation of micromutations throughnatural selection, but having reasons is not the same as having proof. Ihave seen people, previously inclined to believe whatever “science says,”become skeptical when they realize that the scientists actually do seem tothink that variations in nch beaks or peppered moths, or the mereexistence of fossils, proves all the vast claims of “evolution.”

      Many of these reasons for evolution do have some sound evidence that backs it up. Would there be exceptions or certian anomilies? yes, thats what makes those cases and anomily, but what this process does is it best explains this process were we can get these complec structures and specialized traits a such a large variety while sticking to known natural laws. By just simply stating that we can never full trace back lineages, therefore there is no proof is a weak argument and doesn't hold and water.

    Annotators

    1. joinimupbet

      I really like these combinations, "joinimupbet," "markimbet" and "shortenimupbet." For English speakers it may sound a little silly but the truth is we say the same thing it's just we don't combine it into a word in a written sense. If you're already going to be saying "shorten it up a bit" why not just have a word for it? I think pidgin kind of shows that what one person sees as "simple" or "bad grammar" another person sees as being economical with their words. And when Engilsh itself was developing German and French speakers probably also thought that it was ruining their languages. So that's my opinion, don't judge a language for sounding silly or having simpler vocabulary because all languages evolve for the same reason: to allow people to communicate, not to have a bunch of nice-sounding words.

    1. Reviewer #1:

      Taken collectively, the findings described in the manuscript provide a new perspective on how LAP2alpha influences the state of A-type lamins. By extension, one impact of the findings is that they provide a mechanism by which A-type lamin state is distinct within the nucleoplasm and at the nuclear lamina. The authors also arrive at some additional insights that are valuable. For example, the data supporting the initial peripheral localization of what is argued to be pre-lamin A during processing rather than filament assembly was interesting and, although indirect, largely convincing. I would encourage the authors to address the fact that this work drives a reinterpretation of their prior findings early in the paper. I also have some concern that the impact of the findings is somewhat narrow.

      Major points:

      1) Given that a major focus of the paper is to explain conflicting results with (the same group's) prior published data on the effect of LAP2alpha depletion, it would have helped to lay this out more clearly from the outset of the paper. As written, the reader is confused until arriving at Figure 3. I appreciate that resolving this conflict leads to a new perspective - namely that LAP2alpha influences the state of the lamin assembly in a way that disrupts its detection by the N18 antibody, but structuring the manuscript to get to this point as quickly as possible would improve its accessibility.

      2) I found the plots in Fig. 1A and B confusing. Can the authors clarify how the measurements are achieved - through ROIs for the entire nucleoplasm/periphery? How do they capture the diffuse versus focal signal within the nucleoplasm? There is also some concern that the nucleoplasmic signal may simply be too low to detect robustly at early time points (leading to an increase at later time points as the protein accumulates). Line profiles (which are useful in Fig. 3) would be very helpful if used more broadly for assessing the data particularly for Figure 1.

      3) Related to Figure 1 - the results for the deltaK32 mutant is essential for the interpretation and should be included in the primary figures.

      4) The authors make no comment on the functionality of the mEos-tagged lamin A/C CRISPR lines. However, the comment suggesting that some clones could have altered nuclear morphology (line 225) raises some questions. How did the authors interpret this? Were these clones in which there were indels in some lmnA alleles affecting the levels? Or is this a consequence of the fusion? How do the authors explain the relatively low expression level of the mEos fusion relative to the untagged? If the MDFs are diploid, presumably we would expect this to be one allele tagged and one allele untagged. Given that the expression ratio is very different from this, could the tagged lamin A/C be targeted for degradation? As these cell lines are critical for the rest of the study, this information is important.

      5) How does the deltaK32 mutation affect the ability to detect lamin A/C with the N18 antibody? Could this provide further insight into the impact of LAP2alpha by extension?

      6) Greater explanation for the apparent paradox between the increase in immobile fraction by FRAP and the increased diffusion coefficient by FCS in the LAP2alpha-depleted condition is needed. The authors suggest that the latter is due to the loss of LAP2alpha binding (line 395), but some modeling would go a long way here. What form are the lamins thought to be in, and how does the bulk that LAP2 alpha would bring match the apparent changes in diffusivity?

      7) One prediction that arises from the proposed model is that regulation of LAP2alpha levels will modulate the relative pool of A-type lamins at the nuclear interior versus the nucleoplasm. Beyond the knock-out cells, is there any other evidence of this relationship?

      8) Much of the biochemical characterization seems confirmatory - e.g. the binding and gradients in Fig. 5A and B. Use of the assembly mutants of lamin here could be informative is essential to interpret the changes induced by addition of LAP2alpha.

      9) With regards to the effects on chromatin mobility - over what time interval was the volume of movement observed? This is important because more fluctuations in nuclear position, for example, could influence this measure. In addition, telomeres are a confusing choice, given abundant evidence that there is crosstalk between the state of the nuclear lamina and telomere biology (e.g. lamin mutants affecting telomere homeostasis, etc.). At a minimum, acknowledging that telomeres may not reflect the effect on chromatin globally is important. Examples of the raw mean squared displacements would be more informative. Is the difference between lmna KO and lmna/Lap2alpha DKO (Fig. 6 right panel) significant?

      10) How do the authors think the membrane integrated LAP2beta fits into the story?

    1. Remora Communiqué

      The Remora Communiqué

      Issued by No Spectator Left, December 2020

      1

      I heard the voice

      Of the Remora speak –

      Slowly, all in silence,

      To wake me from my sleep.

      2

      I heard the voice

      Of its silence say,

      ‘A Plague Ship has been

      Stopped today.’

      3

      ‘Did you even know

      You were at sea?

      Did you ever stop

      To think of me?’

      4

      ‘Know you’d left

      The world behind,

      Or what on Earth

      You hoped to find?’

      5

      ‘Have you heard the whales

      Now have to yell?

      You think they’re singing –

      You can’t tell!’

      6

      ‘It was the droning on & on

      Of your Dread-Nought Destroyer

      That made me sound my calm alarm

      In the ear of your Employer.’

      7

      ‘The Strain & Refrain

      From onboard seemed familiar,

      An updated version of

      “Long Live Caligula!”’

      8

      ‘I stopped his progress, ah

      The hutzpah of karma!

      Rome outweighed

      By the scales of Remora... ’

      9

      ‘Mark Antony

      I scuppered too,

      Underthrown before

      He knew…’

      10

      ‘But today, you thought,

      What need to worry?

      What voodoo-glue can now undo

      Your ship’s world-beating hurry!’

      11

      ‘So I downsized, to fill the role

      I was unborn to play:

      Remember, as the Show Goes On,

      You recast me this way!’

      12

      ‘You even gave new me a name

      (With hollow ring, it’s true):

      Corona-Virus, The Sick Crown,

      Sitting right with you…’

      13

      ‘If you should miss this hint now –

      Heaven knows, I tried! –

      The next ring at the doorbell?

      No more Mr. Nice Guy!’

      14

      ‘For tho’ the story of l’il ole me

      Is soon & simply told

      (N.B., I’m only as little

      As you made the world),

      15

      Perchance in the Grand Scheme

      There’s ‘small’ & then there’s small,

      And your friend the atom

      May do for us all!’

      16

      ‘Fat Man’s little boy

      For purpose trained fit:

      The crack that splits open

      The hull of the ship!’

      17

      ‘Yes, that’s the thing (you’ll see too late),

      It All cracks from inside:

      Nothing in the world left ‘out’

      Now you’ve grown worldwide.’

      18

      ‘So while we’ve a moment –

      And if not now, when? –

      Pray, pay me best attention:

      We may not meet again.’

      19

      ‘And it’s hard to imagine

      But sadly safe to say, you

      May yet remember me

      Fondly one day!’

      20

      ‘For it’s not just the overlooked

      Pit of the Bomb, the

      Abyss that’s grown tired from

      Yawning so long,’

      21

      ‘There’s now – just in case! –

      As the Atomic Clock ticks,

      A new kid on the Doomsday Block,

      A spare Apocalypse!’

      22

      ‘And with two caps melting

      The Dunce is warming to his task,

      Facing down his Mother,

      Preparing Her Death-Mask.’

      23

      ‘But what does Her life matter

      (& who’ll be left to grieve?),

      The Old Girl in the Chokehold

      Croaking “I Can’t Breathe!”’

      24

      ‘O you wring your hands & ring your bells

      While skies & forests fall,

      But “capitalism will adapt!” no doubt:

      It has to, after all!’

      25

      ‘The trusty greenwashed reset button,

      Point missed without fail –

      “Sustainable development”…

      Of the Fairy Tale!’

      26

      ‘And to “listen to the science”

      Isn’t all you need to do:

      If you want to really heal thyself,

      Listen to my silence too!’

      27

      ‘It really is a killer,

      The racket y’all make:

      What kind of f** bully

      Wants to make his Mother Quake?’

      28

      ‘It is what it is,

      Boys will be boys,

      In their noisome

      Kingdom of Noise?’

      29

      ‘Well, until my little finger

      Touched the spinning top,

      Ripped you from the driver’s seat

      Of the Roaring Chariot.’

      30

      ‘But I cannot now take the helm

      Lay in a course that’s true,

      Back to safely grounded land –

      That’s up to all the Crew.’

      31

      ‘For in this emergency,

      All hands on the (burning) deck:

      Check your destiny’s manifest, there

      Are no passengers left!’

      32

      ‘It’s time to call a midnight strike,

      Make love to Mutiny –

      Go overboard, throw overboard

      This plaguey, illthy Bounty!’

      33

      ‘What exactly should you do? You

      Crave a detailed scheme?

      I’m not a power-point, you know,

      Just your own fever-dream!’

      34

      I started when the silence stopped,

      So badly missed its voice:

      Left all alone, onboard to make

      The choice that is no choice –

      35

      To put away so many

      Very foolish things,

      While we can still remember

      What being human means,

      36

      Remember that the question

      ‘To be or not to be?’

      Isn’t just a question

      Of or for humanity,

      37

      Though it wouldn’t be an issue

      Without the threats we pose,

      The constant hammering it takes

      To crucify Life’s Rose,

      38

      To pulverize the Earth that is

      Our only common wealth,

      To tame and tag, gas & gag

      The good wild life of health.

      39

      I cried, ‘my God, I have to rush,

      Right now alert the crew;

      Not those who know they slave & serve –

      The rest, without a clue,

      40

      Who buckle up,

      Enjoy the ride,

      Let those “in the

      Know” decide

      41

      Their fate: “Awake!,” I’d cry,

      “Discern!, deride

      The course laid in

      For Omnicide!”’

      42

      But my voice would

      Not be the Dream’s,

      And I must wake

      To what It means –

      43

      So first things first,

      Some silence, pray:

      High Time to issue

      The Remora Communiqué…

    1. Decius, well urged.  I think it is not meet, Mark Antony, so well beloved of Caesar, Should outlive Caesar.  We shall find of him A shrewd contriver; and, you know, his means, If he improve them, may well stretch so far As to annoy us all; which to prevent, Let Antony and Caesar fall together.

      Cassius: we should merk Mark Brutus: no dude, thats mean :,(

    1. Author Response

      Reviewer #1:

      The paper has potential. It's not there yet.

      The paper presents a sequencing study describing the evolution of Spiroplasma over various years in lab cultures. Spiroplasma is a fascinating bacteria that induces some unique phenotypes including enhancing insect immunity or "protection" and male-killing. The premise for the study was that sometimes these phenotypes disappear in cultures and thus the bacteria is likely quickly evolving and subject to frequent mutation. The researchers sequence various cultures of Spiroplasma (sHy and sMel), assemble and annotate genomes, compare the genomes, quantify the rates of evolution and compare these rates to some other studies on viruses, human microbiota/pathogens, and wolbachia. They find that Spiroplasma evolve real fast and speculate that the mechanism for this is a lack of various Mut repair enzymes. They look at fast evolving proteins of interest including RIP toxins which kill nematodes and spaid which is an inducer of male killing. So essentially the big result here is that Spiroplasma evolves real fast.

      In my opinion the paper is weak in a few senses. It doesn't reflect hypothesis driven science. It's mostly observational data and the researchers do not test any hypotheses. Now I don't think this is a deal breaker, but I do think it weakens the paper. Also, my comment should not imply that there isn't valuable data herein; and in fact I think the other big weakness is that the researchers do NOT exploit the true value of the data to derive and test novel hypotheses.

      We respectfully disagree with the reviewer’s opinion that hypothesis driven papers are generally ‘stronger’ than observational studies. Arguably, valuable insights can be derived from both types of studies, and this has been discussed in depth elsewhere (e.g., https://doi.org/10.1186/s13059-020-02133-w). However, we did have a hypothesis when we designed this study, and it was based on previous reports that novel phenotypes occur commonly in Spiroplasma in lab culture. We hypothesised that molecular evolution of Spiroplasma is likely also very fast. We further conclude with novel hypotheses on the evolutionary ecology of Spiroplasma poulsonii.

      For example: one aspect I was most excited about was to see how the researchers dissect and annotate evolutionary differences induced by axenic culture systems. The authors have the ability to compare and contrast genomes of Spiroplasma cultured in host insects AND Spiroplasma cultured without insects in axenic culture. Within these genome comparisons are likely novel insights that could shed light on mechanisms of maternal transmission and mechanisms of cell invasion etc... However, I was shocked to see that there is no in-depth analysis of specific proteins that are changing and evolving in these two diverse culture systems. I thought the analysis was entirely insufficient and didn't extract or present the real value of the datasets here. There are some brief mentions in the discussion of adherin binding proteins, but that was essentially it. I think the researchers focused too much on the past, ( the RIP toxins and spaid) rather than pointing out new interesting genes and hypotheses about them.

      For example: Maternal transmission would no longer be required in axenic culture, what genes got mutated? This is perhaps the most interesting thing that is not even touched upon.

      So essentially my main criticism is the added value from this paper which is the potential ability to compare symbiont genomes in hosts to symbionts with Axenic culture was NOT exploited. Given the novelty and impact of the axenic culture studies by Bruno, I would have hoped to see this upfront.

      We agree in general that our dataset presents the opportunity to compare evolution of the symbiont in axenic culture and in the host. However, any potential interpretation of evolution in axenic culture vs. in-host is hampered by the fact that we were comparing two different strains of Spiroplasma. With a sample size of 1 each, any conclusions on evolution in axenic culture vs. in-host would have been speculative.

      Additionally, we did not find notable differences in evolutionary rates or affected proteins between the two strains. From the first version of our paper:

      “The changes in sMel over ~2.5 years in culture affected only 15 different CDS in total, of which four were ARPs, and three lipoproteins”

      –which is overall very similar to the changes observed in sHy (Fig. 3). We concluded that the same genes are likely to evolve in axenic culture and in the host. We have made this clearer now in the manuscript:

      “The changes in sMel over ~2.5 years in culture affected only 15 different CDS in total, of which four were ARPs, and three lipoproteins. [New version:] Thus, the rates and patterns of evolutionary change are similar between the axenically cultured sMel and the host associated sHy.“

      Also there are some paragraphs comparing broad genomic differences between sHy and sMel, but I didn't think the differences in how these genomes evolved over time in comparison to their earlier selves was emphasized or explained in enough detail.

      We summarise the main patterns of change over time in sMel and sHy in the results and discussion sections, in Figure 3, and further list all detected changes from both strains in Supplementary table S2. We thus feel that the level of detail is appropriate here, especially given the length of the overall manuscript.

      Another example of not exploiting the value of the data: The plasmids are usually where much of the action is in microbes. There should be detailed annotations and figures of the plasmids. Tell me what is on them. Tell me which genes are evolving. Tell me if there are operons. Tell me what pathways are in the plasmids. I found the discussions of plasmid results wholly lacking. I also inherently felt that discussions of plasmids should be kept completely separate from discussions of chromosome evolution, regardless of similar rates of evolution or not... Plasmids are unique selfish entities and I imagine their evolution is wholly distinct from the evolution of chromosomes. They deserve their own sections and figures (in my opinion).

      There is a figure comparing plasmid synteny and gene content across the investigated strains in the supplementary material. Notable loci are highlighted, and again, the majority of genes are uncharacterised.

      The figure legends are completely insufficient and they ask me to read other papers to understand them, which is annoying.

      We apologise for this oversight and have now provided more comprehensive legends for all figures.

      Other minor comments:

      What about presence/absence of recA?

      recA is truncated in sMel by a previous stop codon, as discussed in detail in Paredes et al. (https://doi.org/10.1128/mBio.02437-14). recA appears to be complete and potentially functional in sHy, which supports Paredes et al’s inference that the truncation in sMel may be relatively recent (prior to the split of sMel and sHy). The new version of the manuscript now includes this detail:

      “Further, while recA is truncated in sMel, the copy in sHy appears complete and functional. As suggested by Paredes et al. (2015), the loss of recA function in sMel is therefore likely very recent.”

      There are differences in dna extraction prior to genome sequencing for each of the strains. I suspect this is because different individuals sequenced different genomes. But I worry that different protocols could produce different results and therefore a comparison might be tainted by dna extraction and library prep specifics. Can you at least explain to the reader why this is not an issue, if it is not an issue?

      DNA extraction procedures differed because they were done in different laboratories. All DNA extractions were based on phenol-chloroform, and all Spiroplasma extractions were based on isolating fly hemolymph. Any differences in protocols are minor, and mentioned mainly for reasons of reproducibility. We do not see any reason why this would affect genome reconstruction of a single bacterial isolate. Several studies suggest that the impact of DNA extraction and library preparation is negligible for assemblies and calling SNPs (e.g., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2019.e02745; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-71207-3).

      Examples:

      181 - why were heads removed? Why was this dna extraction protocol here different from the hemolymph extraction protocol? Might this have changed anything?

      Please see the comment on DNA extraction above. Head removal is often used when enrichment of symbiont DNA in whole fly extracts is desired.

      195 - how much heterogeneity do you expect in any given fly. Do you have SNP data differences amongst good reads that could point out different alleles within a Spiroplasma population within an individual fly? It would be interesting to know which genes have a large amount of different alleles.

      As described in the methods section, we always pooled hemolymph from multiple fly individuals in order to extract sufficient DNA for genome sequencing, so we cannot say anything about the genetic heterogeneity of Spiroplasma populations in any single fly individual. The levels of heterozygosity in the pooled extracts were however very low: Out of all variants called with more than 10x coverage in sHy-Liv18B and sHy-TX12 strains, 98% and 95% were unanimously supported by all mapping reads, respectively. Only 0.8% and 1% of variants had 5% or more reads supporting an alternative allele, respectively. No alternative allele was supported by more than 18% and 11% of reads, respectively.

      199 - another DNA extraction protocol. There isn't consistency here. If the reads and coverage are good enough, it shouldn't be a problem. But if there were data issues or assembly issues, this would raise concern in my mind. Can the researchers discuss or alleviate concerns here? Some assemblies have 6 chromosomes, some have 3 chromosomes. I presume these were different strains of Spiroplasma and not the same one?

      Please see the comment on DNA extraction above. As described in the methods section, we obtained long reads and short reads from the same DNA extract. Depending on the reads and algorithms employed, we created assemblies that differed in number of contigs. This is not unusual or unexpected (e.g., http://doi.org/10.1099/mgen.0.000132). A consensus was created by using a long read assembly and correcting it with contigs from a hybrid assembly, and subsequently, with Illumina reads. We feel that this was a good approach to ensure a contiguous, but accurate assembly.

      Figure 1: were the samples that are 6 years apart (red) sequence in exactly the same way with the same technology? Could this produce any relics? Also, why display information for sMel in a table and information for sHy in a figure? Can't you creatively standardize a visual means of showing this information and compile information to one item?

      Please see the comment on DNA extraction above. We have taken up the suggestion of the reviewer and created a single figure to display sampling for both strains.

      I wonder what would happen if you took the same sample and did different DNA extraction protocols, different library prep protocols, and different illumina rounds of sequencing and independent algorithm assemblies... how much would they come out the same? Has anyone ever done this experiment? Is there any reference for this control that shows they would in fact come out the same? This is essentially what I am worried about here. This could be a minor issue, if the researchers could just confidently explain why this is NOT an issue.

      Please see the comment on DNA extraction above.

      Line 30 - you introduce sHy and sMel without defining what they are yet? Clarify immediately that they are both S.poulsoni

      This was clearly stated in line 29 of our manuscript.

      line 247 - They found fragmented genes with orthofinder, if it was less than 60% length homology... why set an arbitrary cutoff of 60? Anything less than 100 is possibly a pseudogenization if the last amino acid is important, or the C-terminus is important, which it often is... What is the rationale here?

      We agree with the reviewer that this is a relatively crude measure of pseudogenization that likely results in missing several candidate pseudogenes. Because it is usually impossible to functionally characterise all loci of a bacterial genome, truncation is often used as an indication that genes may have lost their functions (https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gki631). This limitation was acknowledged in the first version of the manuscript: “Both sMel and sHy have a number of missing or truncated (i.e., potentially pseudogenized) genes when compared with each other”.

      To quantify an evolutionary rate, I read that they counted the number of changes in 3rd codon wobble positions/year. Why just wobble codons... why not all SNPs period? But then in the figure 2, it seemed like they are tallying a percentage of a total 100% = 570 "variants" or changes in the sequences (I wouldn't use the word variants, as this makes me think of strains; better to say "changes", no?). These changes include snps, insertions, deletions, and "complex"... no idea what complex is? The figure legends are completely insufficient. And I still don't know if you are tallying in some kind of number of recombinations and psuedogenizations into the mix (I assume these are included in the frame-shifts)? The quantification is murky to me.

      We used third codon positions mainly to facilitate comparison with other studies; e.g., the Richardson et. al analysis of Wolbachia evolutionary rates (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1003129). It is however common to only use mostly neutrally evolving sites to determine evolutionary rates in order to avoid differences arising from adaptive processes.

      The figures the reviewer is referring to aim to convey different types of information: Figure 2 displays the evolutionary rate estimates from neutral sites in comparison to other symbionts and pathogens. Figure 3 in contrast displays all changes we observed in a single strain of Spiroplasma.

      The adhesin proteins are evolving fast. But aren't Spiroplasma commonly intracellular... so why would it be binding an extracellular protein? ... can you discuss this? I presume invasion or something?

      Drosophila-associated Spiroplasma are mostly extracellular, although they experience an intracellular phase during vertical transmission when they infect oocytes. We know that in other Spiroplasma species, adhesins are involved in insect cell invasion (https://doi.org/10.3389/fcimb.2017.00013, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0048606) and we have now clarified this in the discussion:

      “For example, adhesion-related proteins are important in cell invasion in other Spiroplasma species (Béven et al., 2012; Dubrana et al., 2016; Hou et al., 2017) and are enriched for evolutionary changes in sHy and sMel (Fig. 2).”

      There might be a correlation with genome size and speed of evolution. You mention this in the discussion, but briefly. Can you elaborate on this, especially because Spiroplasmas are close to mycoplasmas which are REALLY small genomes.

      There is some novel evidence that prokaryotic genome size is strongly correlated with mutational rate (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.07.034), rather than mostly determined by effective population size as previously suggested. This novel study also found that increased mutation rates often occur in lineages that have lost DNA repair genes, which is in line with our findings. Comparing evolutionary rates (Fig. 1) with genome sizes and the presence of DNA repair genes reveals that correlation is not straightforward for the endosymbiotic lineages we compared. For example, Wolbachia and Buchnera appear to have lower substitution rates than Spiroplasma, yet both have ~similar genome sizes (Wolbachia) or smaller genomes (Buchnera) than Spiroplasma poulsonii. We have included the discussion on mutational rates determining genome size as follows:

      “Further to absence of DNA repair genes causing elevated mutation rates, a recent comparative study demonstrated a strong negative correlation between mutation rate and genome size in free living and endosymbiotic bacteria (Bourguignon et al., 2020). This correlation is however not apparent in the genomes of endosymbionts we have investigated. For example, the considerably slower evolving Buchnera genomes are much smaller than Spiroplasma, and Wolbachia would be predicted to have much larger genomes if their size was mainly determined by mutational rates. This suggests that mutational rates alone are a poor predictor for the sizes of the here investigated genomes. Likely, these genome sizes result from an interplay of multiple factors such as population size, patterns of DNA repair gene absence, and mutational rates (Kuo et al., 2009; Marais et al., 2020).”

      We have further moved supplementary Figure S5 into the main manuscript body (now Fig. 7) to better enable the readers to follow the discussion on the lack of DNA repair genes.

      Figure 3 is really confusing. I assume FS is frameshift, is IF induced fragmentation? After about 10 minutes I could decode it. Is this really the best way to think about these results? Perhaps? But perhaps not? ARP? I think it's adhesin stuff, but you don't say this until later.

      We have revised and clarified all figure legends. Please also see the comment above.

      Reviewer #2:

      General assessment:

      This work utilizes two Spiroplasma populations as the materials to study the substitution rates of symbiotic bacteria. A major finding is that these symbionts have rates that are ~2-3 orders higher than other bacteria with similar ecological niches (i.e., insect symbionts), and these substitution rates are comparable to the highest rates reported for bacteria and the lowest rate reported for RNA virus. Based on these findings, the authors discussed how this knowledge could be used to infer and to understand symbiont evolution. The biological materials used (i.e., symbionts maintained in fly hosts for 10 years and cultivated outside of the host for > 2 years) are valuable, the technical aspects are challenging, and the answers obtained are certainly interesting. The key concern is the limited sampling of other bacteria for comparison to derive the conclusions.

      Major comments:

      1) The key concern regarding sampling involves several points. (a) The two populations represent the species Spiroplasma poulsonii. Is this species a good representative for the genus? Or is it an exception because it is a vertically inherited male-killer? Most of the characterized Spiroplasma species appear to be commensals and are not vertically inherited. (b) The other species with a comparable rate is Mycoplasma gallisepticum (i.e. a chicken pathogen that spreads both horizontally and vertically). Mycoplasma is a polyphyletic genus with three major clades. While closely related to Spiroplasma, their hosts and ecology are quite different. Do all three groups of Mycoplasma have such high rates? If so, are the high rates simply a shared trait of these Mollicutes and has nothing to do with the distinct biology of S. poulsonii? How about other Mollicutes (e.g., Acholeplasma and phytoplasmas). (c) The group "human pathogens" in Fig. 2 show rates spreading across four orders of magnitude. This is too vague. How many species are included in this group? Are their rates linked to their phylogenetic affiliations? (d) Did Fig. 2 provide comprehensive sampling of bacteria? How about DNA viruses? Michael Lynch has done extensive works on mutation rates (e.g., DOI: 10.1038/nrg.2016.104), some of those should be integrated and discussed.

      (a) We agree that it is difficult to draw general conclusions of evolutionary rates in the genus Spiroplasma from looking at only 2 strains from the same species, and therefore we have not attempted to do so. We also agree that population bottlenecks at vertical transmission events may be a main reason for the elevated substitution rates. In the first version of the manuscript (first section of the discussion), we have therefore focussed our comparisons on Bacteria with similar ecology for which evolutionary rate estimates are available (Wolbachia, Buchnera, Blochmannia).

      (b) As far as we are aware, there is some anecdotal evidence that mycoplasmas evolve quickly (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02115648) as well as one study estimating evolutionary rates from genome-wide data of multiple M. gallisepticum isolates (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1002511). We are unaware of systematic studies estimating evolutionary rates in other mollicutes, and we feel it is beyond the scope of this article to provide such a systematic assessment. However, we do agree that loss of DNA repair genes and elevated substitution rates in M. gallisepticum and S. poulsonii could also have occurred independently and have now clarified this in the manuscript: “Absence of DNA mismatch repair pathway may thus be ancestral to Entomoplasmatales (Spiroplasmatacea + Entomoplasmataceae) and contribute to the dynamic genome evolution across this taxon (Lo et al., 2016; Rocha and Blanchard, 2002). [New version:] Alternatively, increased substitutional rates caused by the loss of these loci could have arisen multiple times independently in Entomoplasmatales. ”

      (c) We have now provided a more comprehensive figure legend that clarifies that the estimate was obtained from 16 different human pathogens. The range provided covers almost the entire mutational spectrum in Bacteria (https://doi.org/10.1099/mgen.0.000094).

      (d) Please see the comment under (c). We have now also included an estimate for DNA viruses in Fig. 2.

      2) This study is based on two lab-maintained populations. How may the results differ from natural populations? I understand that no estimate may be available for natural populations and additional experiments may not be feasible, but at least a more in-depth discussion should be provided.

      We have expanded the discussion on this matter:

      “Our rate estimate is potentially biased by at least two factors. First, we have only investigated laboratory populations of Spiroplasma poulsonii. Each vertical transmission event creates symbiont population bottlenecks potentially increasing genetic drift and thus substitution rates. Because the number of generations in natural populations of the Spiroplasma host Drosophila hydei is lower compared with laboratory reared hosts, vertical transmission events are rarer under natural conditions, and substitution rates therefore potentially lower. Further, laboratory strains could experience relaxed selection compared with natural symbiont populations. This may lead to higher substitution rate estimates from laboratory populations compared with natural populations. Secondly, substitution rates often appear larger when estimated over brief time periods (Ho et al., 2005).”

      3) The authors use adaptation as a key explanation for several of the findings. Stronger support and alternative explanations are needed. For example, why genome degradation may be used as a proxy for host adaptation (line 497)? If this explanation works only for sHy but not the other strain within the same species (i.e., sNeo), is this still a good explanation? Similarly, for the arguments made in lines 524-528, supporting evidence should be presented in the Results. For example, what are the rate distribution of all genes? Do those putative adaptation genes have statistically higher rates and/or signs of positive selection?

      We agree with the reviewer in that we have no direct evidence for adaptation as explanation for the genomic architecture of sHy. We have therefore carefully revised the manuscript to make clear that adaptation is a potential explanation. The key paragraph now reads:

      “Using signatures of genomic degradation as a proxy, our findings collectively suggest that sHy is in a more advanced stage of host restriction than sMel. This may indicate host adaptation as a result of the fitness benefits associated with sHy under parasitoid pressure, and the absence of detectable costs for carrying sHy in Drosophila hydei (Osaka et al., 2013; Jialei Xie et al., 2014; Xie et al., 2010). However, the Spiroplasma symbiont of Drosophila neotestacea sNeo is also protective, does not cause obvious fitness costs (Jaenike et al., 2010), but has a less reduced genome (Fig.5, Ballinger and Perlman, 2017). Further, it is also possible that genome reduction in sHy was mainly driven by stochastic effects or even by adaptation to laboratory conditions, as we have not investigated contemporary sHy from wild D. hydei populations.”

      4) The chromosome and plasmids have very different rates (lines 315-316). Since this study aims to compare across different bacteria, perhaps the analysis should be limited to chromosomes for all bacteria.

      We have only used chromosomal variants for the rate estimates. From the results section of the first version of the manuscript: “To estimate rates of molecular evolution in Spiroplasma poulsonii, we measured chromosome-wide changes in coding sequences of Spiroplasma from fly hosts (sHy) and axenic culture (sMel) over time.“ We now also mention this information in the figure legend for Fig. 2.

      5) Formal statistical tests should be performed to test the stated correlations (e.g., lines 360-361, genome size and the number of insertion sequences).

      As suggested, we have calculated Pearson’s correlation coefficients, which confirm the observation that Spiroplasma genome size is correlated with the number of predicted IS elements and proportion of predicted prophage regions (new supplementary file Fig. S4).

      6) Fig. 5. The differences in CDS length distribution should be investigated and discussed in more details. The authors stated that they have re-annotated all genomes using the same pipeline, so this finding cannot be attributed to the bioinformatic tools. If these findings are true (rather than annotation artifacts), it is quite interesting. How to explain these? Why is Sm KC3 so different from all others?

      There are several potential explanations for the differences in CDS length: 1) The skew towards very short predicted CDS is most pronounced in draft assemblies with relatively many contigs. We therefore think that assembly breaks have resulted in an artificially high number of short CDS by introducing splits mid-CDS. For example, in the Poulsonii clade, the sNeo assembly is composed of 181 contigs. This likely explains the higher proportion of very short CDS when compared with sMel and sNeo. 2) An excess of short CDS could also indicate many truncated genes that have become pseudogenised. We would therefore expect shorter median CDS lengths in genomes that undergo reduction. In Fig 5, the differences in CDS lengths within the Mirum group may be explained this way: in comparison with S. eriocheiris, CDS lengths are shorter for S. mirum and S. atrichopogonis. The latter 2 genomes also have a lower coding density and genome size, which may indicate recent genomic reduction. 3) Prophage regions are often characterised by shorter CDS, so genomes with overall higher proportions of prophage are expected to harbour a higher amount of smaller CDS. We have added the following statement to the manuscript:

      “The distribution of CDS sequence lengths varies across the investigated genomes (Fig. 5), which may be explained by differences in proportion of prophage regions, level of pseudogenization, and assembly quality.”

      7) Lines 467-479. Multiple lineages have purged the prophages is an interesting hypothesis and may be important in furthering our understanding of these bacteria. More detailed info (e.g., syntenic regions of prophage sites across different species) should be provided in the Results to support the claim. Perhaps the sampling should be expanded to include the Apis clade (i.e., the clade with the highest number of described species within the genus) to test if the prophage invasion occurred even earlier or independently in multiple lineages. Additionally, CRISPR/Cas systems are known to have variable presence across Spiroplasma species (DOI: 10.3389/fmicb.2019.02701). How does this correspond to prophage distribution/abundance?

      For sMel, none of the prophage regions predicted with PHASTER show clear synteny over the majority of their length in sHy, which makes synteny comparison (including across even more distantly related strains) difficult. CRISPR-Cas systems are entirely absent in Citri and Poulsonii clades, so are unlikely to be responsible for differences in prophage proportions between sMel and sHy. For the revised version of the manuscript, we have performed two additional analyses focussing on prophages and CRISPR/Cas in Spiroplasma, and have expanded the sampling to the Apis clade, as suggested by the reviewer.

      Firstly, we have investigated the history of prophage-related loci across the Spiroplasma phylogeny. Gene tree - species tree reconciliations suggest that the number of prophage loci have expanded greatly in some of the lineages, especially in the Citri clade. Many of these expansions have happened relatively recently, and therefore most likely occurred independently in multiple lineages.

      Secondly, we have used two approaches to predict CRISPR/Cas systems and arrays. We found CRISPR/Cas systems, or their remnants only in the Apis clade, which coincides with the absence of prophage loci in most members of this clade. Based on Cas9 phylogeny, there were multiple origins and several losses of Cas9 systems in the Apis clade. Interestingly, in some taxa with reduced Cas9 systems (e.g., S. atrichopogonis and S. mirum), there are elevated numbers of phage loci which suggests that phage invasion in Spiroplasma is linked to the loss of antiviral systems, as has been suggested previously.

      Overall, these data are in line with Spiroplasma being susceptible to viral invasion when CRISPR/Cas is absent. Highly streamlined genomes in the absence of CRISPR/Cas might thus be explained by loss of prophage regions or by a lack of exposure to phages. We have revised the paragraph discussion prophage distribution:

      “It was therefore argued that phages have likely invaded Spiroplasma only after the split of the Syrphidicola and Citri+Poulsonii clades (Ku et al., 2013). Our prophage gene tree-species tree reconciliations are in line with this hypothesis, but also indicate that prophage proliferation has largely happened independently in different Spiroplasma lineages (Fig. S4, supplementary material). CRISPR/Cas systems have multiple origins in Spiroplasma (Ipoutcha et al., 2019) and only occur in strains lacking prophages (Fig. S4, supplementary material). While the absence of antiviral systems often coincides with prophage proliferation (e.g., in the Citri clade), several strains with compact, streamlined genomes lack CRISPR/Cas and prophages (e.g., TU-14, Fig. S4, supplementary material). These strains also show other hallmarks of reduced symbiont genomes (small size, high coding density, lack of plasmids and transposons, Fig. 5), which is in line with the model of genome reduction discussed above and suggests prophage regions were purged from these genomes. Alternatively, these strains may never have been exposed to phages.“

      Minor comments:

      1) Lines 32, 517, and possibly other parts: Use "increased" or "decreased" to describe the rate differences are inappropriate because these imply inferences of evolutionary events after divergence from the MRCA, which are clearly not the case. It would be more appropriate to use "higher" or "lower" to describe the difference.

      We agree and have revised the use of these terms. In the new version of the manuscript we only use ‘increase’ or ‘decrease’ ’when we refer to a change compared with MRCA.

      2) Lines 31-32. This is too vague. For the rates, the description should be more explicit (e.g., higher by X orders of magnitude). The term "symbiont" is also vague. Broadly speaking, all human pathogens (included in Fig. 2) or plant-associated bacteria could be considered as symbionts as well. Would be better to define this point more clearly.

      Corrected:

      “We observed that S. poulsonii substitution rates are among the highest reported for any bacteria, and around two orders of magnitude higher compared with other inherited arthropod endosymbionts.”

      3) Fig. 1. The alignment is off. For example, June should be located near the middle between two tick marks.

      The tick marks did not correspond to year boundaries. We recognise that this may be confusing and have adjusted the image for the new version of the manuscript.

      4) Line 207. This is confusing. There should not be 6 circular chromosomes.

      Corrected ‘chromosomes’ to ‘contigs’.

      5) Line 211. Why is the hybrid assembly more fragmented?

      The hybrid assembly algorithm used by Unicycler (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005595) first creates an assembly from the short reads and then uses long reads to span repeats and other questionable nodes in the assembly graph. We suspect that if the initial short read assembly is highly fragmented (such as is the case for S. poulsonii), even a large amount of high quality long reads cannot fully resolve the assembly graph. Our approach was therefore to use the complete long read assembly as starting point.

      6) Methods and Results. More detailed information regarding the sequencing and assembly should be provided. For example, how much raw reads were generated for each library? What are the mapping rates? How much variation in observed coverage across the genome?

      We now provide these details in the new Supplementary table S2.

      7) Lines 341-342. How to establish an expected level of synteny conservation?

      We have removed the reference to ‘expected’ levels of synteny.

      8) Line 487. I do not see how this statement could be supported by Fig. 5. Also "less pronounced" is vague.

      Corrected to

      “However, when using the similarity agnostic tool PhiSpy, the predicted prophage regions were similar in size between sHy and sMel (Fig. S2).”

  6. Nov 2020
    1. Reviewer #2:

      This manuscript represents a very considerable amount of work, both wet lab and analytic, constituting excellent science. This may be the best paper yet produced on Bdelloids. Despite this glowing recommendation I have some very significant concerns about certain parts, their conclusions section, and the evidence for "enhanced cellular defence mechanisms" in the abstract. Some parts are very rigorous, but others give in to excess speculation. This paper does not really need additional work, it needs some re-writing. Afterwards this important manuscript would be a welcome addition to the field, even without the supposedly unique defence mechanisms.

      Substantive concerns:

      1) Line 273 onwards: There is a comparison in the manuscript between Bdelloids and Monogonants. It wasn't clear to me however that these groups had been sampled sufficiently. The Monogonants are represented by 5 species (8 genomes) within a single genus in no way representing the diversity of Monogonants and the sampling of Bdelloids is also small. The authors should take a more cautious tone to any conclusions.

      2) Line 276-278: The rationale for focussing on this specific group of TEs did not appear robust. The authors say "this class of TEs is thought to be least likely to undergo horizontal transfer and thus the most dependent on sex for transmission". But other groups are not evolving predominantly by horizontal transfer, transposons can change without meiotic sex and this section needs writing a little more clearly. The following lines make a case that some transposon groups increase, and some decrease in frequency. The obvious hypothesis is drift, but the writing was unclear, I always felt that some other mechanism was being proposed but never really stated clearly.

      3) Lines 288-300, comparison of TE abundances across animals; this section was very poorly done. I thought the authors could delete this comparison and have a better manuscript. How were these other species chosen? Is C. elegans a good representative of the entire phylum Nematoda? Are the tardigrades representatives of their phylum? Assembly and annotation methods vary enormously across datasets so what can the authors conclude without standardising assembly and annotation for these other animal groups? The authors say "as expected, both the abundance and diversity of TEs varied widely across taxa" This was indeed expected, Figure 2b seems to show noise, and suggests to me that the inclusion of this data was not a good idea. I suggest it is removed, or a very substantive analysis and discussion of the way in which it is an accurate and representative sample of animal transposon loads is written.

      4) Line 350-353: This section is weak and needs to be improved. The authors need to make it very clear that this is not a test, it is a single observation. The phrase "as predicted by theory for elements dependent on vertical transmission" seems rather unsupported. Does this relate to the argument put forward in lines 276-278? It was unconvincing at this point also. The current description that some families increase and some decrease is couched in what sounds like too meaningful sounding language, which could be improved to be more consistent with the results. Lines 353-355 here seem to make an argument that the variation of TEs in bdelloids is purely a phylogenetic effect variably present in some bdelloid lineages and related groups. If this is their view (and it seems very reasonable indeed) then the manuscript would be improved considerably if they stated it more clearly.

      5) Lines 533-535 "consistent with a high fit of the data to the phylogeny under a Brownian motion model as would be expected if TE load evolves neutrally along branches of the phylogeny." I felt that this was a truly excellent result that needed to be put forward more strongly in other areas of the manuscript. In this area, and some others in this manuscript the authors have truly unique data dramatically improving our understanding of bdelloids. The manuscript would be improved if authors concentrated much less throughout on ideas this data is exceptional and different from other animals, and instead followed their own analysis that this fits with current biological thought.

      6) Lines 621-632: "no significant difference between monogononts and bdelloids, or between desiccating and non-desiccating bdelloids" It is not clear to me here what statistical test is being carried out. All tests require phylogenetic control of course. I do agree that they are quite similar, perhaps this should be rewritten to reflect only that?

      7) 705-706 The authors look at 3 gene families concerned with transposon control to examine copy number. In one of them they say "the RdRP domain in particular is significantly expanded". I am unclear of what test of significance was carried out and where to find this analysis. Unlike the query concerning desiccating and non-desiccating above I think this analysis is essential. The authors make a really big thing about the expansion of this gene family, including it in the abstract. If they wish to keep its prominence then they need to clearly show whether there is evidence that the size of this domain family is significantly expanded along the branch leading to bdelloids. I understand that this is illustrated in Figure 7 but this is not a test. This needs to be made much clearer in a quantitative rather than descriptive way. There is a need for broad taxonomic sampling, standardisation of assembly and annotation, and a phylogenetic design for this analysis. Else it should be removed or at the least described more conservatively.

      8) Line 725: "Why do bdelloids possess such a marked expansion of gene silencing machinery?" There is no evidence presented that they do. There may be a hypothesis that they do it differently, rather than more, but that also needs testing. There is a lot of speculation in this paragraph, and I think removing this whole paragraph would improve the manuscript.

      9) If there is an expansion of this family what can we then conclude? The authors say in the abstract "bdelloids share a large and unusual expansion of genes involved in RNAi-mediated TE suppression. This suggests that enhanced cellular defence mechanisms might mitigate the deleterious effects of active TEs and compensate for the consequences of long-term asexuality" yet they also review that animal groups can utilize different gene families for transposon control. Is there evidence that clade 5 nematodes with PIWI have a quantitatively different transposon defence mechanism? No, they just use a different pathway to some other groups, and the default position surely has to be the same for bdelloids, there is no evidence presented that their defence is enhanced. I would strongly recommend that the authors reduce the strength of their claims about the significance of bdelloid transposon control gene families in this manuscript.

      10) I felt that the Conclusions (and Abstract) were too speculative and not fully supported by the existing data, though this can easily be addressed by a substantial re-write.

    1. Note: This rebuttal was posted by the corresponding author to Review Commons. Content has not been altered except for formatting.

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      Reply to the reviewers

      Reviewer__ #1 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)):__ Septins are highly conserved small GTPase cytoskeletal proteins that function as molecular scaffolds for dynamic cell wall and plasma membrane-remodeling, as well as diffusion barriers restricting movement of membrane and cell wall-associated molecules. Recent work has started to unravel the functional connections between the septins, cell wall integrity MAPK pathway signaling, and lipid metabolism, however most studies have focused on a small sub-set of septin monomers and/or were conducted in primarily yeast-type fungi. Here the authors show in the filamentous fungus A. nidulans that the core hexamer septins are required for proper coordination of the cell wall integrity pathway, that all septins are involved in lipid metabolism. Especially sphingolipid, but not sterols and phosphoinositides, contributes to the localization and stability of core septins at the plasma membrane. The experiments are simple and clear, therefore the conclusion is convincing. Fig.8 model, I would like to see the situation of septin mutant.

      We thank the reviewer for the positive comments. In response to the request from this reviewer and a similar one from reviewer 2 for more on the effect of the loss of individual septins, we added text clarifying the roles of core hexamer, core octamer and noncore septins throughout the manuscript including in the legend to Fig 8 (li 439-444) and the discussion (li 388-402). Please see responses to reviewer 2 comments for more detail.

      Reviewer #1 (Significance (Required)):

      Since localization of cell wall synthesis proteins, lipid domains and septins are likely to depend on each other, sometimes difficult to evaluate the effect is direct or indirect. The comprehensive analyses like performed here are helpful to catch the overview in the field.

      Reviewer__ #2 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)):__ **Summary** The study by Mela and Momany describes the function of core septins of A. nidulans and links with the requirement of the cell wall integrity pathway and the sphingolipids which, are required for membrane and cell wall stability. The study is of interest for the fungal genetics community, and the authors have conducted a substantial amount of work in a field they have substantial experience. However, one of the main weaknesses of the manuscript is the assumption whether the CWI pathway controls de septin function of if the core septins control it.

      We agree that while our data clearly indicate interactions between the septins and the CWI pathway, which component controls the other is not clear. We have modified the text to address this concern in several places as detailed in responses to the reviewer’s specific comments below.

      **Major comments** In the abstract, the authors claim that double mutant analysis suggested core septins function downstream of the final kinase of the cell wall integrity pathway. However, from the experiments showed, it is difficult to be convinced about that. The authors should make efforts do make it clear in the manuscript and the discussion. For example: -Line 25-26 (abstract): "Double mutant analysis suggested core septins function downstream of the final kinase of the cell wall integrity pathway."

      We agree that while the double mutant analysis shows interaction of septins with the CWI pathway, the evidence for them being downstream is not strong. We have revised the abstract as follows:

      Li29-30: Double mutant analysis with Δ**mpkA suggested core septins interact with the cell wall integrity pathway.”

      -Line 181-182; 219-220 (results) "Double mutant analyses suggest core septins modulate the cell wall integrity pathway downstream of the kinase cascade." This conclusion is one of the most important of the manuscript. However, this reviewer argues that it cannot be convincingly addressed if at least the phosphorylation ok the MAP kinase MpkA in the septins background is not evaluated under conditions of cell stress and sphingolipid biosynthesis inhibition. The genetic analysis alone maybe not enough to infer if septins control the CWI or the other way around. There may have compensatory effects when the CWI pathway is impaired. For example, most of the septins and mpkA double mutants seems to suppress the defect of the delta mpkA under cell wall stress. The authors should consider this idea.

      Although we discuss the epistasis experiments as one possible interpretation, we agree the genetic analysis is not enough to definitively show that the septins are upstream of the CWI pathway or the other way around. The suppression of cell wall defects by deletion of septins in a mpkA null mutant background under cell wall stress suggests a bypass of the CWI pathway for remediation of the cell wall or some other alternate regulatory node. One possible interpretation of these data could be that by inactivation of normal CWI integrity function through deletion of the final kinase, in addition to deletion of septins (possibly acting as negative regulators of CWI components), there may be a parallel node by which cell wall remediation could still occur.

      Wording throughout the abstract, results, and discussion has been modified accordingly.

      Li 29-30: Double mutant analysis with Δ**mpkA suggested core septins interact with the cell wall integrity pathway.

      Li 208-209: Double mutant analyses suggest the core septin aspB cdc3 modulates the cell wall integrity pathway in the ∆mpkA background under cell wall stress.

      Li 221-225: When challenged with low concentrations of CASP and CFW, the ∆aspBcdc3**∆mpkAslt2 and ∆aspE ∆mpkA slt2 mutants were more sensitive than ∆aspBcdc3 and ∆aspE single mutants, but suppressed the colony growth defects of ∆mpkA slt2. The novel phenotype of the double mutants shows that septins are involved in cell wall integrity and raises the possibility that they act in a bypass or parallel node for remediation of cell wall defects (Fig 4).

      Li 227-228: Fig 4. Double mutant analyses suggest core septins modulate the cell wall integrity pathway.

      Li 464-468: Double mutant analyses between septins and CWI pathway kinases also support a role for core septins in maintaining cell wall integrity under stress (Fig 4). Suppression of cell wall defects under cell wall stress by deletion of septins in an ∆mpkA slt2 background suggests a parallel node by which septins negatively regulate cell wall integrity pathway sensors or kinases could exist.

      There is no clear evidences on the manuscript that the core septins AspA, AspB, AspC, and ApsD are epithastic in A. nidulans. Therefore, the authors choice of using different Asp deletion mutants as a proxy for all the septins mutants is questionable. For example, there is no mention of why AspB was chosen for Figure 2 (chitin and β-1,3-glucan deposition), and AspA was chosen for Figure 3 (chitin synthase localization) since these experiments are correlated. The same is true for Figure S1 where AspB and AspE were used. One can wonder if some of the core septins would have a major impact in the chitin content.

      We agree with the reviewer that not all four core septins are equivalent. Previously published work from our lab shows that AspACdc11, AspBCdc3, AspCCdc12, and AspDCdc10 form octamers and that AspACdc11, AspBCdc3, and AspCCdc12 form hexamers, that both of these heteropolymers co-exist, and that the noncore septin AspE is not part of either core heteropolymer, though it appears to influence them possibly through brief interactions (Lindsay et al., 2010; Hernandez-Rodriguez et al., 2012; Hernandez-Rodriguez et al., 2014). This previous work also clearly shows that strains in which the hexameric septins have been deleted (ΔaspA, ΔaspB, and ΔaspC) have very similar phenotypes while strains in which the octamer-exclusive septin has been deleted (ΔaspD) have different phenotypes.

      In our attempt to simplify the current manuscript we discussed the four core septins as a group. In retrospect this caused us to miss important distinctions on the roles of hexamer vs octamer septins and we are grateful to the reviewer for pointing this out. We have modified language throughout the revised manuscript to specify whether results and interpretations apply to core hexamer septins, core octamer septins, the noncore septin, or individual septins. This more detailed analysis has given us several new ideas to test in future work.

      While we cannot exclude the possibility that interesting results might be produced by analyzing null alleles of each individual septin gene for all experiments, we agree with the cross-reference by Reviewer #3 that there is a very low likelihood that we would see different results by analyzing all individual septins within each subgroup (hexamer, octamer or noncore).

      To the reviewer’s questions on choice of septins for Fig 2, Fig 3, and Fig S1:

      ΔaspA, ΔaspB, and ΔaspC showed similar sensitivity to cell wall-disturbing agents in the plate-based assays in Fig 1 and are all part of the core hexamer. We have modified text including the figure legends to make it clear which septins were used in the experiments and which group they belong to.

      In a related comment about Figure 3, the reallocation of chitin synthases in the absence of septins is very interesting, but consider that all the core septin genes should be tested. Without a fully functioning cell wall, the formation of septa will be impaired. It makes their results less surprising.

      In the case of Fig 3, we were unable to recover ChsB-GFP in the ΔaspB or ΔaspC backgrounds but were able to recover it in the ΔaspA background. We have clarified as follows:

      Li184-187: To determine the localization of synthases, a chitin synthase B-GFP (chsB-GFP) strain was crossed with strains in which core hexamer septins were deleted. After repeated attempts, the only successful cross was with core hexamer deletion strain ∆aspA cdc11.

      Figure 3, Panels A and B, chitin was also labeled by Calcofluor White which clearly shows that the formation of septa was not impaired even in the septin null mutant background (this is in agreement with previous work form our lab which shows that septa still forms in individual septin null mutants). The results showed that unlike WT cells, chitin synthase is not only absent in most branch tips in the septin null mutant background, but seems to be limited primarily to longer (presumably actively growing/non-aborted) branches; these findings were surprising to us, considering other major cell wall synthesis events, such as targeting of cell wall synthases to septa during septation appeared to be unimpaired (based on the presence of fully-developed, chitin-labeled septa).

      The labeling of septa by calcofluor is now noted in the legend to Figure 3 as follows:

      Li 201: Calcofluor White labeling shows the presence of the polymer chitin at septa, main hyphal tips, branches, and …

      Why was chitin synthase B chosen to be analyzed in terms of reallocation? How many chitin synthases are in the A. nidulans genome. This rationale should be explained in the manuscript.

      We have added the following:

      Lines 173-182: A. nidulans contains six genes for chitin synthases: chsA, chsB, chsC, chsD, csmA, and csmB. Chitin synthase B localizes to sites of polarized growth in hyphal tips, as well as developing septa in vegetative hyphae and conidiophores, a pattern very similar to septin localization. Deletion of chitin synthase B shows severe defects in most filamentous fungi analyzed thus far, and repression of the chitin synthase b gene expression in chsA, chsC, and chsD double mutants exacerbated growth defects from a number of developmental states observed in each single mutant, suggesting it plays a major role in chitin synthesis at most growth stages (Fukuda et al., 2009). For these reasons, we chose chitin synthase B as a candidate to observe in septin mutant background for possible defects in localization.

      Figure 3 and Figure 4. The authors should make efforts to quantify the phonotypes they claim. They are overall very subtle, especially for Figure 3. Also, a decrease of fluorescence is a tricky observation that should be better reported by quantification.

      Line scans of aniline blue and CFW label were conducted and added as Fig S1. Quantitation was performed and added as Fig S3. See author’s response to Reviewer #3 below for details.

      Again, in Figures 5, 6, and 7, it is clear that the different septins respond differently when ergosterol or sphingolipids synthesis is impaired. It also raises the question again if there are differences in the role of septin genes. Can the authors use previous information about differences in septin function to improve the model (Figure 8)

      As described above, we have modified the manuscript throughout to clarify which phenotypes are seen for core hexamer, core octamer, and noncore septin deletions. As the reviewer notes, these are especially relevant for the sphingolipid-disrupting agents. Our model includes interaction of septins with sterol rich domains that contain both sphingolipids and ergosterol. Because it is not yet clear how subgroups of septins interact with each other and are organized at SRDs, we show all core septins in our model without distinguishing hexamers and octamers in the drawing, but we have now added text to clarify roles and outstanding questions.

      The changes are summarized in the abstract as follows:

      Li 37-40: Our data suggest that the core hexamer and octamer septins are involved in cell wall integrity signaling with the noncore septin playing a minor role; that all five septins are involved in monitoring ergosterol metabolism; that the hexamer septins are required for sphingolipid metabolism; and that septins require sphingolipids to coordinate the cell wall integrity response.

      The clarifications are reflected in the Figure 8 legend (and associated sections of the discussion) as follows:

      Li 436-441: As described in the text, our data suggest that all five septins are involved in cell wall and membrane integrity coordination. The core septins that participate in hexamers appear to be most important for sphingolipid metabolism while all septins appear to be involved in ergosterol metabolism and cell wall integrity. Because SRDs contain both sphingolipids and ergosterol and because it is not yet clear how subgroups of septins interact with each other at SRDs, we show all core septins in our model without distinguishing hexamers and octamers.

      For the above-discussed reasons, the conclusion on lines 384-388 (discussion) is not completely supported by the experiments shown in the manuscript. The authors need to make a better structured and more straightforward story emphasizing the stronger points and reducing descriptions of more speculative points.

      As discussed above, we have made changes throughout the manuscript to clarify which subgroups of septins are involved in which process and to refine our conclusions accordingly. The beginning of the discussion section has been changed as follows:

      Li 384-399: Our data show that A. nidulans septins play roles in both plasma membrane and cell wall integrity and that distinct subgroups of septins carry out these roles. Previous work has shown that the five septins of A. nidulans septins form hexamers (AspACdc11, AspBCdc3, and AspCCdc12) and octamers (AspACdc11, AspBCdc3, AspCCdc12, and AspDCdc10) and that the noncore septin AspE does not appear to be a stable member of a heteropolymer (20). The current work suggests that though all septins are involved in coordinating cell wall and membrane integrity, the roles of hexamers, octamers, and the noncore septin are somewhat different. Core hexamer septins appear to be most important for sphingolipid metabolism, all five septins appear to be involved in ergosterol metabolism, and core septins are most important for cell wall integrity pathway with the noncore septin possibly playing a minor role. As summarized in Figure 8 and discussed in more detail below, our previous and current data are consistent with a model in which: (A) All five septins assemble at sites of membrane and cell wall remodeling in a sphingolipid-dependent process; (B) All five septins recruit and/or scaffold ergosterol and the core hexamer septins recruit and/or scaffold sphingolipids and associated sensors at these sites, triggering changes in lipid metabolism; and (C) The core septins recruit and/or scaffold cell wall integrity machinery to the proper locations and trigger changes in cell wall synthesis. The noncore septin might play a minor role in this process.

      Minor comments Overall the figure caption could be shortened. They are too descriptive and contain details that are easily inferred for the images and from the materials and methods.

      Legends to the following figures have been streamlined by removing portions that belong in the methods: Figure 2, Fig 3, and Fig 6

      The authors made every effort to cove the precedent literature, but the manuscript has 115 references. The authors should evaluate if all the cited literature is extremely relevant. The manuscript would benefit for that conciseness.

      Because this manuscript addresses septins, ergosterol, sphingolipids, cell wall integrity, and multiple different pathways, there is a lot of literature underlying our approaches. Our strong preference is to cite primary literature, however we can shorten our reference list by relying on reviews if requested by the journal.

      Line 124, 493: Replace 10ˆ7, 10ˆ4 to 107, 104, etc

      “10^7” and all other scientific notation was altered to replace carrots “^7” with superscripts “7” throughout.

      The use of fludioxonil as a probe to detect cell wall impairment is perhaps out of context. This drug responds primarily to the HOG pathway and also respond to oxidative damage. So, these results could be suppressed.

      Previous work by Kojima et al., 2006 showed that in addition to the HOG pathway, cell wall integrity is required for resistance to fludioxonil treatment. C. neoformans cell wall integrity mutants bck1, mkk1, and mpk1 (Aspergillus nidulans bckA, mkkA, and mpkA homologues) all exhibit hypersensitivity to fludioxonil, and this was shown to be remediated by the addition of osmotic stabilizers, suggesting cell wall impairment was involved in the growth defect produced by this treatment. Although this drug seems to act primarily through the HOG pathway, the CWI and HOG pathways have been shown to antagonize/negatively regulate one another through a parallel pathway (SVG pathway in yeast) (Lee and Elion, 1999). It has been hypothesized that internal accumulation of glycerol by constitutive activation of the HOG pathway causes decreased cell wall integrity. Due to the apparent cross-pathway control between the HOG and CWI pathways, as well as the high level of conservation of these pathway components in filamentous fungi, we thought this treatment was rightfully dual-purposed to investigate both cell wall impairment in the septin mutants and any possible involvement of the HOG pathway. This seems to be would a reasonable drug treatment to look at cell wall impairment that is not likely to be redundant with the modes of action observed in the other Figure 1 treatments (e.g. CFW, Congo Red, and Caspofungin).

      The text clarifies this point as follows: li 110-112: Fludioxonil (FLU), a phenylpyrrol fungicide that antagonizes the group III histidine kinase in the osmosensing pathway and consequently affects cell wall integrity pathway signaling (Fig 1)(58-67).

      Line 140: "exposure" would be more appropriate than architecture. Please also consider that the difference in the cell wall reported in Figure S1 are very subtle. Are they relevant?

      The differences in the cell wall content reported in Figure S1 (Figure S2 in the revised manuscript) showed that the peak for 4-Glc was almost identical in WT and aspB null mutant, however the overall ratio of peaks switched, where 4-GlcNac content exceeded the 4-Glc content in the mutant compared to WT. By comparison, this was not the case with the septin aspE null mutant. Although this could be considered a ‘subtle’ change in chitin content, we believe this was an important unbiased analysis of the cell wall polysaccharide content and addressed some of the cell wall sensitivity phenotypes we observed, not only between WT and the septin mutants, but also between the septin null mutants which showed sensitivity to cell wall disturbing agents (i.e. aspA, aspB, and aspC) vs. those that did not show significant sensitivity (e.g. aspE). For these reasons we believe this warranted at the very least a supplemental figure for these data.

      Though our idea of cell wall architecture includes changes in polymer exposure, as pointed out by the reviewer, others might use the phrase to mean only content changes. To avoid this misunderstanding, we have replaced the word “architecture” with “organization” in Li 147-148: These data show that cell wall organization is altered in ∆aspB cdc3 and raise the possibility that it might be altered in other core hexamer septin null mutants as well.

      Line 144: explain briefly what it is about and why it was chosen instead of the total detection of chitin sugar monomers. Line 538: Cell wall extraction section. Is this a new method? There is no supporting literature.

      We chose this method because it provides an analysis of all cell wall polysaccharide components and associated linkages. Detection of chitin sugar monomers would have also been a reasonable analysis if this were the only component of the cell wall we were investigating initially. The results showed differences in cell wall chitin content, so these were the data we presented.

      This was addressed on lines 574-576: “Cell walls were isolated from a protocol based on (Bull, 1970); cell wall extraction and lyophilization were conducted as previously described in (Guest and Momany, 2000) with slight modifications listed in full procedure below.”

      The results described on lines 232-257 are marginal to the study and are not exploited by the authors to address the central question of the manuscript, which is the role of the CWI pathway, septins, and sphingolipids. This section could be suppressed or very briefly mentioned in the preceding section.

      We agree that these data did not show any additional involvement of septins in the Calcineurin and cAMP-PKA pathways, and the relevance of the TOR signaling pathway connection is still quite unclear. For this reason, these data were added as a supplemental figure. On the other hand, there are a number of important signaling pathways which have been shown to affect the Cell Wall Integrity pathway directly and indirectly (these three pathways in particular), which is part of the central question of the manuscript. Considering such extensive ‘cross-talk’ between pathways (references produced on Line 65) in filamentous fungi, we felt it necessary to inspect possible involvement of these pathways in septin function via plate-based assays and feel that this s most clearly communicated as its own brief section in the text.

      Reviewer #2 (Significance (Required)): The topic of the manuscript is highly relevant to the fungal biology field and employs a very important genetic model. The cooperation of signaling pathways in mains aspects of fungal physiology is the main significant contribution of this manuscript. Reviewer__ #3 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)):__ **Summary:** In this work the authors use genetic analysis in Aspergillus nidulans to identify phenotypes of septin mutants that point to roles for septins in coordinating the cell wall integrity pathway with lipid metabolism in a manner involving sphingolipids. Most of the major conclusions derive from monitoring the effects of combined genetic or chemical manipulations that target specific components of the pathways of interest. Additionally, the authors monitor the subcellular localization of septins, cell-wall modifying enzymes, and components of the cell wall itself. **Major comments:** The key conclusions are convincing, with the unavoidable caveat that null mutations of this sort and chemical inhibitors of these kinds could have unanticipated effects, such as upregulation of unexpected pathways or other compensatory alterations. The authors qualify their conclusions appropriately in this regard. The methods are explained very clearly and the data are presented appropriately. In some cases results are shown as representative images illustrating altered localization of a protein or a cell wall component. The changes observed in the experimental conditions are fairly obvious, but some quantification would not be difficult and would likely make the results even more obvious. For example, the Calcofluor White staining patterns might be nicely quantified by linescans along the hyphal length, and the same is true for AspB-GFP localization upon addition of drugs.

      We thank the reviewer for the positive comments and have made the suggested changes as follows:

      Line scans of aniline blue and CFW label were conducted and added as Fig S1. Text has been modified accordingly (Li 140-147).

      Quantification of Chitin synthase-GFP localization and CFW staining and statistical analysis have now been added as Figure S3 and main text (Li 187-191) has been modified accordingly.

      I could imagine one simple experiment that might generate interesting and relevant results, but by no means would this be a critical experiment for this study. In yeast, exposure to Calcofluor triggers increased chitin deposition in the wall. It would be interesting to know how Calcofluor staining looks in WT or septin-mutant cells that have been growing the presence of Calcofluor for some time, particularly with regard to the localization of chitin deposition in these cells. Such experiments could help connect the idea of septins as sensors of membrane lipid status and also effectors of CWI signaling.

      This is a cool idea that we will pursue in future work. Thanks!

      **Minor comments:** • Body text refers to Figure 1A and 1B but the figure itself does not have panels labeled A or B.

      Figure 1 was revised to show panels A and B labeled clearly.

      • Line 885: "S3" is missing from the beginning of the title of the figure.

      “S” was added to the figure title.

      Reviewer Identity: This is Michael McMurray, PhD, Associate Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

      Reviewer #3 (Significance (Required)): This is an important conceptual advance in our understanding of septin function because previous work in fungal septins mostly points toward them being important in directing or restricting the localization of other proteins that modify the cell wall or plasma membrane. This new work suggests that septins can play a sensing role, as well. As a fungal (budding yeast) septin researcher myself, I think that other fungal septin researchers would be very interested in these results, and I also think the broader septin community would appreciate it. Additionally, those studying fungal cell wall and plasma membrane biogenesis and coordination, including the Cell Wall Integrity Pathway, will be interested. REFEREES CROSS COMMENTING After reading Reviewer #1's comments, I agree that it would be appropriate to modify the wording of the authors' conclusions about where the septins lie in the CWI pathway (upstream or downstream). While they do mention that there may be other ways to interpret their results, a reader would have to search for the mention of these caveats and if the reader did not, then the strong conclusion statements might be taken as fact.

      The abstract, main text, and discussion have been modified to show that while there is evidence that the septins interact with the CWI pathway, it is not clear which component is upstream vs downstream. See response to reviewer 2 above for details.

      On the other hand, I don't think additional experiments looking at deletions of the other core septins will be worthwhile. I think that there is sufficient evidence to suspect that any single core septin deletion mutant will behave similar to another, and therefore that any one can be taken as representative. While it's possible that the authors might find something informative by looking at other mutants, I personally find the likelihood too low to justify additional experimentation along those lines.

      Based on results from previous work from our lab, there are two subgroups of core septins in A. nidulans (hexamer and octamer) and septins within subgroups appear to behave similarly. The results from the current work support this idea with the same groups of mutants behaving in very similar ways. So, the core hexamer septins, AspACdc11, AspBCdc3, and AspCCdc12 can be used to make predictions about each other, but not about the octamer-exclusive septin AspDCdc10 or the noncore septin AspE. We agree with reviewer 3 that repeating analysis on multiple septins within a subgroup is not likely to give new insight. However, we were not careful in the original version of the manuscript to distinguish between core hexamer and octamer septins. As detailed in the response to reviewer 2 above, we have modified the manuscript throughout to make clear which subgroup of septins were being examined and to put conclusions into this context.

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      Reply to the reviewers

      Reviewer #1 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)):

      In this study, the authors use focused-ion beam (FIB) milling coupled with cryo-electron tomography and subtomogram averaging to uncover the structure of the elusive proximal and distal centrioles, as well as different regions of the axoneme in the sperm of 3 mammalian species: pig, horse, and mouse. The in-situ tomograms of the sperm neck region beautifully illustrate the morphology of both the proximal centriole, confirming the partial degeneration of mouse sperm, and intriguingly, asymmetry in the microtubule wall of pig sperm. In distal centrioles, the authors show that in all mammalian species, microtubule doublets of the centriole wall are organized around a pair of singlet microtubules. The presented segmentation of the connecting piece is beautiful and nicely shows the connecting piece forming a nine-fold, asymmetric, chamber the centrioles. The authors further use subtomogram averaging to provide the first maps of the mammalian central pair and identify sperm-specific radial spoke-bridging barrel structures. Lastly, the authors perform further subtomogram averaging to show to the connecting site of the outer dense fibers to the microtubule doublet of the proximal principal piece and confirm the presence of the TAILS microtubule inner protein complex (Zabeo et al, 2018) in the singlet microtubules occupying the tip of sperm tails.

      The manuscript provides the clearest insight into flagellar base morphology to date, giving insight into the morphological difference between different mammalian cilia and centriole types. The manuscript is suitable for publication, once the following questions are addressed.

      We are ecstatic that the reviewer shares our enthusiasm for this work. We are particularly grateful that the reviewer appreciates the significance of the unique, and hitherto under-explored biology of the sperm centrioles and the flagellar base.

      **Major Points:**

      How many centrioles and axonemes were used in generating the averages presented in the paper? If too few samples were used, especially in centrioles undergoing dramatic remodeling or degeneration, the reality of MIPs and MAPs being present might be completely affected. For instance, In figure 1d, the authors present a cryoET map of the centriole microtubule triplet. However, centrioles are divided into several regions with different accessory elements. Here, the authors could show the presence of only part of the A-C linker. The A-C linker covers only 40% of the centriole, so does it mean that this centriole is made only of the accessories that characterize the proximal side of the centriole? In the same line, what were the boundaries governing subtomogram extraction? For example, in the distal centriole, were microtubules extracted from just before the start of the transition zone, to the end of the microtubule vaulting, more pronounced at the end of the proximal region? There are known heterogeneities in centriole, as well as flagella, ultrastructure along the proximal distal axis. If no pre-classification was performed for subtomogram longitudinal position along with the centriole and axoneme, structural features may be averaged out, and or present and not reflecting their real longitudinal localization. The classification should be applied here if it was not the case.

      These are all valid points. Because there is no easy way to target the PC/DC when cryo-FIB milling, and because there is only one of each structure in every cell, the chances of catching them in ~150-nm-thin lamellae are slim (not to mention the number of things that can and do go wrong when doing cryo-ET on lamellae). As such, the averages of the PC were generated from 3 tomograms (3 cells) and those of the DC from 2 tomograms (2 cells). We do have more tomograms with the PC/DC, but these were used for segmentation/visual inspection since we only used the best tomograms for averaging. These numbers are not entirely atypical for cryo-FIB datasets; the only other in situ centriole structures are from 5-6 centrioles (from Chlamydomonas, from Le Guennec et al 2020 doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aaz4137 and Klena et al 2020 doi: 10.15252/embj.2020106246).

      To allow readers to adjust their interpretations according to the small number of cells analysed, we explicitly stated the number of animals/cells/tomograms used to generate averages in Table S1. Furthermore, we amended the text to clarify which regions of the centrioles our averages represent. These changes are detailed below:

      (1) proximal centriole

      The lamellae used for averaging PC triplets caught mostly the proximal end of the centriole, and essentially all of the particles come from the most proximal ~ 400 nm. In a sense, this was a form of pre-classification. We now state explicitly that our structure represents only the proximal region and that proximal/distal differences may be identified in the future (see section on distal centriole below). Despite the limited particle number, we are confident in the presence of the MIPs as these are also visible in the raw data (the striations in Fig. 1a, now Fig. 1d, for instance). Page 7, Line 165 was edited accordingly as well as the legend to Fig. 1.

      (2) distal centriole

      The subtomograms used for the DC average were extracted from the region of the distal centriole closest to the base of the axoneme (i.e; the region marked “distal centriole” in Fig. 2h-i). Because the DC doublet average in Fig. 2j was generated from very few particles, we tried to be very conservative when interpreting it. Page 9, Line 216 was edited accordingly likewise the legend to Fig. 2.

      (3) axoneme

      We did attempt to average the axoneme from different regions of flagella (midpiece, proximal principal piece, distal principal piece). This is shown in Fig. 6d-l. The major difference we found was at the doublet-ODF connection. We did not find any striking differences in MIP densities, or in radial spoke densities along the proximodistal axis. As such, the averages in Fig. 5 are from the entire principal piece (but not the midpiece), which we state in the figure legend.

      Because mammalian sperm flagella are very long, it is possible that we missed more subtle differences. We now state this in the Discussion (page 20, line 491):

      **Minor Points:**

      • In line 3, motile cilia are not only used to swim, they can move liquid or mucus for instance.

      Done. Page 3, line 64

      • In line 175, the authors stated " a prominent MIP associated with protofilament A9, was also reported in centrioles isolated from CHO cells (Greenan et al. 2018) and in basal bodies from bovine respiratory epithelia (Greenan et al 2020). Actually, this MIP has been seen in many other centrioles from other species, such as Trichonympha (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2013.06.061 ), Chlamydomonas, and Paramecium ( DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aaz4137 ). Citing these studies will reinforce the evolutionary conservation of this MIP and therefore its potential crucial role in the A microtubule.

      We thank the reviewer for pointing out these very important papers, we added them to the manuscript (page 7, lines 175-176).

      • In Line178, the authors stated: "Protofilaments A9 and A10 are proposed to be the location of the seam (Ichikawa et 2017)". High-resolution cryoEM maps confirmed it: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2019.09.030 . This publication should be cited. Moreover, authors should also refer to this paper when discussing MIPs in the microtubule doublet.

      Done (page 7, lines 178-179 and page 13, line 329).

      We also now cite Ma et al (along with Ichikawa et al 2019 doi: 10.1073/pnas.1911119116 and Khalifa et al 2020 doi: 10.7554/eLife.52760) in the Discussion when alluding to high-resolution structures as a possible means of identifying MIPs (page 19, lines 479).

      • In Line 187-189 the authors stated, "We resolved density of the A-C linker (gold) which is associated with protofilaments C9 and C10." The A-C linker interconnects the triplets of the proximal centriole (Guichard et. al. 2013, Li et. al. 2019, Klena et. al. 2020) with distinct regions binding the C-tubule, as shown by the authors in gold, as well as an A-link, making contact with the A-tubule through various protofilaments in a species-specific manner, but always on protofilament A9. The authors may have identified the A-link, labeled in green, on the outside of protofilament A8/A9 in Figure 1d.

      We thank the reviewer for pointing this out. The position of the olive green density associated with A8/A9 is indeed consistent with the A-link, and this is also now illustrated more clearly in the new version of Fig. 1e (now Fig. 1h, see below). We accordingly edited page 8, lines 187-188.

      • In figure 1e, the authors provide a 9-fold representation of the centriole based on their map. How relevant is this model ? the distance between triplet is inconsistent here, which has not been observed before. Do they use true 3D coordinates to generate this model? The A-C linker, which is only partially reconstructed, does not contact the A microtubule. Is it really the case? did the authors see that the A-link density of the A-C linker has disappeared? If these points are not clearly specified, this representation might be misleading.

      In order to avoid misleading readers, we replaced this panel with a model generated directly by plotting back the averages into their original positions and orientations in the tomogram (new Fig. 1h). This model now shows that the olive green density on A8/A9 is in the right position to form part of the A-C linker (as Reviewer 1 correctly pointed out in their previous point). We have amended the figure legend accordingly. We also described how the plotback was generated in the Materials and Methods section (page 26, line 648).

      As the reviewer points out, the distance between triplets does indeed seem inconsistent in the plotback. This is an interesting observation, but we feel it is a bit too preliminary to discuss in detail here. This can be explored in a follow-up study more focused on sperm centriole geometry.

      • The nomenclature regarding MIPs is sometimes confusing in this manuscript. For example, in lines 228-229 "We then determined the structure of DC doublets, revealing the presence of MIPs distinct from those in the PC." Does this include the gold and turquoise labeled structures in Figure 2j? These densities appear to correspond to the inner scaffold stem in the gold density presented in Figure 2j, and armA, presented in the turquoise density (Li et. al. 2011, Le Guennec et. al. 2020). The presence of this Stem here is important as it correlates with the presence of the molecular player making the inner scaffold (POC5, POC1B, CENTRIN): https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-04678-8

      While we were initially very conservative with interpreting the DC doublet average (as stated above it comes from very few particles), we agree with the reviewer’s assessment that the gold and turquoise densities in Fig. 2j are consistent with the Stem and armA respectively of the inner scaffold. Because the inner scaffold contributes to centriole rigidity, it will be interesting to determine if and how it changes during remodelling of the atypical DC in mammalian sperm. Intriguingly, at least some inner scaffold components (including POC5, POC1B) reorganise into two rods in the mammalian sperm DC (Fishman et al 2018 doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-04678-8). We expanded the section on the DC average (page 9, lines 218-220):

      • The connecting piece is composed of column vaults emanating from the striated columns is compelling and beautiful segmentation data. However, it is important to note how many pig sperm proximal centrioles had immediate-short triplet side contact with the Y-shaped segmented column 9, as well as in how many mouse centrioles have the two electron-dense structures flanking the striated columns.

      Done. Material and Methods Page 25, lines 615-619.

      The resolution of the mammalian central pair is an important development brought by this work. The structural similarity between the central pair of pig and horse is convincing. However, with only 281 subtomograms being averaged for the murine central pair, corresponding to an estimated resolution of 49Å, the absence of the helical MIP of C1 with 8 nm periodicity suggests that there is simply not enough signal to capture it in the average. The same could be said for the smaller MIP displayed in Figure 4 c, panel ii. This point should be clearly stated.

      We agree with the reviewer that the quality of the mouse CPA structure is not on par with the pig and horse CPA structures. We now explicitly state this caveat in the text (pages 11, lines 276-277):

      Another piece of compelling data presented in this study is the attachment of the outer dense fibers to the axoneme of the midpiece and proximal and distal principal pieces. From the classification data presented along the flagellar length, it is clear that the only ODF contact made with the axoneme is at the proximal principle plate. However, this is far from obvious in the native top view images presented. Is it possible to include a zoomed inset of the connection between the A-tubule and ODF connection?

      We are very happy that the reviewer finds this data exciting. As Fig. 6 is quite cluttered as is, we instead tried to better annotate the cross-section views of the axoneme by tracing one doublet-ODF pair in each image (or only a doublet in the case of the distal principal piece). This shows that there is a gap between the doublet and the ODF in the midpiece, and that there is no such gap in the principal piece. We also hope that annotating one doublet-ODF pair helps the reader see that the same pattern holds true for the other doublets/ODFs. The legend to Fig. 6 was changed accordingly.

      Reviewer #1 (Significance (Required)):

      This work is of good quality and provides crucial information on the structure of centriole and axoneme in 3 different species. This work complements well the previous works.

      The audience for this type of study is large as it is of interest to researchers working on centrioles, cilium, and sperm cell architecture.

      We are pleased the reviewer appreciate the quality of our work and see the interest for broad audience.

      My expertise is cryo-tomography and centriole biology

      Reviewer #2 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)):

      In this study, Leung et al. used state-of-the-art EM imaging techniques, including FIB cryo-milling, Volta Phase plate, cryo-electron tomography and subtomogram averaging, to study the structure of sperm flagella from three mammalian species, pig, horse and mouse. First, they described two unique centrioles in the sperm, the PC and the DC. They found the PCs are composed of a mixture of triplet and doublet MTs. In contrast, the DCs are composed mainly of doublet and singlet MTs. By using subtomogram averaging, they identified a number of accessory proteins, including many MIPs bound to the MT wall. Many are unique to the mammalian sperm. They further described the connecting piece region of the sperm enclosing the centrioles and found an asymmetric arrangement. Furthermore, the authors presented the structure of sperm axonemes from all three species. These include the DMT and the CPA. Finally, they described the tail region of the sperm and described how the DMTs transitioned to the singlet MTs.

      This is a beautiful piece of work! It is by far the most comprehensive structural study of mammalian sperm cells. These findings will serve as a valuable resource for structure and function analysis of the mammalian flagella in the future. Now the stage is set for identifying the molecular nature of the structures and densities described in this study.

      We thank the reviewer for their positive evaluation! We are very happy that they share our excitement for the work, and that they also see it as “setting the stage” for future studies at the molecular level.

      The manuscript is clearly written. The data analysis is thorough. The conclusions are solid and not overstated. I don't have any major issues for its publication. A number of minor suggestions are listed below. Most are related to the figures and figure legends.

      Figure 1d, the figure legend should mention this is the subtomogram average of PC triplet MTs from pig sperm, though this is mentioned in the text. Also, for convenience, the color codes for the MIPs should be mentioned in the figure legend.

      Done.

      Figure 2J, similarly, the figure legend should mention this is the subtomogram average of DC doublets. It also needs a description of the color codes of the identified MIPs. For the DMT, please indicate the A- and B-tubule, which are colored in light or dark blue.

      Done, except we would prefer not to enumerate the MIPs as we did not name them nor discuss them extensively in the main text as we do not want to over-interpret the MIPs at this point as the average is from relatively small number of particles. However, we did specify that the gold and turquoise densities on the luminal surface are consistent with the inner scaffold. The figure legend was edited accordingly.

      Line 228, "We then determined the structure of DC doublet by subtomogram averaging"

      Done.

      For both Fig 2 and Fig 3. the DC doublets are colored in dark and light blue, please specify which is the A- or B-tubule in the figure legends.

      Done.

      Line 273, need space between "goldenrod"

      We would prefer to keep “goldenrod” spelled as is since this is how the color is referred to in Chimera and ChimeraX.

      Figure 4. need to expand the figure legend. Panels I, ii, iii, iv, are cut-through view of the lumen of CPA microtubules C1 and C2.

      Done.

      Line 338, Interestingly, the RS1 barrel is radially distributed asymmetrically around the axoneme

      Done.

      Figure 5, need color codes for the arrowheads (light pink, pink, magenta) in panels i~n,

      Done.

      Figure 7, (a-c) please use arrowheads to indicate the location of caps in the singlet MT.

      Done.

      Reviewer #2 (Significance (Required)):

      This is a beautiful and significant work - by far the most comprehensive analysis of mammalian sperm structure

      We are thrilled the reviewer appreciate the novelty of our work.

      Reviewer #3 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)):

      This is a very interesting study that explores the structural diversity of mammalian sperm flagella, in pig, mouse and horse, at high resolution using cryo-FIB milling and cryo-tomography. The study provides the first in situ cryo-EM structure of a mammalian centriole and describes a number of microtubule associated structures, such as MIPs and plugs at the plus-end of microtubules, that were not been reported so far. Additionally, the authors identify several asymmetries in the overall structure of the flagellum in the three species, which have implications for the understanding of the flagellar beat and waveform geometry in sperm, which are discussed by the authors. Although this study does not provide mechanistic novel information on the function of the described structures, it will undoubtedly serve as a reference for future theoretical and empirical work on the role of these structures in shaping the flagellar beat.

      With the exception of a couple of "eclectic word choices" in the Introduction (see detailed feedback in Minor Comments), the manuscript is also well written. Image acquisition and analysis are sound.

      We thank the reviewer for positively evaluating our work. We are glad that they feel our study will “serve as a reference” to inform future studies.

      However, I have some suggestions that should help the authors to strengthen their claims and present their results. The study is in principle suitable to be published, after the following points will be addressed:

      **Major comments:**

      • A major concern is that it is not clear how many animals, sperms and lamellae the authors used to acquire the data presented in the manuscript. This information needs to be provided, because it not uncommon to encounter aberrant flagella, even in a wildtype animal. The authors should state how many animals, and how many flagella per each animal were analyzed, in order to allow the reader to have an opinion on the reliability of their observations.

      • The figures are esthetically pleasing; however, the figures legends should be carefully revised to include necessary information about color codes, image annotations.

      We thank the reviewer for raising these points. We completely agree that the numbers of animals and cells are important pieces of information. As such, we now explicitly state the number of animals/cells/tomograms used for each average in Table S1. For more qualitative observations (such as the relationship between the asymmetry of the pig sperm PC and the Y-shaped segmented columns), we now state in the number of cells and animals in which we see each feature (see detailed response to Reviewer 1).

      **Minor comments:**

      • Line 26. I do not think that the word "menagerie" is properly used in this context.

      • Line 29. The same is true for the word "Bewildering" in this sentence.

      We apologise for our somewhat eclectic word choice. We see the reviewer’s point that unconventional word choice may distract readers, so we replaced these two words with ‘diverse’ and ‘an extensive’, respectively.

      • Line 286 "Our structures of the CPA are the first from any mammalian system, and our structures of the doublets are the first from any mammalian sperm, thus filling crucial gaps in the gallery of axoneme structures." Sentences like this one would fit much better in the Conclusions or at least in the Discussion.

      We thank the reviewer for this suggestion, but we would prefer to keep this sentence where it is, if possible. We think it is useful to tell the audience upfront why these structures are significant, especially since readers who aren’t deep in the field may be bogged down by all the details.

      • Line 377 "Large B-tubule MIPs have so far only been seen in human respiratory cilia (Fig. 5j) and in Trypanosoma (the ponticulus, Fig. 5n), but the morphometry of these MIPs differs from the helical MIPs in mammalian sperm." Please insert the citations for the studies about respiratory cilia and Trypanosoma flagella.

      Done.

      • In Figure 1. What do the stars shown in panel a and a' indicate?

      We indeed failed to specify what the asterisks/stars indicate. They are meant to emphasise that the electron-dense material in the lumen of the PC is continuous with the CP. We have now specified this in the text (page 10, lines 245).

      Given the complexity of the structures that compose the flagellar system of sperms, it would be helpful to add an illustration of the sperm with careful annotation of the centriole structures and the various segments of the flagellum.

      This is an excellent suggestion. To help orient readers, we added three panels to Fig. 1 (Fig. 1a-c) showing low-magnification images of whole sperm cells. We annotated different parts of the flagellum (neck, midpiece, principal piece, endpiece) so that readers can refer back to these panels in case they want to know which part of the cell the averages are from.

      • Figure 2. Explanation of the used color codes is missing. Additionally, the authors should include an explanation for the black and white arrows and for the 2 insets in i.

      Done. For the color code, please see response to Reviewer 2. For the black and white arrows, we edited the figure legend.

      • In "(j) In situ structure of the pig sperm DC with the tubulin backbone in grey and microtubule inner protein densities colored individually" ...it should be written "...sperm DC microtubule doublet..."

      Done.

      • In this figure, but also in every other figure that shows centriole, axoneme, or even microtubule averages it is important to indicate the microtubule polarity. Please add the symbol + and - to indicate microtubule polarity in the figures.

      Done. In order to avoid overcrowding, we only labelled the pig structures as the horse and the mouse structures are always shown in the same orientations as the pig.

      • Figure 3. Additional to the images in a,b, and c, the original tomographic slices (without segmentation) should be shown here, to allow the reader to visualize the structure.

      We now include three additional supplementary movies slicing through the respective tomograms.

      • Figure 7. Scale bars are missing in d-f.

      Done.

      • Scale bars are missing in most Supplementary figures.

      Done.

      • Table S1. The Information about horse and mouse centriole data is missing.

      The reviewer is correct, but this information is missing because we did not average from the horse and the mouse. For the mouse, the triplets were in various stages of degeneration, resulting in heterogeneity that precluded us from averaging. For the horse, we simply did not catch enough centrioles to generate a meaningful structure.

      Reviewer #3 (Significance (Required)):

      This study provides several novel structural insights in to the sperm flagellum structure that have implications for the understanding of the flagellar beat and waveform geometry in sperm. Although this study does not provide mechanistic novel information on the function of the described structures, it will undoubtedly serve as a reference for future theoretical and empirical work on the role of these structures in shaping the flagellar beat.

      Great to see the reviewer appreciate the novelty of our work.

    1. It affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing.

      What Bush called "associative indexing" is the key idea behind the memex. Any item can immediately select others to which it has been previously linked.

    2. Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the corresponding code space.

      Once two items are linked, tapping a button would take you from one to the other.

    3. It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book. It is more than this, for any item can be joined into numerous trails.

      Although Bush envisioned associative trails to be navigable sequences of original content and notes interspersed, what seems to make more sense when viewed through today's technology, is a rich document of notes where the relevant pieces from external documents are transcluded.

    4. And his trails do not fade. Several years later, his talk with a friend turns to the queer ways in which a people resist innovations, even of vital interest. He has an example, in the fact that the outraged Europeans still failed to adopt the Turkish bow. In fact he has a trail on it. A touch brings up the code book. Tapping a few keys projects the head of the trail. A lever runs through it at will, stopping at interesting items, going off on side excursions. It is an interesting trail, pertinent to the discussion. So he sets a reproducer in action, photographs the whole trail out, and passes it to his friend for insertion in his own memex, there to be linked into the more general trail.

      I find this idea of saved associative trails very interesting. In Roam the equivalent would be that you can save a sequence of opened Pages.

    5. Selection by association, rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage.

      It should be easy to surpass the mind's performance in terms of storage capacity as well as lossiness. It might be more difficult to surpass it in terms of the speed and flexibility with which it "follows an associative trail"

    6. The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.

      The human mind doesn't work according to the file-cabinet metaphor — it operates by association.

      "With one items in its gras, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain."

    7. The real heart of the matter of selection, however, goes deeper than a lag in the adoption of mechanisms by libraries, or a lack of development of devices for their use. Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path.

      Bush emphasises the importance of retrieval in the storage of information. He talks about technical limitations, but in this paragraph he stresses that retrieval is made more difficult by the "artificiality of systems of indexing", in other words, our default file-cabinet metaphor for storing information.

      Information in such a hierarchical architecture is found by descending down into the hierarchy, and back up again. Moreover, the information we're looking for can only be in one place at a time (unless we introduce duplicates).

      Having found our item of interest, we need to ascend back up the hierarchy to make our next descent.

    8. So much for the manipulation of ideas and their insertion into the record. Thus far we seem to be worse off than before—for we can enormously extend the record; yet even in its present bulk we can hardly consult it. This is a much larger matter than merely the extraction of data for the purposes of scientific research; it involves the entire process by which man profits by his inheritance of acquired knowledge. The prime action of use is selection, and here we are halting indeed. There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the account of the experience on which they are based, all encased within stone walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can get at only one a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not likely to keep up with the current scene.

      Retrieval is the key activity we're interested in. Storage only matters in as much as we can retrieve effectively. At the time of writing (1945) large amounts of information could be stored (extend the record), but consulting that record was still difficult.

    9. There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.

      As scientific progress extends into increased specializations, efforts at integrating across disciplines are increasingly superficial.

    10. A record if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted.

      Bush emphasises the need for notes to not only be stored, but also to be queried (consulted).

    11. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.

      The rate at which we're generating new knowledge is increasing like never before (and this was written in 1945), but our ability to deal with that information has remained largely unimproved.

    12. Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose. If the aggregate time spent in writing scholarly works and in reading them could be evaluated, the ratio between these amounts of time might well be startling. Those who conscientiously attempt to keep abreast of current thought, even in restricted fields, by close and continuous reading might well shy away from an examination calculated to show how much of the previous month's efforts could be produced on call. Mendel's concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential.

      Specialization, although necessary, has rendered it impossible to stay up to date with the advances of a field.

    1. Note: This rebuttal was posted by the corresponding author to Review Commons. Content has not been altered except for formatting.

      Learn more at Review Commons


      Reply to the reviewers

      Reviewer #1 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity):

      This manuscript follows on from previous work from the Rhind lab to investigate whether the load of MCMs at origins is a factor in when the origin activate (as a population average) during S phase. The authors use budding yeast and a auxin degron system to modulate the levels of an MCM subunit. This allows them to titrate down the concentration of the MCM hexamer and observe the effect. Crucially, they assay both the reduction in MCM load at origins and the subsequent replication dynamics in the same experiment. This is the power of their approach and allows them to rigorously test their hypothesis.

      **Major comments**

      1.I found the introductory paragraph discussing the Rhind lab hypothesis about the possibility of multiple MCM being loaded at origins somewhat misleading. The first paragraph of the discussion was much clear. However, I feel that the introductory paragraph should deal with the difference between the two proposals: 0-1 MCM-DH per origin (de Moura et al), vs 0-50+ MCM-DH (Yang et al). It s also important to note that Foss et al find that "In budding yeast, [MCM] complexes were present in sharp peaks comprised largely of single double-hexamers" - i.e. consistent with 0-1 MCM-DH per origin.

      To improve the balance of the introduction, I think the authors should briefly introduce the concepts behind the 0-1 MCM-DH per origin; this was defined as origin competence by Stillman and clearly described by McCune et al (2008; see figure 8) prior to the work from de Moura et al.

      Furthermore, in the discussion the authors should be more even-handed. To date there is no data to conclusively rule one way or the other in distinguishing between single vs multiple MCMs. The authors cite Lynch et al and state "overexpression of origin-activating factors in S phase causes most all origins to fire early in S phase, consistent with most origins having at least one MCM loaded". However, Lynch et al report equivalent (roughly equal) origin efficiencies, but the assay doesn't distinguish between all going up to high efficiency or all going to a lower intermediary efficiency. Given that fork factors (polymerases, etc) are likely to become limiting at some point (or checkpoints could be activated due to limited dNTP supplies) it would seem plausible that uniform origin efficiency could be a consequence of less than maximal origin firing. As part of this discussion it would be useful for the authors to include what conclusions have been reached on MCM load from in vitro systems (with chromatin substrates).

      Because the main focus of the paper is not dependent on whether MCM stoichiometry varies from 0 to 1 or 0 to many, we had relegated our discussion of absolute stoichiometry to the Discussion. However, it is clear from multiple reviewer's comments that it is something very much on readers minds. Therefore, we have now included a brief introduction to the 0-to-1 and 0-to-many scenarios in the Introduction and moved the bulk of the discussion of the data supporting the two scenarios to the Discussion.

      2.The authors are not the first to look at the consequence of reduced MCM concentrations on origin function. This was essentially the basis for the MCM screen undertaken by Bik Tye's lab that first identified the MCM genes. In addition to temperature sensitive mutants, the Tye group also examined heterozygotes (Lei et al., 1996) to show differential effect on the ability of two origins to support plasmid replication. The authors finds are entirely consistent with these early studies, particularly since ARS416 (formerly ARS1) was found to highly sensitive to reduced MCM levels and ARS1021 (formerly ARS121) was found to be insensitive to MCM levels. The authors find a signifiant reduction in MCM load at ARS416, but the MCM load at ARS1021 is unaltered by reduced MCM concentration. It would be worth the authors noting this consistency. The authors do cite the Lei study, but not in this context. The original MCM screen was published here:

      Maine, G., Sinha, P., Tye, B. (1984). Mutants of S. cerevisiae defective in the maintenance of minichromosomes Genetics 106(3), 365 - 385.

      Furthermore, at the end of the discussion the authors state that "it will be interesting to dissect the specific cis- and trans-acting factors that make origins sensitive or resistant to changes in MCM levels". The equivalent effect reported by the Tye lab has already been dissected by the Donaldson lab (Nieduszynski et al., 2006) and perhaps it would be worth briefly mentioning their findings.

      We have included both of these literature precedents in the Discussion.

      3.The authors should show the flow cytometry data for each of their cell cycle experiments, if only in supplementary figures. This is important to allow a reader (and reviewer) to judge the level of synchrony achieved when interpreting the results.

      This data is now included as Figure S1

      4.I think the authors should show the ChIP signal at some example origins, including ones sensitive and insensitive to the reduction in MCM concentration. Currently all the high resolution ChIP data (i.e. over 1400 bp, e.g. Fig 3a) is presented as meta-analyses of many origins.

      We will include this analysis in a subsequent revision.

      5.When describing the results in Fig 4a the authors focus on changes (highlighted in black boxes) that fit their expectation. However, there are other sites that should at least be mentioned that don't seem to fit the authors model, e.g. ARS517, ARS518. It would be worth discussing what fraction of the timing data can be explained by the reduced MCM load.

      We now explicitly point out that Figures 4c and 4d address this issue of the robustness of the correlation. Although there is significant variation, as the reviewer points out, the trend is seen genome wide. As it happens, both ARS517 and ARS518 do fit the model reasonably well. They have intermediate loss of MCM signal and intermediate delay in timing.

      **Minor comments**

      -These data, rather than this data (throughout).

      I suspect that the journal style and/or copy editors will make the final call. However, I will point out that although 'data' is most certainly plural in Latin, its predominate modern English usage is as a mass noun, such as water or sand or information. In general, users do not think of, or use, 'data' as a collection of discrete elements, each on being a 'datum', a contention supported by the very infrequent use of the word datum. For instance, in ChIP-seq experiment, what is a datum? Each individual read? Each individual nucleotide in each read? The quality score for each individual nucleotide in each read? Each pixel in each image from the sequencer? When one wants to refer to an individual piece of data, common usage is to refer to a data point, just as one would refer to a grain of sand. Moreover, if 'data' were plural, it would be incorrect to use it in phrases such as "there is very little data available". Would the review really suggest using "there are very few data available"?

      -the authors should clearly state in figure legends what window size has been used in analysing genomic data.

      All analyses were done using 1kb windows, as now stated in the figure legends.

      -in figure 2a the authors show pairwise comparisons between conditions, it would be nice to see the 3rd pairwise comparisons perhaps as a supplementary figure

      We have included the third comparison in Figure 2a.

      -in figure 2c it would be clearer to use the same colour for the lines and the points

      The regression lines are in the same colors as the data points they fit. x=y is shown in blue for comparison, as now noted in the figure legend.

      -the authors should avoid the use of red/green colour combinations in their figures (see: https://thenode.biologists.com/data-visualization-with-flying-colors/research/)

      All figures will be redrawn in colorblind-accessible colors in a subsequent revision.

      -in the text the authors state "ORC binding to the ACS and subsequent MCM loading is a directional process dependent on a ACS- site and a similar but inverted nearby sequence (Xu et al., 2006)". I think it would be more appropriate to cite the following study here:

      Coster, G., Diffley, J. (2017). Bidirectional eukaryotic DNA replication is established by quasi-symmetrical helicase loading Science (New York, NY) 357(6348), 314 - 318. https://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.aan0063

      The Coster reference has been included.

      -the list of factors that influence replication timing should include Rif1, whereas it is less clear that Rpd3 acts within the unique genome (as opposed to indirectly via repetitive DNA, e.g. rDNA)

      Rif1 has been added to the list.

      -figure 4 - it might help to mark the centromere on panel a. Also, why do the ChIP peaks and annotated origins appear to line up so poorly?

      The shift between the peaks and the ACS positions was introduced during the construction of the figure. Thanks for catching it. The alignment has been corrected and the centromere annotation has been added.

      -figure 4d - would it not be better to use fraction of lost MCM signal on the x-axis as in previous figures?

      If T_rep was a linear function of MCM stoichiometry, fraction lost would work as well as amount lost. However, we find that there is a lower correlation between fraction of MCM signal lost and T_rep delay than between absolute MCM signal lost and T_rep delay, suggesting a more complicated relationship.

      -"with galactose or raffinose, to induce or repress Mcm2-7 overexpression, respectively." This is incorrect, raffinose does not repress this promoter (that requires glucose).

      Fixed.

      -the S. pombe spike in is a great addition to the over expression experiments. It's a shame that it wasn't included in the auxin experiments.

      Yes, we agree.

      -why does the data in fig 5d appear to be at much lower resolution that the previous ChIP data?

      The resolution was inadvertently reduced during the rendering of the figure. The resolution has restored.

      -in the sequencing analysis pipeline for MCM ChIP the authors use a 650 bp upper size limit; why have such a large threshold compared to the size of a nucleosome? Are the analyses and findings sensitive to this size threshold?

      Although the MNase digestion was optimized to produce mostly mononucleosomal-sized digestion, some di- and very little tri- nucleosomal fragments still remain. In order to capture as many of the MCM-protected immunoprecipitated fragments as possible, the upper limit was set at 650 bp (up to 4 nucleosomes-worth of DNA). However, there is a very minimal contribution from fragments larger than mononucleosomes, qualitatively as well as quantitatively in 1kb windows around origins. Figure 3a provides a qualitative depiction of the contribution of dinucleosomes (input, ~300bp).

      -the repliscope package was published here:

      Batrakou, D., Müller, C., Wilson, R., Nieduszynski, C. (2020). DNA copy-number measurement of genome replication dynamics by high-throughput sequencing: the sort-seq, sync-seq and MFA-seq family. Nature Protocols 15(3), 1255 - 1284. https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41596-019-0287-7

      The reference has been corrected.

      Reviewer #1 (Significance):

      This work builds upon a body of work from the Rhind group (and others) to determine the contribution of MCM load to replication origin activation dynamics. To my mind this is the most convincing dataset and analysis to date and goes a long way to supporting the model that the efficiency of MCM loading is a major factor in determining the mean replication time of an origin. As the authors state, they are still not able to distinguish between two different models of MCM load (single vs multiple). It would be interesting for the authors to discuss how these two models could be distinguished in the future (perhaps with single cell/molecule experiments).

      This study will be of interest to those in the fields of DNA replication and genome stability.

      My field of expertise is DNA replication and replication origin function.

      Reviewer #2 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity):

      **Summary:**

      This is a nice study that characterizes the consequences of limiting or increasing Mcm expression on the replication program. Prior ChIP experiments in yeast have observed that not all origins exhibit the same level of Mcm enrichment and that increased mcm enrichment was correlated with origin activity. These observations led to two different models -- a) that multiple Mcm2-7 double hexamer complexes are loaded at some origins and b) a probabilistic model where the differential enrichment of Mcm2-7 reflected the fraction of cells in a population that had loaded the Mcm2-7 complex at a specific origin. While the titration experiments presented here don't provide any conclusive support for either model, they do provide some novel and relevant insights for the replication field, in part, due to the increased resolution and quantification afforded by the MNase ChIP-seq approach (and S. pombe spike in). The authors very nicely demonstrate that origins are differentially sensitive to Mcm2-7 depletion and that loss of Mcm2-7 loading results in an altered replication timing profile. The origins most impacted by loss of Mcm2-7 are 'weak' origins as described by the Fox group. Intriguingly, the authors find that the 5X overexpression of Mcm2-7 does not perturb the relative Mcm2-7 loading at individual origins, but rather instead globally represses Mcm2-7 association at all origins. They also find that overexpression of both Cdt1 and Mcm2-7 is detrimental to the cell (although no obvious replication phenotype was observed). Finally, the authors present a reasonable interpretation of their data in the context of models for replication timing which was very well articulated.

      **Major Comments:**

      From the methods it appears that different analyses were performed with different replicates?

      "Replicate #1 was used for all analyses except for V plots, for which the higher resolution Replicate #2 was used."

      Ideally all of the conclusions should be supported by all the replicates independently, or if the replicates are concordant -- they should be merged (at a similar sequencing depth) prior to doing the analyses.. Even the v-plots with merged replicates will be informative due to the greater sequencing depth.

      Though we agree that greater sequencing depth would be informative for aggregation analysis, we think that one of the main strengths of our study is the analysis of MCM quantitation and replication timing in the same population of cells. Although the experiments were performed in exactly the same way, there is always slight biological or temporal differences between the replicates, due to the complicated nature of the experimental design. This variation increases the noise between the MCM ChIP and the replication timing analyses. Therefore, were analyzed the replicates separately. However, we did do all of the analyses on both replicates and got similar results. We have now explicitly stated as much.

      The authors should provide a separate analysis for the larger nucleosomal sized fragments and smaller putative MCM double hexamer fragments with regards to the Mcm loading and relationship to ACS and orientation. They may represent an interesting intermediate with mechanistic consequences for the interpretation.

      We will include the suggested analysis in a subsequent revision.

      The authors should present the v-plots and an analysis of which side the Mcm's load for the overexpression studies. I was surprised that there was no further in-depth analysis for these two extremes. Perhaps similar conclusions will be reached, but it should at least be mentioned/presented as a supplementary figure.

      We will include the suggested analysis in a subsequent revision.

      **Minor Comments:**

      This is largely semantic, but the majority of MNase ChIP-seq signal recovered is associated with the nucleosomes and not in the NDR and as the signal in the NDR is differentially sensitive to digestion, I would suggest rephrasing the following sentence:

      "In contrast to previous genome-wide reports (Belsky et al., 2015), but in agreement with recent in-vitro cryo-EM structures (Miller et al., 2019), we also observe MCM signal in the nucleosome-depleted region (NDR) of origins. "

      to :

      "In agreement with a previous genome-wide report (belsky 2015), we found that the bulk of the MCM signal was associated with nucleosomal sized fragments; however the increased resolution afforded by our approach allowed us to also detect protected fragments in the NDR as predicted by recent in vitro cryo em structures..."

      We have modified the sentence as suggested.

      As a sanity check, please double check V-plots and presence of small fragments with the digestion conditions. In the Henikoff manuscript the bulk of sub-nucleosomal fragments were lost with the longer digestion time. Specifically, the TF footprints were more pronounced with minimal digestion. While it might be argued that the longer digestion more tightly resolved the binding site, in many cases they were completely lost with the 20 minute digestion. This is just a simple check -- I don't doubt the results as reported given the experimental conditions are very different. For example, the henikoff manuscript did not use cross linking or an antibody enrichment step.

      We double checked and confirmed that more small fragments are found in the more digested library. The reason that we see more small fragments when we digest more, in contrast to the contrary observation in the Henikoff paper is presumably because MCM has a larger footprint than a transcription factor and protects that footprint more effectively.

      Last paragraph of the "MCM associates with nucleosomes section" which reports that the Mcm2-7 complex is loaded up or downstream from the ACS independent of orientation should cite Belsky 2015 (Figure 5 and discussion) for the initial observation.

      Done.

      The authors argue that the global reduction in MCM loading associated with overexpression may be a technical artifact given that all origins exhibit a proportional reduction in mcm2-7 loading. However, this is exactly what the S. pombe spike in control is intended for. The relative difference between individual origins resulting from Mcm2-7 depletion would still be evident without the spike in. The authors do discuss different possibilities, but I would not be so keen to discard this as technical artifact.

      We, too, are reluctant to dismiss this result as a technical artifact. However, we are at a loss to offer any other explanation. We raise a handful of biological possibilities in the Discussion, but dismiss each one as failing to account for our results. We would be happy to entertain other suggestions.

      Reviewer #2 (Significance):

      This work has several advances that will be appreciated by the replication field -- including a high resolution view of Mcm2-7 loading in the context of chromatin; the impact of titrating (low and high) MCM expression on MCM loading and replication timing program; and a well reasoned discussion of how different models of MCM loading would impact origin activation and replication timing program. The work builds on prior studies in the field (eg. Belsky 2015), while some of the conclusions regarding the localization of the Mcm2-7 complex relative to the ACS and surrounding nucleosomes are confirmatory, the increased resolution provides new insight (like the enrichment of small fragments in the NDR) that could be further strengthened by additional analysis (see above).

      My expertise is DNA replication and chromatin.

      Reviewer #3 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)):

      In this study, the authors use Auxin-mediated degradation of Mcm4 to reduce the concentration of the MCM helicase complex in yeast, and determine the effects of this reduction on both MCM-origin association (interpreted as MCM loading) by MNase-MCM-ChIPSeq and on replication origin function by Sync-Seq replication timing experiments (deep sequencing of a yeast population as it progresses through a synchronized S-phase). Complementary experiments testing the effect of induced MCM complex over-expression on MCM-origin association are also performed.

      The authors find that reducing Mcm4 levels (and thus loading-competent MCM complexes) causes yeast cells to be more sensitive to DNA replication stress. In addition, not all origins are equally susceptible to reductions in MCM levels; the origins that do lose MCM binding at reduced MCM levels show a reduction in activity and an associated delay in their replication time under those conditions. Finally, over-expression of the MCM complex has no effect on MCM-origin association or origin function, suggesting that MCM levels are not limiting for origin licensing in yeast under normal lab conditions. The strengths of the study are the well-executed experiments and very nice data that are presented. However, there are several weaknesses. The authors make conclusions that are not supported by their data; and several of the outcomes are not at all unexpected based on extensive published studies in yeast and mammalian cells, raising issues about whether this study advances and/or clarifies the current gaps in the field. While some of the relevant past studies were referenced, the authors did not place their own study in the context to published work and current models in the field, which reduced the scholarly value of their study. Because the work was not placed in context of the field, some of the rationale and conclusions were misleading.

      **Some specific major comments:**

      1,The title is misleading. The authors have clearly shown that when MCM levels are be made limiting in an engineered system, some origins are substantially less active, which means that these origin loci are replicated "passively" (i.e. by a Replication Fork (RF) emanating from a distal origin) rather than actively (i.e. by "firing" and initiating replication). Their own replication data show that. But this competition is only revealed when MCM levels are artificially/experimentally lowered. What is the evidence that competition for MCM complexes among individual origins establishes replication timing patterns in yeast? If anything, the over-expression experiment suggests the opposite--that MCM levels are not limiting and therefore do not play a substantial role in establishing the replication timing patterns that are observed in yeast. Instead those patterns appear to result primarily from the fact that MCM complex activation factors are present in limiting concentrations relative to origins.

      We agree with the reviewer's analysis and have revised the title to "The Capacity of Origins to Load MCM Establishes Replication Timing Patterns".

      2,The abstract states that "the number of MCMs loaded onto origins has been proposed to be a key determinant of when those origins initiate DNA replication during S-phase". While it is true that this lab has proposed this model in budding yeast, the current study performs no experiments that directly address this model--i.e. that i. individual origins possess a different number of MCM complexes and or ii that these differences underlie timing differences. They acknowledge this point in their Discussion--a ChIPSeq experiment is an ensemble experiment--there is no way to know that differences in MCM signals correspond to a different number of MCM complexes per origin versus a differences in the fraction of cells that contain and MCM complex at all at a given origin . But this statement in the abstract, combined with their conclusion in the same section of the paper: "Our results support a model in which the loading activity of origins, controlled by their ability to recruit ORC and compete for MCM, determines the number of helicases loaded, which in turn affects replication timing" implies that they have tested a model that they have not tested. Given how quickly readers "skim" the literature these days, a misleading abstract can do a lot of damage to a field. The results presented in this study neither support nor refute the model for the number of helicases loaded per origin, and the fact that reducing origin licensing efficiency by making the major substrate limiting reduces the number of licensed origins in a cell population is fully expected based on the current state of the field .

      Four questions are addressed in this comment. The first is whether there is variable MCM stoichiometry at origins. The second is whether that variation ranges from 0 to 1 and 0 to many. The third is if the variation is stoichiometry affects replication timing. The fourth is how this variation in stoichiometry comes about.

      Our work is based on the conclusion, supported by a substantial body of literature, that MCM loading stoichiometry varies among origins. Our data in this paper further supports this conclusion.

      As the reviewer notes, and as we had tried to make clear, the data is this paper does not address the range of the variation. Moreover, as we also tried to make clear, our hypotheses, results and conclusions are not affected by whether the range is 0 to 1 or 0 to many.

      This paper focuses on Questions 3 and 4. We have reworked the introduction to make these distinctions more clear.

      We have also corrected the abstract to refer to "the stoichiometry", instead of "the number", of MCMs.

      3,The rationale for the study as stated in the Introduction: "Although the molecular biochemistry of initiation at individual origins continues to be elucidated in great detail (Bleichert, 2019), the mechanism governing the time at which different regions of the genome replicate has remained largely elusive (Boos and Ferreira, 2019)." Is also misleading. In fact, in budding yeast (and other organisms) there have been several advances in this area particularly with respect to DNA replication origin activation. The S-phase origin activation factors are limiting for origin function, and factors such as Ctf19 at centromeres and Fkh1/2 at non-centromeric early-acting origins help to directly recruit the limiting S-phase factor, Dbf4, to origins. It is misleading to ignore this substantial progress and not make an effort to place this current study, which is important and one of the first to look directly at MCM loading control in yeast, into a relevant context with respect to what is known. What's interesting is that this S-phase model assumes/requires that most origins are, in fact, licensed and thus that differences in licensing efficiency are not a major driving of replication timing patterns in yeast. But we do not know why there are only subtle differences in MCM loading---this study may help explain that.

      We have broadened the scope of our Introduction and Discussion to address these points. However, it is not the case that "there are only subtle differences in MCM loading". MCM ChIP-seq (, and this paper) and MCM ChEC-seq both show well over ten-fold variation in MCM stoichiometry at origins. We have now explicitly made this point in the Introduction.

      4,The authors link the differential ability of MCM loading deficiencies when MCM is made limiting to differences in ORC binding categories. The "weak" origins, that presumably bind ORC weakly, were most affected by reductions in MCM. Are these origins less efficient than the other categories, DNA and chromatin-dependent (using the origin efficiency metric data from the Whitehouse lab) where MCM binding is not reduced as much? In normal cells are these early or late origins? Is the idea that the role of excess MCM is to achieve a sufficient number or "back up" origins per cell to deal with potential stress, as proposed by the Blow and Schwob labs in tissue culture cells many years ago? It seems likely that the data reported here are in fact confirmations of those early studies in mammalian cells---which is useful to know even if not unexpected.

      We will include the suggested analyses in a subsequent revision.

      Excess MCM do, as has been long appreciated and as we discuss, contribute to replication-stress tolerance. However, that is not a major point of our paper.

      5,Aren't the results that losing MCM signal corresponds to loss of origin activity peaks entirely expected? The same result would be obtained if you made a point mutation in that origin's ACS. Of course preventing an origin from being licensed will delay that region's replication time in S-phase because it now must be replicated passively. Licensing affects replication timing patterns because the MCM complex is the substrate for limiting S-phase factors, but that is far different from concluding that the number of MCMs at an origin is what controls the time in S-phase when an origin is activated.

      Yes, "the results that losing MCM signal corresponds to loss of origin activity peaks [are] entirely expected". However, this is not the important result. The key result is that the distribution of MCM at origins is not uniformly affected, which leads to our conclusions that, in wild-type cells, origin capacity dominates MCM stoichiometry and that, when MCM become limiting, origin activity (probably determined by ORC affinity) becomes critical—neither of which were expected results. In any case, the expected correlation between MCM loading and origin activity was observed as a consequence of measuring MCM stoichiometry and replication timing and is an obvious analysis to include, so we did so.

      6,The authors stated that the measured MCM abundance for the 43% of origins that are not known to be controlled by the multiple mechanisms that have been shown to control origin replication time. Is this because they think that MCM loading contributes to the timing control of only these origins? Was MCM loading not affected at any of these other origins when MCM levels were reduced? Are those 43% of origins in the "weak" binding category in terms of ORC? The rationale for eliminating so many origins from these analyses were not clear.

      We propose that the probability of origin activation is the product of the stoichiometry of MCM at the origin and the rate of MCM activation, which may be affected by trans-acting factors. For the 43% of origins for which there is no known trans-acting regulation, the correlation with stoichiometry is stronger. However, the correlation holds when looking at all origin, too. The suggestion to look at only the 57% of origins with known trans-action regulation is a good one. We will include this analysis and the other suggested analyses in a subsequent revision.

      7,Doesn't the data in Figure 4c at 0 mM auxin support the conclusion that differences in MCM ChIP signals have negligible effects on origin activation time, in contrast to the publication by Das, 2015 from this lab? Or is the point that these origins are sensitive to reductions in MCM levels and the more sensitive they are the more delayed their replication time (but again, doesn't that have to be true? If they are losing MCM signals they cannot function as origins, so they are replicated passively and, by definition, will show delayed replication timing. An origin is defined as such by a loaded MCM complex.)

      No. The reason the correlation in 4c is not a good as in our previous work is that in Das 2015 we compared origin-activation efficiency (calculated from our stochastic model in Yang 2010), instead of T_rep, which we used here. T_rep is a convolution of origin-activation time and passive-replication time, reducing to correlation. The important observation is that the correlation gets better as MCM levels are reduced.

      The correlation between MCM stoichiometry and activation efficiency may seem trivial, but just because a model is simple does not mean it is not correct. If stoichiometry was the only factor regulating origin activation, we would expect a stronger correlation. So, we conclude that there are other factors at play, quite possible the trans-acting factors that the reviewer mentions in their second point. However, if stoichiometry played no role, we would expect no correlation. So, we propose that MCM stoichiometry is "an important determinant of replication timing".

      8,I do not understand the conclusions from Figure 4d. There is an extremely small positive correlation between how much of an MCM signal is lost and delay in replication time of an origin, but this correlation is not surprising as an unlicensed origin cannot be an origin and will be replicated passively. What seems most surprising about these data is that the effect is so weak, not that it exists. There is quite a lot of scatter in this plot at 500 uM auxin, with some origins losing a given amount of signal (x) and being only slightly delayed in replication time, and others losing the same amount of signal (x) and being substantially delayed. What underlies this outcome?--Are the ones that are not substantially delayed closer to origins that have not been affected at all by MCM reductions? Why is the correlation so weak? The other regulators of origin activation time have stronger and more precise effects--for example the centromere-control can be precisely eliminated so that only the replication time of the centromere-proximal origins are delayed.

      We believe that much of the noise in Figure 4d is due, as the reviewer suggests, to passive replication of origins which lose most of their MCM signal and become inactive but happen to reside next to origins which don’t lost any MCM signal and fire early. And excellent example is ARS 510 (see Figure 4a). ARS510 loses most of its MCM signal and clearly loses its initiation peak in the T_rep plot. However, because it is next to ARS511, which does not lose much MCM signal and which remains a efficient origin, ARS510 is still replicated early. We will include this example in a subsequent revision.

      9,Multiple studies in yeast and mammalian cells indicate that MCM subunits are in excess relative to other licensing and S-phase initiation factors, so it is not unexpected that over-expressing MCM did not lead to enhanced levels of licensing. It seems much more plausible that Cdc6 or Cdt1 or both factors are present in limiting amounts for MCM loading, so I did not understand the point of over-producing MCM subunits. If the "weak" origins are the ones that are most dramatically affected by reducing MCM to "limiting" levels, isn't the question whether you can increase licensing at these origins when you over-produce a factor that is likely limiting for licensing, such as Cdt1 or Cdc6 (or both) while leaving MCM at its normal levels. The fact that MCM levels are not limiting for licensing is not surprising and, if anything, argues against these levels having a regulatory role in origin activation timing---which seems to be the opposite of what the authors want to conclude.

      Orc1-6, Cdc6 and Cdt1 are all substoichiometric to MCM. However, they all act catalytically to load MCM. So, although they may be kinetically limiting, they do not prevent most or all MCMs being loaded in wild-type cells. The fact that overexpressing MCMs (with or without Cdt1) does not allow for more MCM loading suggests that under normal conditions origins are saturated with MCMs and have little or no capacity to load more MCM, even when given plenty of time to do so. From this result, we conclude that origin capacity is a major determinant of MCM loading in wild-type cells. From our MCM-reduction experiments, we also conclude that, when MCM is limiting, origin competition affects which origins load MCMs faster. However, we agree with the reviewer's first point, that our title gave the incorrect impression that we concluded that origin competition is the primary determinant of MCM loading in wild-type cells. Thus, as suggested, we have changed the title. We have also reworked the Introduction and Discussion to more clearly explain that competition is only a determining factor when MCMs are limited.

      In summary, I think the technical aspects of the experiments were quite strong, but I do not think that the experiments answered the question that was posed by the authors.

      **Minor points:**

      Many places where "This data" should be changed to "These data". Data are plural.

      See comments on this point in the response to Reviewer #2.

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      Referee #3

      Evidence, reproducibility and clarity

      In this study, the authors use Auxin-mediated degradation of Mcm4 to reduce the concentration of the MCM helicase complex in yeast, and determine the effects of this reduction on both MCM-origin association (interpreted as MCM loading) by MNase-MCM-ChIPSeq and on replication origin function by Sync-Seq replication timing experiments (deep sequencing of a yeast population as it progresses through a synchronized S-phase). Complementary experiments testing the effect of induced MCM complex over-expression on MCM-origin association are also performed.

      The authors find that reducing Mcm4 levels (and thus loading-competent MCM complexes) causes yeast cells to be more sensitive to DNA replication stress. In addition, not all origins are equally susceptible to reductions in MCM levels; the origins that do lose MCM binding at reduced MCM levels show a reduction in activity and an associated delay in their replication time under those conditions. Finally, over-expression of the MCM complex has no effect on MCM-origin association or origin function, suggesting that MCM levels are not limiting for origin licensing in yeast under normal lab conditions. The strengths of the study are the well-executed experiments and very nice data that are presented. However, there are several weaknesses. The authors make conclusions that are not supported by their data; and several of the outcomes are not at all unexpected based on extensive published studies in yeast and mammalian cells, raising issues about whether this study advances and/or clarifies the current gaps in the field. While some of the relevant past studies were referenced, the authors did not place their own study in the context to published work and current models in the field, which reduced the scholarly value of their study. Because the work was not placed in context of the field, some of the rationale and conclusions were misleading.

      Some specific major comments:

      1,The title is misleading. The authors have clearly shown that when MCM levels are be made limiting in an engineered system, some origins are substantially less active, which means that these origin loci are replicated "passively" (i.e. by a Replication Fork (RF) emanating from a distal origin) rather than actively (i.e. by "firing" and initiating replication). Their own replication data show that. But this competition is only revealed when MCM levels are artificially/experimentally lowered. What is the evidence that competition for MCM complexes among individual origins establishes replication timing patterns in yeast? If anything, the over-expression experiment suggests the opposite--that MCM levels are not limiting and therefore do not play a substantial role in establishing the replication timing patterns that are observed in yeast. Instead those patterns appear to result primarily from the fact that MCM complex activation factors are present in limiting concentrations relative to origins.

      2,The abstract states that "the number of MCMs loaded onto origins has been proposed to be a key determinant of when those origins initiate DNA replication during S-phase". While it is true that this lab has proposed this model in budding yeast, the current study performs no experiments that directly address this model--i.e. that i. individual origins possess a different number of MCM complexes and or ii that these differences underlie timing differences. They acknowledge this point in their Discussion--a ChIPSeq experiment is an ensemble experiment--there is no way to know that differences in MCM signals correspond to a different number of MCM complexes per origin versus a differences in the fraction of cells that contain and MCM complex at all at a given origin . But this statement in the abstract, combined with their conclusion in the same section of the paper: "Our results support a model in which the loading activity of origins, controlled by their ability to recruit ORC and compete for MCM, determines the number of helicases loaded, which in turn affects replication timing" implies that they have tested a model that they have not tested. Given how quickly readers "skim" the literature these days, a misleading abstract can do a lot of damage to a field. The results presented in this study neither support nor refute the model for the number of helicases loaded per origin, and the fact that reducing origin licensing efficiency by making the major substrate limiting reduces the number of licensed origins in a cell population is fully expected based on the current state of the field .

      3,The rationale for the study as stated in the Introduction: "Although the molecular biochemistry of initiation at individual origins continues to be elucidated in great detail (Bleichert, 2019), the mechanism governing the time at which different regions of the genome replicate has remained largely elusive (Boos and Ferreira, 2019)." Is also misleading. In fact, in budding yeast (and other organisms) there have been several advances in this area particularly with respect to DNA replication origin activation. The S-phase origin activation factors are limiting for origin function, and factors such as Ctf19 at centromeres and Fkh1/2 at non-centromeric early-acting origins help to directly recruit the limiting S-phase factor, Dbf4, to origins. It is misleading to ignore this substantial progress and not make an effort to place this current study, which is important and one of the first to look directly at MCM loading control in yeast, into a relevant context with respect to what is known. What's interesting is that this S-phase model assumes/requires that most origins are, in fact, licensed and thus that differences in licensing efficiency are not a major driving of replication timing patterns in yeast. But we do not know why there are only subtle differences in MCM loading---this study may help explain that.

      4,The authors link the differential ability of MCM loading deficiencies when MCM is made limiting to differences in ORC binding categories. The "weak" origins, that presumably bind ORC weakly, were most affected by reductions in MCM. Are these origins less efficient than the other categories, DNA and chromatin-dependent (using the origin efficiency metric data from the Whitehouse lab) where MCM binding is not reduced as much? In normal cells are these early or late origins? Is the idea that the role of excess MCM is to achieve a sufficient number or "back up" origins per cell to deal with potential stress, as proposed by the Blow and Schwob labs in tissue culture cells many years ago? It seems likely that the data reported here are in fact confirmations of those early studies in mammalian cells---which is useful to know even if not unexpected.

      5,Aren't the results that losing MCM signal corresponds to loss of origin activity peaks entirely expected? The same result would be obtained if you made a point mutation in that origin's ACS. Of course preventing an origin from being licensed will delay that region's replication time in S-phase because it now must be replicated passively. Licensing affects replication timing patterns because the MCM complex is the substrate for limiting S-phase factors, but that is far different from concluding that the number of MCMs at an origin is what controls the time in S-phase when an origin is activated.

      6,The authors stated that the measured MCM abundance for the 43% of origins that are not known to be controlled by the multiple mechanisms that have been shown to control origin replication time. Is this because they think that MCM loading contributes to the timing control of only these origins? Was MCM loading not affected at any of these other origins when MCM levels were reduced? Are those 43% of origins in the "weak"binding category in terms of ORC? The rationale for eliminating so many origins from these analyses were not clear.

      7,Doesn't the data in Figure 4c at 0 mM auxin support the conclusion that differences in MCM ChIPsignals have negligible effects on origin activation time, in contrast to the publication by Das, 2015 from this lab? Or is the point that these origins are sensitive to reductions in MCM levels and the more sensitive they are the more delayed their replication time (but again, doesn't that have to be true? If they are losing MCM signals they cannot function as origins, so they are replicated passively and, by definition, will show delayed replication timing. An origin is defined as such by a loaded MCM complex.)

      8,I do not understand the conclusions from Figure 4d. There is an extremely small positive correlation between how much of an MCM signal is lost and delay in replication time of an origin, but this correlation is not surprising as an unlicensed origin cannot be an origin and will be replicated passively. What seems most surprising about these data is that the effect is so weak, not that it exists. There is quite a lot of scatter in this plot at 500 uM auxin, with some origins losing a given amount of signal (x) and being only slightly delayed in replication time, and others losing the same amount of signal (x) and being substantially delayed. What underlies this outcome?--Are the ones that are not substantially delayed closer to origins that have not been affected at all by MCM reductions? Why is the correlation so weak? The other regulators of origin activation time have stronger and more precise effects--for example the centromere-control can be precisely eliminated so that only the replication time of the centromere-proximal origins are delayed.

      9,Multiple studies in yeast and mammalian cells indicate that MCM subunits are in excess relative to other licensing and S-phase initiation factors, so it is not unexpected that over-expressing MCM did not lead to enhanced levels of licensing. It seems much more plausible that Cdc6 or Cdt1 or both factors are present in limiting amounts for MCM loading, so I did not understand the point of over-producing MCM subunits. If the "weak" origins are the ones that are most dramatically affected by reducing MCM to "limiting" levels, isn't the question whether you can increase licensing at these origins when you over-produce a factor that is likely limiting for licensing, such as Cdt1 or Cdc6 (or both) while leaving MCM at its normal levels. The fact that MCM levels are not limiting for licensing is not surprising and, if anything, argues against these levels having a regulatory role in origin activation timing---which seems to be the opposite of what the authors want to conclude.

      In summary, I think the technical aspects of the experiments were quite strong, but I do not think that the experiments answered the question that was posed by the authors.

      Minor points:

      Many places where "This data" should be changed to "These data". Data are plural.

      Significance

      Significance: see above

      Referees Cross Commenting

      Reviewer 3. My overall conclusions about this study are that the data are extremely nice and useful to the field, but that their potential to advance the field or clarify it for 'outsiders' are limited by 1, a biased. model-centric presentation that fails to put the work in context of a lot of strong previous work. Some of the conclusions cannot event be tested by the experimental design 2, some of the data analyses, for example the parsing of origins for analyses of MCM effects versus effects on replication time seem arbitrary and were not clearly justified. 3, The correlation between reductions in MCM loading and Trep delay seemed weak, even after parsing for origins expected to experience the largest effects, which is actually kind of interesting, but was ignored in favor of the pre-determined interpretation.

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      Reply to the reviewers

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      *Reviewer #1 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)):

      The manuscript by Abrams and Nance describes how the polarity proteins PAR-6 and PKC-3/aPKC promote lumen extension of the unicellular excretory canal in C. elegans. Using tissue-specific depletion methods they find that CDC-42 and the RhoGEF EXC-5/FGD are required for luminal localization of PAR-6, which recruits the exocyst complex required for lumen extension. Interestingly, they show that the ortholog of the mammalian exocyst receptor, PAR-3, is dispensable for luminal membrane extension. Overall, this is a well-written and interesting manuscript.*

      1.Because depletion of PAR-3 in the canal causes milder defects than PAR-6 or CDC-42 the authors suggest that they cannot rule out the possibility that an alternative isoform of PAR-3 is expressed and buffering the defect. They should perform canal-specific RNAi-mediated depletion of the entire PAR-3 gene to determine if this is true.

      We agree with Reviewer 1 that it would be useful to provide additional evidence that an alternative isoform of PAR-3 lacking the ZF1 degron is not expressed. While tissue-specific RNAi could be used, we have not been successful obtaining complete knockdown in previous tissue-specific RNAi experiments. Moreover, this approach does not target any maternal PAR-3 protein that may be inherited by the excretory cell. As an alternative approach to address this point, we will analyze par-3::zf1::yfp/par-3(null) worms following excretory-cell-specific expression of zif-1, and compare to par-3::zf1::yfp/par-3::zf1::yfp siblings. We would expect the excretory cell phenotype to become more severe if additional, ‘phenotype-buffering’ forms of PAR-3 were present, or if there was incomplete degradation of PAR-3::ZF1::YFP in our previous experiments.

      2.The authors suggest that GTP-loaded (activated) CDC-42 recruits PAR-6 to the luminal membrane. It would be nice if they could use a biosensor, such as the GBD-WSP-1 reagent from Buechner's lab to confirm that EXC-5 depletion also reduces activated CDC-42, as would be expected. This should be achievable since there is strong CDC-42 signal, even in the cytoplasm.

      This is an excellent suggestion. We will utilize a CDC-42 biosensor – an integrated cdc42p::gfp::wsp-1(gbd) strain created in our lab and previously validated and characterized (Zilberman et al. 2017). We have confirmed that the biosensor is detected in the excretory canal and appears enriched at or near the lumenal membrane. We will cross the biosensor into the exc-5::zf1::mScarlet background. This will allow us to assess lumenal enrichment, and using heat shock inducible ZIF-1, determine if there is a reduction in biosensor lumenal enrichment when EXC-5::ZF1::mScarlet is acutely degraded.

      If the biosensor is difficult to measure at the canal lumen, an alternative approach would be to use an available exc-5 null allele to examine genetically if cdc-42 and exc-5 are acting in the same pathway. We could cross CDC-42exc(-) larvae into exc-5(rh232) and quantify excretory canal phenotypes. If CDC-42 and EXC-5 are indeed functioning in the same pathway we would expect no enhancement of the CDC-42exc(-) phenotype.

      3.Related to point 2, (i) does mutation of the CRIB domain of PAR-6 impair its recruitment to the luminal membrane, and (ii) does this mutant exacerbate canal defects when PAR-3 is depleted?

      (i) Our lab has previously generated and characterized a transgenic par6P::par-6(**CRIB)::gfp strain (Zilberman et al., 2017). We will examine this strain to determine if expression is detectable in the excretory canal, and if so, we will compare lumenal enrichment of PAR-6(CRIB)::GFP to control worms expressing wild-type PAR-6::GFP.

      (ii) This is a very interesting experiment, as it would help address if the mild phenotype observed in PAR-3 depleted animals is due to the remaining PAR-6 that is recruited by CDC-42. Our lab has previously shown that par6P::par-6(**CRIB)::gfp cannot rescue the embryonic lethality of a par-6 mutant, in contrast to par-6::gfp (Zilberman et al. 2017). This indicates that the CRIB domain is needed for PAR-6 function during embryogenesis and suggests that CRIB domain mutations introduced by CRISPR would almost certainly be lethal, precluding analysis of the excretory cell.

      As an alternative experiment, we would determine if PAR-3 localizes to the lumenal membrane independently of CDC-42; such a finding would imply that PAR-3 and CDC-42 likely have independent contributions to PAR-6 localization (rather than CDC-42 promoting PAR-6 localization by localizing PAR-3). To do this, we will degrade ZF1::YFP::CDC-42 in the excretory cell and examine the localization of PAR-3::mCherry compared to controls. We have all of the strains needed for this experiment.

      4.The authors hypothesize that partial recruitment of PAR-6 by CDC-42 is sufficient for luminal membrane extension to explain the mild defects caused by PAR-3 depletion. Since depletion of PAR-6 and CDC-42 alone causes milder canal truncations the authors should co-deplete these proteins (as well as PAR-3 and CDC-42) to determine if there is an additive effect.

      This is an excellent suggestion in principal. However, it is not possible to know in any given degradation experiment whether the targeted protein is completely degraded; we can only say it is no longer detectable by fluorescence. Thus, any degron allele (in the presence of ZIF-1) could behave like a strong hypomorph rather than a null. It would not be possible to interpret double degradation experiments in such a case, as a more severe phenotype in the double could simply be a result of combining two hypomorphic alleles, further reducing pathway activity even if the genes function together in the same pathway. To interpret this experiment properly, a null allele of at least one of the genes would have to be used. This is not possible since par and cdc-42 null mutants are lethal and there is also maternal contribution. As an alternative to these double depletion experiments, we will deplete PAR-6::ZF1::YFP or PAR-3::ZF1::YFP in exc-5 null mutant larvae, as unlike cdc-42, exc-5 is not an essential gene.

      5.In figure 2, the authors show that depletion of PKC-3 causes more severe canal truncations than PAR-6. Since these proteins function in the same complex what do they think is the reason for this difference? This point could be discussed more in the manuscript.

      As described in the previous point, incomplete degradation could produce modestly different phenotypes even for genes that act in the same pathway. Therefore, it is not possible to determine whether PAR-6 and PKC-3 have different roles using this approach. We will add text to the discussion bringing up this point.

      6.Related to point 5, more experiments with PKC-3 should be done to determine if, for example, localization of SEC-10 is similarly affected as ablation of PAR-3, PAR-6 and CDC-42.

      We agree, and will address this point by acutely degrading ZF1::GFP::PKC-3 and examining transgenic SEC-10::mCherry, as we have done for other par genes.

      Reviewer #2 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)): The manuscript by Abrams & Nance describes a precise investigation of the role of PAR proteins in the recruitment of the exocyst during and after the extension of the C. elegans excretory canal. State-of-the-art genetic techniques are used to acutely deplete proteins only in the targeted cell, and examine the localization of endogenously expressed markers. Experiments are well described and carefully quantified, with systematic statistical analysis. The manuscript is easy to follow and the bibliography is very good. Most conclusions are well supported.

      1) I am not entirely convinced by the presence of CDC-42 at the lumenal membrane (Fig3G); it seems to be more sub-lumenal that really lumenal. It peaks well before PAR-6 (Fig3H) which itself seem slightly less apical that PAR-3 (Fig3F). Could you use super-resolution microscopy (compatible with endogenous expression levels) to more precisely localize CDC-42? Similar point for PAR-3 and PAR-6 which do not seem to colocalize completely - a longitudinal line scan along the lumenal membrane might provide the answer even without super-resolution; this could help explain why these two proteins do not have the same function. These suggestions are easy to do provided the authors can have access to super-resolution (Airyscan to name it; although other methods will be perfectly acceptable I believe it is the most simple one).

      We agree that the CDC-42 localization peak does not precisely match the PAR-6 peak. As the reviewer notes, resolving the subcellular localization of these two proteins will not be feasible using standard confocal microscopy. We will image the ZF1::YFP::CDC-42; PAR-6:mKate strain using a Zeiss LSM 880 with Airyscan to determine if their subcellular localization patterns are distinct.

      To examine PAR-3 and PAR-6 colocalization at the lumen, we will acquire additional confocal images of the PAR-6-ZF1-YFP; PAR-3-mCherry strain and examine colocalization of the clusters along the lumenal membrane. As a positive control for two proteins that should co-localize, we will image ZF1::GFP::PKC-3; PAR-6-mKate; these two proteins bind directly and co-localize in nearly all cells in which they have been examined.

      2) The same group has described a CDC-42 biosensor to detect its active form. It could be used here to precisely pinpoint where active CDC-42 is required: in the cytoplasm? At the lumenal membrane? colocalizing with what other protein? This will require the expression of a transgene under an excretory cell specific promotor and a simple injection strategy while helping to strengthen the description of the CDC-42 role.

      See Reviewer 1 point #2.

      3) As the authors certainly know, there is a PAR-6 mutation which prevents its binding to CDC-42. They could express this construct in the excretory canal a simple extrachromosomal array should be sufficient) to validate the direct interaction between these proteins in this cell.

      See Reviewer 1 point #3.

      4) What is the lethality of ZIF-1-mediated depletion of the various factors under the exc promoter? Can homozygous strains be maintained? Authors just have to add a sentence in the Mat&Met section.

      All of the strains with excretory cell-specific degradation we have examined are viable when grown on NGM plates. We will add this point to the materials and methods.

      Provided that the authors have access to an Airyscan, all the questions asked here can be answered in two months (one month for constructs, one month for injection and data analysis) at a very minor cost.

      Reviewer #3 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)):

      Strengths of this manuscript include the use of endogenously tagged proteins (rather than over-expressed transgenes) for high resolution imaging and a cell-type specific acute depletion strategy that avoids complicating pleiotropies and allows tests of molecular epistasis. While some results were fairly expected based on prior studies of Cdc42, PAR proteins, and the exocyst in other tissues or systems, differences in the requirements for par-6 and pkc-3 vs. par-3 strongly suggest that the former genes play more important roles in exocyst recruitment. I was also excited to see a connection made between EXC-5 and PKC-3 localization.

      1.Lumen formation vs. lumen extension. The abstract and introduction use these two terms almost interchangeably, but they are not the same and more care should be taken to avoid the former term. The data here do not demonstrate any roles for par or other genes in lumen formation, but do demonstrate roles in lumen extension and organization/shaping.

      We agree and will correct wording to indicate that lumen extension is affected.

      2.Related to the above, mutant phenotypes here are surprisingly mild and variable. The authors discuss possible reasons for the particularly mild phenotype of par-3 mutants, but don't specifically address the mild phenotypes of the others. Clearly quite a bit of polarization and apical membrane addition occurs in ALL of the mutants. Is this because those early steps use other/redundant molecular players, or is depletion too late or incomplete to reveal an early role?

      We agree with Reviewer 3 and will bring up these points in the discussion. Degradation of proteins strongly predicted to function together (RAL-1 and SEC-5; PAR-6 and PKC-3) produce similar although not identical phenotypes; as discussed above we consider it likely that these differences reflect minor differences in degradation efficiency below our ability to detect by fluorescence. As Reviewer 3 points out, the excretory-specific driver we use to express ZIF-1 may not be active at the very earliest stages of lumen formation, and degradation could take 45 minutes or more after the promoter becomes active (Armenti et al, 2014). Thus, we agree that phenotypes could be more severe if it were possible to completely deplete each tagged protein prior to the onset of lumen formation. However, this caveat does not change the interpretations of our experiments since all proteins are degraded with the same driver. We have avoided mentioning that the phenotypes we observe reflect the ‘null’ phenotype for these reasons. We will emphasize these points in the discussion.

      The authors introduce a new reagent, "excP" (the promoter for T28H11.8), which they use to drive canal cell expression of ZIF-1 for their degron experiments. Please provide more information about when in embryogenesis this promoter becomes active, how that compares to when the par genes, sec-5, ral-1 and cdc-42 are first expressed, and what canal length is at that time. It would also be helpful to show the timeframe for degron-based depletion using this reagent (Figure 1C shows only depletion at L4, days later).

      Publicly available single cell RNA seq data (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31488706/ and https://cello.shinyapps.io/celegans_explorer/) suggest that canal expression of the endogenous T28H11.8 gene doesn't really ramp up until the 580-650 minute timepoint, which is several hours after par gene canal expression (270-390 minutes) and the initiation of canal lumen formation (bean stage, 400-450 minutes). These data suggest that excP might come on too late to test requirements in lumen formation and early stages of extension. This caveat should be at least mentioned.

      See point #2 above. We agree that providing more information on expression from the T28H11.8 promoter would be important for interpreting the severity of phenotypes. We will raise this point in the discussion, and include existing published expression data and a more detailed analysis of the excP::mCherry transgene.

      3.There are two major aspects to the mutant phenotypes observed here: short lumens and cystic lumens. A short lumen makes sense intuitively, but the cysts could use a little more explanation. (What are cysts? What is thought to be the basis of their formation?). It is intriguing that cysts in sec-5 vs. ral-1 mutants (Figure 1) and par-6 vs. pkc-3 mutants (Figure 4) seem to have a very different size and overall appearance. Are these consistent differences, and if so, what could be the explanation for them?

      This is an interesting point. Since it is not practical to perform time-lapse imaging to watch canal cysts form, we analyzed only L1 and L4 larvae. We believe from our imaging that these are discontinuous regions of the lumen. One explanation for the expansion and dilation of the cystic lumens by L4 stage could be that the canal lumen has been expanded by fluid buildup resulting from a defect in canal function in osmoregulation, but we have not tested this directly. The reviewer also raises an interesting point regarding different appearances of cysts in SEC-5 and RAL-1 depleted larvae compared to PAR-6 and PKC-3. It is possible that these differences arise because SEC-5 and RAL-1 might direct whether vesicles will fuse at all, whereas PAR proteins direct where they will fuse in the cell (i.e. there could be fusion at basal surfaces, or just reduced apical fusion). We will bring up these points in the discussion.

      4.The authors did not test if PKC-3, like PAR-6, is required to recruit exocyst to the canal cell apical membrane, but their prior studies in the embryo suggested that it is (Armenti et al 2014). They also did not test if EXC-5 is required to recruit PAR-6 and the exocyst (along with PKC-3), or if CDC-42 is required to recruit PKC-3 (along with PAR-6). There seems to be an assumption that PAR-6 and PKC-3 are regulated and function in a common manner (as is often the case), but that has not been demonstrated here specifically. The basis for this assumption and alternatives to the linear model should be acknowledged.

      As discussed above (Reviewer 1 point #6), we will directly test whether PKC-3 is required to recruit SEC-10::mCherry to the lumenal membrane. We agree with Reviewer 3 that we have not shown that PAR-6 and PKC-3 always function similarly, although this is expected based on their similar phenotypes and co-dependent functions in other cells. We will mention this caveat in the discussion.

      5.EXC-5 is presumed to act upstream of CDC-42 based on shared phenotypes and the known Rho GEF activity of its mammalian homologs. However, direct evidence for this is currently lacking. In future, the authors might test if depleting EXC-5 affects CDC-42 activation/GTP-loading by using CDC-42 biosensors that have been reported in the literature (e.g. Lazetic et al 2018).

      See Reviewer 1 point #2.

      \*Minor comments:** Figure 1, Figure 4, Figure S3, Figure S4 Blue color/CFP indicates the apical/luminal membrane or the apical region of the canal cytoplasm, not the actual lumen as the labels suggest. The lumen is a hollow cavity on the opposite side of the plasma membrane from these markers, and it is shown as white in the Figure 1A upper right cartoon.*

      Thank you for pointing this out. We will correct the figure labelling.

      Figure 2, Figure S2 I'm not confident in the statistical analysis used here (Fisher's Exact test on two bins, 50% canal length), given that four length bins (not two) were defined. I recommend consulting a statistician.

      Our rationale for using two bins for the statistical analysis was because control larvae nearly all have a similar canal length (L1 stage: 99% of larvae have canal length that is 51-75% of body length; L4 stage: 98% of larvae have canal length that is 76-100% of body length), making it straightforward to ask if mutants are shorter. We chose not to make more granular phenotypic comparisons, as we cannot rule out that subtle differences in degradation efficiency, rather than differences in biological function, underlie any differences in canal length of the degron mutants. We will consult with a statistician to determine if this is an acceptable way to statistically compare controls and mutants.

      p.3 "Born during late embryogenesis..." Actually, the canal cell is born at ~270 minutes after first cleavage, which is in the first half of embryogenesis, not what I would call "late".

      We agree and will correct the wording.

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      Reply to the reviewers

      We are grateful to Review Commons for the opportunity to get valuable comments on our manuscript “Trim39 regulates neuronal apoptosis by acting as a SUMO-targeted E3 ubiquitin-ligase for the transcription factor NFATc3”. We would like to acknowledge the very nice and constructive reviews that our manuscript received. We found all of the reviewer comments well founded and we are taking them into careful consideration in preparing the revised version. We are currently performing additional experiments to address the questions raised by the reviewers. We are not yet able to provide a revised version of the manuscript, but you will find below our response to the reviewers and our plan of revision. It is difficult to anticipate exactly how much time we will need to get the requested results and to prepare a complete revised version, as it will depend on whether we can work normally and whether we encounter technical problems. However, it should be possible within a few months.

      Reviewer #1

      **Summary:**

      Desagher and co-workers investigate the regulation of the NFAT family member NFATc3, a transcription factor in neurons with a pro-apoptotic role. They identify TRIM39 as a ubiquitin E3 ligase regulating NFATc3. They demonstrate that TRIM39 can bind and ubiquitinate NFATc3 in vitro and in cells. They identify a critical SUMO interaction motif in TRIM39, that is required for its interaction with NFATc3 and for its ability to ubiquitinate NFATc3. Moreover, mutating sumoylation sites in NFATc3 reduces the interaction with TRIM39 and reduces its ubiquitination. Silencing TRIM39 increases the protein levels of NFATc3 and its transcriptional activity, leading to apoptosis of neurons. TRIM17 modulates the TRIM39-NFATc3 axis. Combined, TRIM39 appears to be a SUMO-targeted ubiquitin ligase (STUbL) for NFATc3 in neurons.

      **Major points:**

      1.This manuscript containing two stories: the rather exciting story that TRIM39 is a STUbL for NFATc3 (as mentioned in the title) and the second less exciting story: TRIM17 modulates the regulation of NFATc3 by TRIM39. These stories are now mixed in a confusing manner, disrupting the flow of the first story. It would be better to focus the current manuscript on the first story and strengthen it further and develop the second story in a second manuscript.

      We understand that the reviewer is more interested in the part of our manuscript related to the characterization of Trim39 as a STUbL due to his/her field of expertise. However, the two other reviewers are also interested in the other parts of our work. Notably the third reviewer would like us to highlight the physiological importance of our findings. Indeed, the main goal of this article is to describe the mechanisms regulating the stability of the transcription factor NFATc3. Trim17 plays a role in this regulation by inhibiting Trim39. It is particularly important for understanding the impact of these mechanisms on neuronal apoptosis as Trim17 is induced in these conditions. As we want to reach a wide audience, we prefer not to focus our manuscript on the identification of a new STUbL. However, we agree with the reviewer that it would be very interesting to strengthen this part of our work and we are grateful for his/her suggestions.

      2.Whereas the cellular experiments to indicate that TRIM39 acts as a STUbL are properly carried out, the observed effects are not necessarily direct. Direct evidence that TRIM39 is indeed a STUbL for sumoylated NFATc3 needs to be obtained in vitro, using purified recombinant proteins. Does TRIM39 indeed preferentially ubiquitinate sumoylated NFATc3? Is ubiquitination reduced for non-sumoylated NFATc3? Is ubiquitination of sumoylated NFATc3 dependent on SIM3 of TRIM39? Do other SIMs in TRIM39 contribute?

      We agree with the reviewer that additional in vitro experiments using purified recombinant proteins would strengthen the characterization of Trim39 as a STUbL. In order to answer the specific questions of the reviewer, we propose to perform in vitro ubiquitination using different forms of GST-Trim39 (WT/mSIM3/mSIM1&2) following in vitro SUMOylation (or not) of NFATc3 produced by TnT (wheat germ) and purified by immunoprecipitation. Preliminary results using WT Trim39 show that indeed the in vitro ubiquitination of NFATc3 is improved by prior in vitro SUMOylation. We have to confirm these results and to test the SIM mutants of Trim39 in the same conditions.

      3.Rule out potential roles for other STUbLs by including control knockdowns of RNF4 and RNF111 and verify the sumoylation of NFATc3 and ubiquitination of wildtype and sumoylation-mutant NFATc3.

      Our data show that silencing of Trim39 deeply decreases the ubiquitination level of NFATc3 in Neuro2A cells, indicating that Trim39 plays a major role in this process. We agree that this does not exclude the possible involvement of other STUbLs in NFATc3 ubiquitination in this model but their potential contribution would be limited. This point will be better addressed in the discussion.

      4.Figure 6B: use SUMO inhibitor ML-792 to demonstrate that ubiquitination of wildtype NFATc3 by TRIM39 is dependent on sumoylation.

      We thank the reviewer for suggesting this experiments that can easily improve the strength of our demonstration. Our preliminary results indeed indicate that in vivo ubiquitination of NFATc3 by Trim39 is strongly decreased following treatment with the SUMO inhibitor ML-792. We have to confirm these results.

      **Minor points:**

      5.Figure 1A and B: demonstrate by immunoprecipitation and Western that the endogenous counterparts indeed interact.

      We are currently setting the conditions to immunoprecipitate endogenous NFATc3 and Trim39 in order to demonstrate that they indeed interact.

      6.Figure 1C and 1E: Quantify the PLA results properly and perform statistics.

      We will perform these quantification and statistical analysis as requested.

      7.Figure 2B: Correct unequal loading of samples.

      We agree with the reviewer (as with reviewer #2) that the blots showing the total lysates of this experiment are confusing. As mentioned in the legend, some material has been lost during the TCA precipitation resulting in unequal loading. However, these experiments have been performed a very long time ago and we do not have the protein extracts anymore. We are currently trying to produce efficient shRNA-expressing lentiviruses to reproduce this experiment and provide a better figure.

      8.Figure 6B: proper statistics are needed here from at least three independent experiments.

      The reviewer is right. Statistics are needed to reinforce the significance of these results. We have quantified three independent experiments and made graphs and statistics that will be presented in the revised version of the manuscript. They better support our conclusion.

      Reviewer #1 (Significance (Required)):

      Humans have over 600 different ubiquitin E3s. Currently, RNF4 and RNF111 are the only known human SUMO-Targeted Ubiquitin Ligases (STUbLs). Here, the authors present evidence that the ubiquitin E3 ligase TRIM39 is a STUbL for sumoylated NFATc3. Identification of a new STUbL is an exciting finding for the ubiquitin and SUMO field and for the field of ubiquitin-like signal transduction in general, but needs to be strengthened as outlined above. My field of expertise is SUMO and ubiquitin signal transduction.

      Reviewer #2

      In this manuscript, the authors analyze the effect of TRIM39, a ubiquitin E3 ligase, on NFATc3, a transcription factor that regulates apoptosis in the nervous system. The authors show that TRIM39 can promote the ubiquitination of NFATc3 and regulate its half-life. Furthermore, ubiquitination depends on the SUMOylation state of NFATc3, which suggests that TRIM39 could be a new example of SUMOylation-dependent ubiquitin ligase or STUbL. **In addition, the authors show that TRIM17 interferes with TRIM39 ubiquitination, representing a new regulatory level for NFATc3 degradation. This has consequences on the regulation of apoptosis in cells derived from the nervous system.

      The authors show well-controlled, sound results for the most part. The manuscript is well written, and argumentation is convincing. Given the fact that only 2 STUbLs were previously characterized in mammals, the results are relevant and represent an advance in the field. Overall, this is a nice piece of work. Here are some comments.

      **Major comments**

      -In Fig. 2B, the levels of material loaded are uneven, which difficult the interpretation.

      We agree with the reviewer (as with reviewer #1) that the blots showing the total lysates of this experiment are confusing. As mentioned in the legend, some material has been lost during the TCA precipitation, resulting in unequal loading. In the other experiments, we have the same problem or the background is too high. We are currently trying to produce efficient shRNA-expressing lentiviruses to reproduce this experiment and provide a better figure.

      However, it seems that the control shRNA also has an effect on NFATc3 ubiquitination, which should not be the case.

      It is true that, in the present figure, the ubiquitination signal is decreased in cells transduced with the control shRNA. However, this is likely due to reduced expression of transfected NFATc3 following lentiviral infection, as it can be seen on the western blot of total lysates.

      Also, by reducing ubiquitination by TRIM39, shouldn't you expect an increase in the levels of NFATc3, if this ubiquitination was driving degradation? The authors do not specify whether those cells were treated or not with proteasomal inhibitor.

      We agree that an increase in the protein level of NFATc3 is expected following silencing of Trim39. However, in the assay presented in Figure 2B, NFATc3 is transfected and the part of overexpressed NFATc3 that is ubiquitinated by endogenous Trim39 is certainly low. Therefore, silencing of Trim39 cannot have a visible impact on the total protein level of NFATc3.

      Indeed, cells were treated with proteasome inhibitor. It is mentioned in the legend of Figure 2A. To avoid repeating it in the legend of Figure 2B, we just wrote that, after 24h transfection, cells were treated as in A, with includes MG-132 treatment for 6h.

      Same applies in Figure 4B, where no reduction in NFATc3 are seen after including TRIM39 in the reaction (beyond the fact that it looks reduced because the presence of ubiquitinated forms).

      In Figure 4B, the reaction of ubiquitination is performed in an acellular medium with purified recombinant proteins. Although NFATc3 is produced by in vitro transcription/translation in wheat germ extract, it is purified by immunoprecipitation before in vitro ubiquitination. Therefore, the reaction does not contain any proteasome and NFATc3 should not be degraded following its ubiquitination by TRIM39.

      -After the experiments in vitro shown in Fig. 2C, the authors conclude that the NFATc3 is a direct substrate of TRIM39. I think the authors used the right approach by using bacterially produced GST-TRIM39 for the ubiquitination reaction. However NFATc3 is produced by an in vitro transcription-translation system, which could in principle provide other contaminant proteins to the reaction. Did the authors try to use bacterially produced NFATc3? This might be difficult in the case of big proteins, in which case the authors could add some caution note in the text. Same applies in Figure 4B.

      The reviewer is right. It would have been preferable to use NFATc3 produced in bacteria. Indeed, we started with this approach. However, it was very difficult to get NFATc3 expressed in bacteria, and when we succeeded, most of the protein was degraded. We tried different protease inhibitor cocktails and we used a strain of bacteria (BL21-CodonPlus(DE3)-RP) that is mutated on the genes coding for the proteases Lon and OmpT and is further engineered to express tRNAs that are often limiting when expressing mammalian proteins. Unfortunately, this did not improve our production enough.

      We agree that, in principle, in vitro transcription-translation (TnT) systems can include contaminant proteins. However, we used wheat germ extract to produce NFATc3 by TnT. Moreover, we immunopurified NFATc3 from the TnT reaction prior to the ubiquitination reaction. The probability that proteins modifying NFATc3 are expressed in plants and are co-purified with NFATc3 is low. Nevertheless, we will discuss this point in the result section of the revised version of the manuscript, when describing results of Figure 2B and 4B.

      -In Fig. 6B, higher levels of ubiquitination in the different SUMOylation mutants are shown. Is this effect consistent? How this can be explained?

      We are grateful to the reviewer for pointing out this inconsistency in our manuscript. It will be corrected. Indeed, the values indicated in red in Figure 6B are confusing and are certainly not consistent. We calculated them by normalizing the intensity of the ubiquitination signal by the intensity of NFATc3 in total lysates, which seems to have introduced a bias. Variations in NFATc3 levels are probably responsible for the artificially higher levels of ubiquitination for different SUMOylation mutants after normalization. When quantifying three independent experiments, as requested by reviewer #1, we realized that results are much more consistent without normalization. Therefore, in the revised version of manuscript, we will add a graph showing the average and standard deviation of three independent experiments quantified without normalization. We will also replace the experiment currently presented in Figure 6B by another one in which the levels of NFATc3 show lower variations in the total lysates.

      In addition, variations in the levels of NFATc3 are shown in the total lysate, despite the use of proteasomal inhibitors. How the author explain this effect?

      These variations in NFATc3 levels in the total lysates may be due to differential protein precipitation by TCA. That is why, in more recent experiments, we collected a portion of the homogenous cell suspension before lysis in the guanidinium buffer, to assess the expression level of transfected proteins (as presented in Figures 4A and 7E).

      It is true that treatment with proteasome inhibitor should attenuate differences in protein level due to different ubiquitination levels. However, cells are transfected for 24h and then treated with MG-132 for 6h before lysis. Proteasome inhibition cannot compensate for what occurred in the cells during the 24h transfection. It is added essentially to accumulate poly-ubiquitinated forms of NFATc3.

      Somehow, this is contradictory with the general message of SUMOylation-dependent ubiquitination.

      The reduced levels of SUMOylation mutants in total lysates may appear to be contradictory with SUMOylation-dependent ubiquitination. However, as mentioned above, this could be due to differential protein precipitation by TCA or to different transfection efficiencies. In contrast, the half-life measurement of WT and EallA mutant, that does not rely on initial expression levels, clearly shows a stabilization of the SUMOylation mutant. Moreover, the average of the three ubiquitination experiments is really convincing. Therefore, we believe that the data that will be presented in the revised manuscript will strongly support our hypothesis.

      -In Fig. 7E, not clear to me what the big bands above 130 KDa is after the nickel beads. Do they correspond to monoUb NFATc3 or to the unmodified protein that is sticky to the beads? Do the authors have side-by-side gels of the initial lysate next to the nickel beads eluates to show the increase in molecular weight?

      The big bands above 130 kD among nickel bead-purified proteins in Figure 7A are unlikely to be unmodified NFATc3 sticking to the beads. Indeed, in the control condition, in which NFATc3 is overexpressed in the absence of His-ubiquitin, these bands are not visible. Therefore, they might be mono-ubiquitinated forms of NFATc3, or degradation products of poly-ubiquitinated NFATc3. We will correct the figure to clarify this point. Unfortunately, we do not have a gel with nickel bead eluates and total lysates side by side for this experiment.

      -Quantifications in some pictures (i.e. Figures 5A, 5B, 6B, 7) is shown in red above or below the bands. Not clear whether the quantifications shown correspond to that single experiment or is the average of several experiments. In the first case, the number would not be very valuable. Authors could add quantification graphs with standard deviations or error bars to the experiments if they want to make the point of changes (significant or not) in the levels. Alternatively, indicate in the Figure legends whether the numbers correspond to the average of several experiments.

      These quantifications correspond to the representative experiments shown in the different figures. We will clarify this point in the Figure legends of the revised manuscript. We added these quantifications to normalize the amount of co-precipitated proteins by the amount of the precipitated partner (Fig 5A, 5B, 7B, 7C, 7D) which is not always precipitated with the same efficiency in the different conditions. We think that it should help the reader to assess the degree of interaction. We also added quantifications to Figure 7E to normalize the ubiquitination signal by the amount of NFATc3 expressed in the total lysate. However, we did not want to overload the figures by adding too many graphs.

      For Figure 6B, where TCA precipitation of total lysates created an inconsistency, we will provide a graph with the average and standard deviation of three independent experiments, as requested by reviewer #1.

      -In Fig. 8, the quantification of apoptotic nuclei has been done just based on the morphology after DAPI staining. Could you use an apoptosis marker (i.e. cleaved caspase Abs) to label the apoptotic cells?

      We have been using primary cultures of cerebellar granule neurons (CGN) as an in vitro model of neuronal apoptosis for many years. Nuclear condensation, visualized after DAPI staining, is very characteristic in these neurons and allows a reliable assessment of neuronal apoptosis. In a previous study (Desagher et al. JBC 2005), we have shown that the kinetics of apoptosis in CGN is the same whether we measure cytochrome c release, active caspase 3 or nuclear condensation (Fig 1b). We therefore believe that the counting of apoptotic nuclei is sufficient to support our conclusions, notably for transfection experiments in Figure 8A which would require a lot of work to be repeated with active caspase 3 staining. However, if we can produce efficient shRNA-expressing lentiviruses, we will reproduce the experiment presented in Figure 8B and we will perform a western blot using anti-active caspase 3 to confirm our conclusion.

      **Minor comments**

      -In Figs. 1 and 5, the red channel should be put in black and white, as it is much easier to see the signal. Not relevant to have DAPI alone in B&W (it does not hurt either), as it is well visible in the merge picture. Also, quantification of the PLA positive dots should be shown in Fig. 1.

      We thank the reviewer for these suggestions. We will modify the figures and we will quantify the PLA dots in Figure 1 as requested.

      -In Fig. 3C, is the difference in TRIM17 expression between empty plasmid and NFATc3 plasmid significant? If so, indicate it in the graph. The same in panels D, E, indicate all significant differences. Same in other Figures.

      No, the difference in Trim17 expression is not statistically significant between NFATc3 and empty plasmid although it clearly increases. However, we agree with the reviewer that more significant differences could be shown in the figures, particularly in Figure 3. Nonetheless, we will try not to overload the figures and will restrict ourselves to comparisons that make sense.

      -It would be nice to show a scheme on the location of SIMs in TRIM39 in relation to the other feature of the protein.

      We are grateful to the reviewer for this suggestion. We will be happy to add a scheme of Trim39 showing its different domains and the location of its SIMs in the revised Figure 7.

      -In Fig. 2 legend, "Note that in the presence of ubiquitin the unmodified form of WT GST-Trim39 is lower due to high Trim39 ubiquitination." Please change to "...in the presence of ubiquitin the levels of the unmodified form..."

      -In Fig. 7 legend, the phrases "The intensity of the bands ... " are not clear. Please rephrase.

      -In Fig. 8 legend, "\** * PWe thank the reviewer for pointing out typographical errors and awkward sentences in our manuscript. Changes will be made as requested.

      Reviewer #2 (Significance (Required)):

      In this manuscript, the authors analyze the effect of TRIM39, a ubiquitin E3 ligase, on NFATc3, a transcription factor that regulates apoptosis in the nervous system. The authors show that TRIM39 can promote the ubiquitination of NFATc3 and regulate its half-life. Furthermore, ubiquitination depends on the SUMOylation state of NFATc3, which suggests that TRIM39 could be a new example of SUMOylation-dependent ubiquitin ligase or STUbL. In addition, the authors show that TRIM17 interferes with TRIM39 ubiquitination, representing a new regulatory level for NFATc3 degradation. This has consequences on the regulation of apoptosis in cells derived from the nervous system.

      The authors show well-controlled, sound results for the most part. The manuscript is well written, and argumentation is convincing. Given the fact that only 2 STUbLs were previously characterized in mammals, the results are relevant and represent an advance in the field. Overall, this is a nice piece of work.

      Audience: researchers interested on proteostasis in general and on nervous system regulation

      My expertise: postranslational modifications

      Reviewer #3

      **Summary:**

      In this study, Shrivastava et al. elucidated the previously unknown function of TRIM39 in regulating protein stability of NFATc3, the predominant member of the NFAT family of transcription factor in neurons, where it plays a pro-apoptotic role. NFATs have been shown to be regulated by multiple mechanisms, including at the level of protein stability. In this study, the authors identify TRIM39 as the E3 ligase for NFATc3. Interestingly, TRIM39 recognizes the SUMOylated form of NFATc3 and the interaction facilitates its ubiquitylation and subsequent proteasomal degradation. They further showed that binding of TRIM39 to NFATc3 can also be regulated by TRIM17. Like TRIM39, TRIM17 is a ring-finger containing protein previously shown by this group that it binds NFATc3 but the interaction resulted in an up- rather than down-regulation of NFATc3. In this study, they offer insight to the paradox that overexpression of TRIM17 binding to TRIM39 is to inhibit TRIM39-mediated ubiquitylation of NFATc3. Furthermore, they showed activation of NFATc3 transcriptionally activates TRIM17 expression, thus forming a feedback loop between NFATc3 and TRIM17. Hence, an TRIM17-TRIM39-NFATc3 signaling axis for modulating the protein stability for promoting the activity of NFATc3 in regulating apoptosis in the cerebellar granule neurons induced by KCl deprivation is proposed

      The key conclusions are convincing. The data in general are of good quality and with many of the key interactions vigorously documented **by conducting reciprocal interaction analysis. For knockdown expeRIMents, two shRNA independent sequences were used. However, some issues remain to be addressed:

      **Major comments:**

      1.Figure 1D - the authors should demonstrate that the depletion of TRIM39 expression by shRNA in Neuro2A by Western blotting

      We agree with the reviewer that it would be better to provide this control. Unfortunately, we have never been able to observe a convincing decrease in the protein level of Trim39, following knockdown, by Western blotting in Neuro2A cells. This is surprising because the decrease is clearly visible by immunofluorescence in Neuro2A cells, and by western blotting in neurons (see Figure 8C). It is possible that Neuro2A cells, but not neurons, express a protein that is non-specifically recognized by our best anti-Trim39 antibody in western blots and that migrates at the same size as Trim39, thus preventing the investigator to detect the depletion of Trim39. We will test additional anti-Trim39 antibodies to address this question.

      2.Figure 3 - the author should show overexpression of TRIM39 resulted in reduction of basal level of endogenous NFATc3 due to its effect on protein stability by using CHX or other pulse chase method.

      This is an important point and we have performed many experiments using cycloheximide to measure the half-life of NFATc3 in the presence or the absence of overexpressed Trim39. The results were neither consistent nor reproducible. This is certainly due to the fact that the half-life of endogenous NFATc3 is longer than that of overexpressed Trim39 and that cycloheximide inhibits the expression of both proteins. Therefore, we will perform pulse-chase experiments after metabolic labelling of cells with [35S]-Met. We are currently setting up the conditions to immunoprecipitate endogenous NFATc3 to be able to perform these experiments.

      3.Figure 3 - Does overexpression or knockdown of TRIM39 has an effect on affecting levels of NFATc3 mRNAs?

      The reviewer is right. It is important to control that overexpression and knockdown of Trim39 do not modify the mRNA level of NFATc3. Therefore, we are currently measuring NFATc3 mRNA levels in all the experiments used to make the graphs of Figure 3. These results will be added to the revised version of the manuscript as supplemental data. First results show no significant change of NFATc3 mRNA levels in these experiments.

      4.Figure 6A - the authors should confirm the multiple bands that are slower migrating are SUMO form of NFATc9 by demonstrating the presence of SUMO in these forms of NFATc3, or alternatively, perform His-SUMO pull-down and probe for NFATc3.

      The reactions shown in Figure 6B have been performed in vitro, with purified recombinant proteins and with NFATc3 produced by in vitro transcription/translation. The wheat germ extract used to produce NFATc3 is unlikely to provide the material needed for post-translation modification of a mammalian protein. However, we agree that it would be better to confirm that slower migrating bands are indeed SUMOylated forms of NFATc3. We may hybridize the membranes with an anti-SUMO antibody but it would give a smear as the enzymes added to the reaction mix are themselves SUMOylated. Therefore, we will show an experiment in which the reaction mix has been incubated with and without SUMO. The results show no slower migrating bands in the absence of SUMO although all conditions were otherwise identical. This will be added to the revised Figure 6.

      5.Figure 7C - the quantification for mSIM1 does not seem to agree with the band intensity.

      Yes, we agree with the reviewer that the quantification (122%) does not seem to reflect the amount of SUMO-chains bound to GST-Trim39 mSIM1. This is due to the normalization of the SUMO signals by the intensity of GST-Trim39 bands. Indeed, it is difficult to control exactly how much recombinant protein is used. GST-Trim39 mSIM1 was slightly less abundant than the other GST-Trim39 proteins in this experiment, explaining why less SUMO-chains were eluted in this condition. The normalization is mentioned in the legend of Figure 7C.

      6.TRIM17 reduces TRIM39/NFATc3 interaction and inhibits TRIM39 E3 activity, which results in stabilization of NFATc3. NFATc3 in turn transcriptionally induces TRIM17 expression, thus forming a feedback loop between NFATc3 and TRIM17. It will be good if the authors can discuss the possibility of the existence of this feedback mechanism in physiological context? Is the protein level of NFATc3 level, which should be low abundance at the resting state, elevated by KCI deprivation? If so, can the authors discuss the possible signalling event(s) that that lead to activation of NFATc3 upon KCI deprivation? For instance, does KCL deprivation cause de-SUMOylation of NFATc3?

      We thank the reviewer for these suggestions. Our preliminary results suggest that the protein level of NFATc3 is increased in neurons following KCl deprivation. We are currently performing additional experiments to confirm this result. If proved, this increase may be due to the transcriptional induction of Trim17 that should result in the stabilization of NFATc3 through the inhibition of Trim39. It may also be due to a possible deSUMOylation of NFATc3 following apoptosis induction, as suggested by the reviewer. To address the latter point, we are currently setting up PLA using anti-NFATc3 and anti-SUMO antibodies to assess the SUMOylation level of endogenous NFATc3 in neurons. If they are of good quality, we will add these data to Figure 8 and we will discuss the possible existence of feedback loops in neuronal apoptosis, as suggested by the reviewer.

      **Minor comments:**

      1.Line 294 - it should be "SUMOylation" instead of "SUMO".

      We thank the reviewer for pointing out this typographical error that will be corrected.

      2.Figure 8 - to include TRIM39/NFATc3 double knockdown to show the effect on increased neuronal apoptosis in the cells with TRIM39 knocked down was due to elevation of NFATc3 rather than other target(s) of TRIM39.

      We agree that it would be interesting to test whether the increase on neuronal apoptosis following Trim39 silencing is mainly due to its effect on NFATc3. We will therefore perform double silencing of Trim39 and NFATc3 in neurons in order to address this point.

      3.The discussion may be shortened and revised to highlight the physiological importance of the findings linked to cerebellar granule neurons survival.

      As suggested by the reviewer, we will modify the discussion to better highlight the physiological implications of our data, particularly by discussing the results of the additional experiments we will conduct in neurons.

      Reviewer #3 (Significance (Required)):

      Prior to this study, the mechanism by which protein stability of NFATc3, the pre-dominant member of the NFAT family of transcription factor in neurons, is regulated remains poorly understood. Shrivastava et al. have unravelled the interplay between ubiquitylation and SUMOylation involving TRIM39 and TRIM17 to have an important role in regulating protein stability of NFATc3. The work is interesting and bears significance towards understanding how apoptosis could be finely controlled in cerebellar granule neurons. Furthermore, the study has also expanded the understanding of the role and regulation of the TRIM family of proteins. The senior author is an expert in this field and over the years, her group has contributed many key discoveries on the function of TRIM family of E3 ubiquitin ligases and their critical ubiquitylation substrates in neuronal survival and its relevance to neuronal biology and diseases.

      The referee's field of expertise in in the field of mitochondrial apoptosis signalling. The referee extensively involved in studying how protein stability of regulators in apoptosis signalling are regulated by the ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS) and how does the regulation play a role in physiology and diseases.

      Key words: apoptosis, ubiquitylation, cell signaling, liver diseases

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      Reply to the reviewers

      Reviewer #1 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity):

      **A. Summary:**

      In this modeling study, the authors devised a multicellular model to investigate how circadian clocks in different parts (organs) of plants coordinate their timing. The model uses a plausible mechanism to explain how having a different sensitivity to light leads to different phase and period of circadian clock, which is observed in different plant organs. The model allows for entrainment in Light-Dark (LD) cycles and then a release in always-light (LL) environments. The model disentangles numerous factors that have confounded previous experiments. In one instance, the authors assigned different light sensitivities to the different organs (e.g., root tip, hypocotyl, etc.) which unambiguously show that this one element alone - spatially differing sensitivity to light - is sufficient for recapitulating experimentally observed differences in periods and phases between plant organs. The model also recapitulates the spatial waves of gene expression within and between organs that experimentalists reported. At the sub-tissue level, the model-produced waves have similar patterns as the experimentally observed waves. This confirmation further validates the model. By having the cells share clock mRNA, from any clock component genes, showed the same, experimentally observed spatial dynamics. The main conclusion of the study is that regional differences (e.g., between different organs) in light senilities, when combined with cell-to-cell sharing of clock-gene mRNAs, enables a robust, yet flexible, circadian timing under noisy environmental cycles.

      Thank you for your assessment of our work. We plan to make the following revisions based on your feedback.

      **B. Specific points:**

      1.Lines 125-127: "To simulate the variability observed in single cell clock rhythms, we multiplied the level of each mRNA and protein by a time scaling parameter that was randomly selected from a normal distribution." - Why not add a white (Gaussian) noise term to these equations? How does multiplying by a random variable (for rescaling time) different from my proposal? Some explanation should be given in the text here.

      We opted for a time scaling approach as this generates between-cell period differences but avoids within-cell period differences. This is consistent with single cell experiments (S1 Fig; Gould et al., 2018, eLife). We will provide an explanation of this in the text.

      2.Does the spatial network model simplify calculations by assuming separations of timescales (e.g., for equilibration in concentrations of mRNAs that diffuse between cells)? If so, it would be good to spell these out in the beginning of the Results section (where the model is described).

      We agree that a more detailed discussion of the model assumptions would be beneficial and we will provide this in the text.

      3.Lines 161-162: "....in a phase only model by local...." should be "....in a phase model only by local...."

      Thank you for your correction.

      4.Lines 188-190: The authors observed that qualitatively similar/indistinguishable behaviors arose regardless of which elements are varied (e.g., global versus local cell-cell coupling, setting light input to be equal in all regions of the seedling, etc.). Then they claim here that "...these results show that the assumptions of local cell-to-cell coupling and differential light sensitivity between regions are the key aspects of our model that allow a match to experimental data." - I don't see how this follows from the observation almost any of the variations lead to the same behaviors in this section (spatial waves). Show the reasoning in the text here.

      We observed spatial waves with different local coupling regimes (4 v. 8 nearest neighbours). However, we did not observe spatial waves with global coupling (S10 Fig). This led us to conclude that local coupling is a key aspect. In addition, we do not observe waves when setting the light input to be equal in all regions of the seedling (S11 Fig). This confirms that local differences in light sensitivity are also required in our simulations to generate spatial waves. We will clarify these points with revisions to the text.

      5.Pgs. 9-10: Section on "Cell-to-cell coupling maintains global coordination under noisy light-dark cycles": The simulation results rigorously support the authors' main conclusion here, which is that local cell-to-cell coupling allows for global coordination under noisy LD cycles. But I'm missing an intuitive explanation (or just any explanation) for why this is. At the end of this section, the authors should provide some intuition or qualitative explanation for the observations that they produced using their model in this section.

      We will revise the text to provide an intuitive explanation of these results. The coupling decreases the within-region phase differences. Despite the between-regions phase differences persisting, this effect is sufficient to improve the overall global synchrony.

      6.Lines 261-262: Replace the present tenses with past tenses.

      Thank you for your correction.

      7.Is the main idea that cell-to-cell coupling allows for averaging of fluctuations, between organs or cells within the same organ, while allowing for coordination of the average quantities? Is this responsible for both the flexibility and robustness observed under noisy environmental cycles?

      The cell-to-cell-coupling allows for the averaging of fluctuations between cells and the regional flexibility arises from the different light sensitivities in each region. What was interesting to us was that under light-dark cycles the regional flexibility was not lost due to either the noise in the light or the averaging effect of the cell-to-cell coupling. We will revise the text to emphasize these points. Thank you for your prompts.

      8.Line 304: Is it really true that the mammalian circadian rhythm is centralized? Don't some parts of our bodies have different circadian clock (e.g., slight differences in phase) than some other parts of our bodies?

      There are indeed some small phase differences between parts of our bodies because the mammalian system, like the plant system, is imperfectly coupled. However, the mammalian system is considered more centralized because the suprachiasmatic nucleus in the brain receives the key entraining signal of light and then coordinates rhythms across the body (Bell-Pedersen et al., 2005, Nat Rev Gen; Brown & Azzi, 2013, Circadian Clocks). We will expand on these interesting points by adding a paragraph to the discussion.

      Reviewer #1 (Significance):

      **Overall assessment:**

      I enthusiastically recommend this work for publication after the authors address my comments below (please see "Specific points").

      The model's main strength is that the authors could vary each ingredient separately - light sensitivity of each cell/organ, which gene's mRNA diffuses between cells, cellular noise, local versus global cell-cell coupling, etc. Afterwards, the authors could determine which of these variations produces which experimentally observed behaviors. Another strength of the model is that it can reproduce not just one, but numerous, experimentally observed behaviors that are important for understanding circadian clocks in plants. Thus, the model is grounded in experimental truth and produces experimentally observed results. Crucially, since the authors could vary every single element in the model independently of the other elements, the authors are able to provide plausible explanations for why the experiments produced the results that they did (experimentally, a number of confounding factors prevented one from pinpointing to which element produced which observation).

      Another strength of the model is also extendable, by other researchers to investigate other plant physiologies in the future (e.g., circadian clock's influence on cell division). The authors highlight these future uses in the discussion section. Therefore, I believe that this work will be valuable to plant biologists, non-plant biologists who are interested in circadian clocks, and systems biologists in general.

      The manuscript is also well written and relatively easy to follow, even for non-plant biologists like myself.

      Thank you for the positive feedback - we are pleased that you find the manuscript of broad interest to a range of readers.

      Comment on Reviewer #2:

      I agree with his/her major criticism #3 (ELF4 long-distance movement). I find this to be a reasonable request. Fulfilling it would increase the paper's impact.

      Please see our response to reviewer #2.

      Comment on Reviewer #3:

      The reviewer's point (1) asks for a reasonable request.

      Regarding his/her point (2): This is also reasonable. I'd recommend his/her suggestion (a). In the end, I'd be interested to see how the authors respond to this (what function they choose to let adjacent cells be subjected to some correlated light-input intensity. I'd be happy with something simple such as + noise, where is a deterministic term that, for example, decreases exponentially as one moves away from some central cell. Basically, I'd let the authors decide how to implement this and accept their current implementation - no correlation in light-intensity between adjacent cells - as an extreme scenario, as this reviewer points out.

      Please see our response to reviewer #3.

      Reviewer #2 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity):

      **Summary:**

      The manuscript presents an improved model of the circadian clock network that accounts for tissue-specific clock behavior, spatial differences in light sensitivity, and local coupling achieved through intercellular sharing of mRNA. In contrast to whole-plant or "phase-only" models, the authors' approach enables them to address the mechanism behind coupling and how the clock maintains regional synchrony in a noisy environment. Using 34 parameters to describe clock activity and applying the properties mentioned above, the authors demonstrate that their model can recapitulate the spatial waves in circadian gene expression observed and can simulate how the plant maintains local synchrony with regional differences in rhythms under noisy LD cycles. Spatial models that incorporate cell-type-specific sensitivities to environmental inputs and local coupling mechanisms will be most accurate for simulating clock activity under natural environments.

      Thank you for your assessment of our work. We plan to make the following revisions based on your feedback.

      *We have the following **major criticisms** as follows*

      1) When assigning light sensitivities in different regions of the plant, the authors assign a higher sensitivity value to the root tip (L=1.03) than they do to the other part of the root (L=0.90). We are curious why the root tip would have higher light sensitivity than the rest of the root. Is this based on experimental data (if so, please cite in this section or methods)? It seems that these L values were assigned simply to make sure they recapitulated the period differences observed in Fig. 2A. Are these values based on PhyB expression in those organs? Or perhaps based on cell density in those locations?

      We assign the light sensitivity to match observed experimental period differences across the plant (Fig 2A,B). This is based on previous experiments demonstrating that experimental period differences are dependent on light input through the light sensing gene PHYB (Greenwood et al., 2019, PLoS Bio; Nimmo et al., 2020, Physiologia Plantarum). For example, in WT seedlings, the root tip oscillates faster than the root, but this difference is lost in the phyb-9 mutant (Greenwood et al., 2019). Thus, we assume the root tip to be more sensitive to light than the roots.

      Further supporting this assumption, there is evidence that expression of phytochromes and cryptochromes are increased in the root tip relative to the root (e.g., Somers & Quail, 1995, Plant J; Bognar et al., 1999, PNAS; Toth et al., 2001, Plant Physiol), as the reviewer proposes. However, further experiments would be needed to verify that these differences in expression are what lead to the differences in clock timing. We will add a discussion of these experiments to the text.

      2) In the discussion of the test where they set the "light inputs to be equal" in all regions to simulate the phyb-9 mutant, could the authors please clarify whether that means they set the L light sensitivity value equal in all regions?

      This is indeed what we mean, we will rephrase the text for clarity.

      a. If they are referring to setting the L value equal to all regions, we suggest that this discussion be moved to the section about different light sensitivities instead of the local sharing of mRNA section.

      Thank you for your suggestion, we agree and will move this discussion.

      b. Additionally, is it possible to set the light sensitivity to zero for all parts of the plant? We think this would be more suitable to simulate the phyb-9 mutant phenotype.

      We thank the reviewer for this suggestion. We will include a simulation with light sensitivity set to zero in the revised manuscript, in addition to the existing simulations with light sensitivity set to 1.

      3) Based on the recent Chen et al. (2020) paper showing ELF4 long-distance movement, we think it would be of great interest for the authors to model ELF4 protein synthesis/translation as the coupling factor, in addition to the modeling using CCA1/LHY mRNA sharing. We understand you may be saving this analysis for a future modeling paper, but this addition to the paper could increase the impact of this paper.

      Thank you for the suggestion to improve our manuscript. We agree it will be of interest to model ELF4 protein as the local coupling factor. In the revision, we will simulate each clock protein (including ELF4) as the local coupling factor and compare.

      In addition, we will also modify the coupling mechanism to simulate the long-distance transport of ELF4 proposed by Chen et al., 2020. Our preliminary simulations show that we can couple shoot rhythms to those in the root tip, but that this long range coupling can not on its own generate the spatial structure observed in experiments. We agree with the reviewers that this analysis and an associated discussion will further increase the impact of the paper.

      4) This model is able to simulate circadian rhythms under 12:12 LD cycles, which represents two days of the year-the equinoxes. We are curious if the model can simulate rhythms under short days and long days as well. We understand this analysis may be outside the scope of this paper and may require changing the values of the 34 parameters used but think it could be a useful addition here or in future work.

      We agree it would be interesting to observe the behavior of the model under different day lengths. We will include simulations under short and long days in the revision.

      *And **minor criticisms** as follows*

      1) In the first paragraph of the results section, it would be helpful for the authors to reference Table S1 when they mention the 34 parameters used to model oscillator function

      We agree and we will implement this helpful suggestion.

      2) In the first paragraph of the section titled "Local flexibility persists under idealized and noisy LD cycles", it would be helpful for the authors to reference S12 Fig after the last sentence that starts "However, ELF4/LUX appeared more synchronized..."

      We agree and we will implement this helpful suggestion.

      3) In the first paragraph of the section titled "Cell-to-cell coupling maintains global communication under noisy light-dark cycles", the authors refer to a "Table 1" but I think they mean to refer to Table S1"

      Thank you, we will implement this helpful suggestion.

      4) In Fig. 1, panel C is described as demonstrating the cell-to-cell coupling through the "level of CCA1/LHY". This phrasing is vague and we think could be improved to the "mRNA level of CCA1/LHY".

      We agree and will implement this helpful suggestion.

      Reviewer #2 (Significance (Required)):

      This work would be broadly interesting to other researchers studying cell-to-cell signaling and coupling of circadian rhythms in plants and other species where spatial waves of gene expression have been observed (i.e., mice and humans). Additionally, the computational modeling aspect of this work was easily interpretable for someone outside this expertise. Our expertise lies in plant circadian biology.

      We thank the reviewer for recognising the broad appeal of our work.

      Reviewer #3 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity):

      **Summary:**

      The authors start by taking a previously published model of the plant circadian clock and implement five changes: 1) updating the network topology to reflect some recent experimental findings, 2) make a spatial model loosely based on a seedling template 3) introduce coupling between cells based on shared levels of CCA1/LHY 4) randomly rescale time in each cell to induce inter-cell differences in period, 5) include a light sensitivity that depends on the region considered.

      For a certain configuration of light sensitivities/intensities, the different periods of oscillations in each seedling region roughly match that of experiments. With a sufficiently high coupling between cells, the system can also generate spatial waves, which are also observed in the experimental system.

      With pulsed light inputs the spatial pattern is still produced. The authors then investigate the robustness to environmental noise by generating stochastic light signals and show that the global synchrony, as measured with a synchronisation index, increases with cell-to-cell coupling strength. The paper is overall well-written, and the background and details of the analysis are well presented.

      Thank you for your assessment of our work. We plan to make the following revisions based on your feedback.

      **Major comments:**

      For the first part of paper, the output of the model is certainly the focus. There is virtually no discussion of the inferred parameters and how much confidence the authors have in their values.

      Thank you for this point. We will add discussion of the inferred parameters to the initial part of the results.

      My main issue with the paper is about the section with noisy light signals, which is included in the title and is ultimately one of the main themes of the article.

      Specifically, on line 224:

      "This decrease in cell-to-cell variation revealed an underlying spatial structure (Fig 4D, middle and right, and S13 Fig), comparable to that observed under idealized LD cycles (Fig 4B, middle and right, and S12 Fig)."

      Firstly, I don't feel these conclusions match with the data presented. Comparing figure 4D middle and right with figure 4B middle and right shows a clear and pronounced loss in spatial structure. In its current form, this statement has to change, but I believe there are at least two other major issues with this figure:

      We agree there are some differences in the spatial structure between idealized (Fig 4B) and noisy (Fig 4D) LD cycles. Preliminary simulations suggest that this is due to the way the noisy LD cycles are programmed.

      In the current implementation of noisy LD cycles, the maximum intensity of L, L**max, differs between each region, such that relative differences in light sensitivity between regions are maintained. This means that some phase differences between regions are maintained. However, as the reviewer correctly points out in point 1 below, due to the noise fluctuations, the average level of light is lower than under idealized LD cycles, and with considerable day-to-day variation. We believe this is why the spatial structure differs.

      Preliminary simulations suggest that if we normalize the mean light intensity such that the mean is equal between the two conditions (as the reviewer suggests in point 1 below), the spatial structure appears similar. We will present this analysis in the revision.

      1) The figure is clearly designed to invite a comparison between the noise-free light cycles on the left with the noisy cycles on the right. However, due to how the noisy light is simulated, the variance of light signal increases AND the average intensity of light decreases by 50%. When comparing the left and the right, we therefore don't know whether the changes are due to differences in the average signal or differences from the stochasticity. I think the authors should simulate a noisy light signal with the same mean intensity level as the deterministic signal.

      As discussed above, we agree that the average intensity of the light decreases due to the noise, and this complicates interpretation. We will simulate idealized and noisy light cycles with the same mean light level upon revision.

      2) The noise model for the light doesn't seem realistic. On line 484 is says:

      "We made the simplifying assumption that each cell is exposed to an independent noisy LD cycle due to their unique positions in the environment. LD cycles were input to the molecular model through the parameter L".

      In fact, this could be considered as an incredibly complex signal, because for 800 cells it means drawing 800 random light signals. The implication is that two adjacent cells receive statistically independent light signals. Depending on chance, one cell might receive tropical levels of light while its neighbour experiences a cloudy day. This affects the interpretation and conclusions from figures 4 and 5. I propose two different ways of improving the simulation of the noisy light signal:

      a) In one extreme case, all cells receive the same noisy light signal, and the other extreme, they all receive independent signals. You could consider a mixture model of light signals, where each cell receives \lambda L_global(t) + (1-\lambda) L_individual(t), where L_global(t) is a global light signal that is shared by all cells and L_individual(t) is a light signal unique to an individual cell. The mixing parameter \lambda controls how similar the light signal is between cells

      b) Clearly the light signal will differ depending on the region, but there will be some spatial correlation. You could also consider methods of simulating light such that neighbouring cells receive correlated signals, although this might be difficult.

      Thank you for your proposals. We agree that our current implementation of noisy LD cycles represents an extreme scenario. Given that there is no environmental data at sufficient resolution to reliably evaluate which implementation is most realistic, we will explore different approaches based on your suggestions and present them in our revision.

      Assuming that the problem with the mean signal is corrected, do you expect the average spatial pattern to be the same between figure 4 B and D with no coupling (J=0) (although an increase in the variance between cells)? Perhaps not (owing to nonlinearities in the system), but it would be interesting to comment.

      We agree that the decreased light intensity complicates interpretation of the spatial structure. Although in the current implementation relative light differences between regions are maintained, the spatial structure is altered because the mean intensities are lower. Preliminary simulations with the mean intensity fixed do result in spatial patterns more similar to that seen in Fig 4B, but with increased variance. Comprehensive simulations will be included in the revised manuscript.

      The different periods in the different regions of the seedling are caused by differences in light sensitivity, which the authors claim is justified from refs 12-15. An alternative hypothesis is the that biochemical parameters such as degradation rates are different between regions. This is briefly alluded to in the introduction, but I think it would be interesting to discuss further. What would be the pros and cons of the two different mechanisms?

      We agree that an alternative hypothesis is that biochemical parameters such as degradation rates may differ between regions. Experimental evidence, however, more supports the light sensitivity hypothesis. This is because, for example, mutations in light signalling remove the spatial differences between regions. We agree though that this is an important point, and will add a paragraph to the discussion discussing the pros and cons of the two different mechanisms.

      I understand that the authors used a pre-existing model, but I must say that I find the way that light is incorporated into the model a bit confusing.

      On line 345 it says:

      "L(t) represents the input light signal (L = 0, lights off; L > 0, lights on) and D(t) denotes a corresponding darkness input signal (D = 1, lights off; D = 0, lights on)."

      Surely the only thing that matters biophysically is the number of photons hitting the plant? Could you explain why the model needs to have a separate "darkness signal" compared to just a single light signal?

      A darkness signal has been introduced in many circadian clock models because degradation rates of the clock genes can depend upon the light or dark condition. We agree with the reviewer that we should explain this clearer in the text.

      In the model, the light intensity changes depending on the region. It might make more sense for interpretability if instead there is an additional light-sensitivity coefficient that depends on the region, because at the moment I'm not sure what units L(t) is supposed to take.

      Thank you for your suggestion. We will try to implement this approach.

      **Minor comments**

      Could you more explicitly describe a possible molecular mechanism through which the coupling acts?

      Thank you for your suggestion. We will more explicitly discuss likely transport mechanisms in the text.

      In Figure 1C it looks like different genes are coupling to different genes, so you may need to rearrange it.

      In our model, the level of CCA1/LHY is shared. Thus, CCA1/LHY from one cell can be considered to repress the expression of other interacting genes in the neighbour cell.

      Line 103: "We found that regional differences persist even under LD cycles, but cell to-cell minimized differences between neighbor cells." Missing word.

      Thank you for your correction.

      Line 124: "The coupling strength was set to 2 (Methods)." This is meaningless in isolation, so it would be better to briefly explain what the coupling parameter is before mentioning its value.

      Thank you for your suggestion, we will describe the coupling function in more detail.

      Through the text, I think De Caluwe should be corrected to De Caluwé

      Thank you for your correction.

      Typo line 493

      Thank you for your correction.

      Code and data are not made available.

      Model code will be made available from our project GitLab page: https://gitlab.com/slcu/teamJL/greenwood_tokuda_etal_2020

      Output of analysis of experimental data and simulations will also be made available on the GitLab page.

      Reviewer #3 (Significance (Required)):

      The authors motivate the paper by highlighting that their proposed model improves on phase-based models in that it describes underlying molecular mechanisms.

      From an experimental side, it's interesting that a model is developed and directly compared with measured spatio-temporal waves of gene expression. From a theoretical side, the authors address questions relating to oscillations, multi-scale modelling and noise robustness that also generalise to other systems. I therefore expect that both experimental and theoretical audiences will be interested in the results.

      There are many possible additions and modifications that could be made to the model, and so the model and analysis could provide a platform for future research. However, I can't comment on whether there are similar pre-existing models of the plant circadian clock that contain both a molecular description of the circadian clock as well as a spatial scale.

      We appreciate the reviewer’s view that the work is interesting to both experimental and theoretical audiences.

      Comments on Review #1:

      The time is rescaled in each cell, meaning that each cell has a unique period, but the dynamics remain deterministic and hence the peak-to-peak times will be exactly the same for each cell. I imagine this isn't completely consistent with single-cell data (if available), where peak-to-peak times are very likely to be variable due to noisy gene expression. In a future paper it would be interesting to analyse the system using stochastic differential equations.

      Please see our response to reviewer #1.

      Comments on Review #2:

      I agree on the following two points:

      1) It would add value to discuss whether the different ranking of light sensitivities by organ matches any available experimental data.

      Please see our response to reviewer #2.

      2) As the Reviewers point out, there are many possibilities for testing the robustness of the system to light clues, including varying the length of the day. Although outside of the scope of this paper, I wonder if it's possible to find data from a light sensor measuring light intensity across an entire year? Plugging such data into the model and measuring how the amplitude and period changes would be really interesting, in my opinion.

      Thank you for your suggestion. We also see this as an interesting future direction.

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      Referee #3

      Evidence, reproducibility and clarity

      Summary:

      The authors start by taking a previously published model of the plant circadian clock and implement five changes: 1) updating the network topology to reflect some recent experimental findings, 2) make a spatial model loosely based on a seedling template 3) introduce coupling between cells based on shared levels of CCA1/LHY 4) randomly rescale time in each cell to induce inter-cell differences in period, 5) include a light sensitivity that depends on the region considered.

      For a certain configuration of light sensitivities/intensities, the different periods of oscillations in each seedling region roughly match that of experiments. With a sufficiently high coupling between cells, the system can also generate spatial waves, which are also observed in the experimental system.

      With pulsed light inputs the spatial pattern is still produced. The authors then investigate the robustness to environmental noise by generating stochastic light signals and show that the global synchrony, as measured with a synchronisation index, increases with cell-to-cell coupling strength. The paper is overall well-written, and the background and details of the analysis are well presented.

      Major comments:

      For the first part of paper, the output of the model is certainly the focus. There is virtually no discussion of the inferred parameters and how much confidence the authors have in their values.

      My main issue with the paper is about the section with noisy light signals, which is included in the title and is ultimately one of the main themes of the article.

      Specifically, on line 224:

      "This decrease in cell-to-cell variation revealed an underlying spatial structure (Fig 4D, middle and right, and S13 Fig), comparable to that observed under idealized LD cycles (Fig 4B, middle and right, and S12 Fig)."

      Firstly, I don't feel these conclusions match with the data presented. Comparing figure 4D middle and right with figure 4B middle and right shows a clear and pronounced loss in spatial structure. In its current form, this statement has to change, but I believe there are at least two other major issues with this figure:

      1) The figure is clearly designed to invite a comparison between the noise-free light cycles on the left with the noisy cycles on the right. However, due to how the noisy light is simulated, the variance of light signal increases AND the average intensity of light decreases by 50%. When comparing the left and the right, we therefore don't know whether the changes are due to differences in the average signal or differences from the stochasticity. I think the authors should simulate a noisy light signal with the same mean intensity level as the deterministic signal. . 2) The noise model for the light doesn't seem realistic. On line 484 is says:

      "We made the simplifying assumption that each cell is exposed to an independent noisy LD cycle due to their unique positions in the environment. LD cycles were input to the molecular model through the parameter L".

      In fact, this could be considered as an incredibly complex signal, because for 800 cells it means drawing 800 random light signals. The implication is that two adjacent cells receive statistically independent light signals. Depending on chance, one cell might receive tropical levels of light while its neighbour experiences a cloudy day. This affects the interpretation and conclusions from figures 4 and 5. I propose two different ways of improving the simulation of the noisy light signal:

      a) In one extreme case, all cells receive the same noisy light signal, and the other extreme, they all receive independent signals. You could consider a mixture model of light signals, where each cell receives \lambda L_global(t) + (1-\lambda) L_individual(t), where L_global(t) is a global light signal that is shared by all cells and L_individual(t) is a light signal unique to an individual cell. The mixing parameter \lambda controls how similar the light signal is between cells

      b) Clearly the light signal will differ depending on the region, but there will be some spatial correlation. You could also consider methods of simulating light such that neighbouring cells receive correlated signals, although this might be difficult.

      Assuming that the problem with the mean signal is corrected, do you expect the average spatial pattern to be the same between figure 4 B and D with no coupling (J=0) (although an increase in the variance between cells)? Perhaps not (owing to nonlinearities in the system), but it would be interesting to comment.

      The different periods in the different regions of the seedling are caused by differences in light sensitivity, which the authors claim is justified from refs 12-15. An alternative hypothesis is the that biochemical parameters such as degradation rates are different between regions. This is briefly alluded to in the introduction, but I think it would be interesting to discuss further. What would be the pros and cons of the two different mechanisms?

      I understand that the authors used a pre-existing model, but I must say that I find the way that light is incorporated into the model a bit confusing.

      On line 345 it says: "L(t) represents the input light signal (L = 0, lights off; L > 0, lights on) and D(t) denotes a corresponding darkness input signal (D = 1, lights off; D = 0, lights on)."

      Surely the only thing that matters biophysically is the number of photons hitting the plant? Could you explain why the model needs to have a separate "darkness signal" compared to just a single light signal?

      In the model, the light intensity changes depending on the region. It might make more sense for interpretability if instead there is an additional light-sensitivity coefficient that depends on the region, because at the moment I'm not sure what units L(t) is supposed to take.

      Minor comments

      Could you more explicitly describe a possible molecular mechanism through which the coupling acts?

      In Figure 1C it looks like different genes are coupling to different genes, so you may need to rearrange it.

      Line 103: "We found that regional differences persist even under LD cycles, but cell to-cell minimized differences between neighbor cells." Missing word.

      Line 124: "The coupling strength was set to 2 (Methods)." This is meaningless in isolation, so it would be better to briefly explain what the coupling parameter is before mentioning its value.

      Through the text, I think De Caluwe should be corrected to De Caluwé

      Typo line 493

      Code and data are not made available.

      Significance

      The authors motivate the paper by highlighting that their proposed model improves on phase-based models in that it describes underlying molecular mechanisms.

      From an experimental side, it's interesting that a model is developed and directly compared with measured spatio-temporal waves of gene expression. From a theoretical side, the authors address questions relating to oscillations, multi-scale modelling and noise robustness that also generalise to other systems. I therefore expect that both experimental and theoretical audiences will be interested in the results.

      There are many possible additions and modifications that could be made to the model, and so the model and analysis could provide a platform for future research. However, I can't comment on whether there are similar pre-existing models of the plant circadian clock that contain both a molecular description of the circadian clock as well as a spatial scale.

      REFEREE'S CROSS-COMMENTING

      Comments on Review #1:

      The time is rescaled in each cell, meaning that each cell has a unique period, but the dynamics remain deterministic and hence the peak-to-peak times will be exactly the same for each cell. I imagine this isn't completely consistent with single-cell data (if available), where peak-to-peak times are very likely to be variable due to noisy gene expression. In a future paper it would be interesting to analyse the system using stochastic differential equations.

      Comments on Review #2:

      I agree on the following two points:

      1) It would add value to discuss whether the different ranking of light sensitivities by organ matches any available experimental data.

      2) As the Reviewers point out, there are many possibilities for testing the robustness of the system to light clues, including varying the length of the day. Although outside of the scope of this paper, I wonder if it's possible to find data from a light sensor measuring light intensity across an entire year? Plugging such data into the model and measuring how the amplitude and period changes would be really interesting, in my opinion.

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      Referee #2

      Evidence, reproducibility and clarity

      Summary:

      The manuscript presents an improved model of the circadian clock network that accounts for tissue-specific clock behavior, spatial differences in light sensitivity, and local coupling achieved through intercellular sharing of mRNA. In contrast to whole-plant or "phase-only" models, the authors' approach enables them to address the mechanism behind coupling and how the clock maintains regional synchrony in a noisy environment. Using 34 parameters to describe clock activity and applying the properties mentioned above, the authors demonstrate that their model can recapitulate the spatial waves in circadian gene expression observed and can simulate how the plant maintains local synchrony with regional differences in rhythms under noisy LD cycles. Spatial models that incorporate cell-type-specific sensitivities to environmental inputs and local coupling mechanisms will be most accurate for simulating clock activity under natural environments.

      We have the following major criticisms as follows

      1) When assigning light sensitivities in different regions of the plant, the authors assign a higher sensitivity value to the root tip (L=1.03) than they do to the other part of the root (L=0.90). We are curious why the root tip would have higher light sensitivity than the rest of the root. Is this based on experimental data (if so, please cite in this section or methods)? It seems that these L values were assigned simply to make sure they recapitulated the period differences observed in Fig. 2A. Are these values based on PhyB expression in those organs? Or perhaps based on cell density in those locations?

      2) In the discussion of the test where they set the "light inputs to be equal" in all regions to simulate the phyb-9 mutant, could the authors please clarify whether that means they set the L light sensitivity value equal in all regions? a. If they are referring to setting the L value equal to all regions, we suggest that this discussion be moved to the section about different light sensitivities instead of the local sharing of mRNA section. b. Additionally, is it possible to set the light sensitivity to zero for all parts of the plant? We think this would be more suitable to simulate the phyb-9 mutant phenotype.

      3) Based on the recent Chen et al. (2020) paper showing ELF4 long-distance movement, we think it would be of great interest for the authors to model ELF4 protein synthesis/translation as the coupling factor, in addition to the modeling using CCA1/LHY mRNA sharing. We understand you may be saving this analysis for a future modeling paper, but this addition to the paper could increase the impact of this paper.

      4) This model is able to simulate circadian rhythms under 12:12 LD cycles, which represents two days of the year-the equinoxes. We are curious if the model can simulate rhythms under short days and long days as well. We understand this analysis may be outside the scope of this paper and may require changing the values of the 34 parameters used but think it could be a useful addition here or in future work.

      And minor criticisms as follows

      1) In the first paragraph of the results section, it would be helpful for the authors to reference Table S1 when they mention the 34 parameters used to model oscillator function

      2) In the first paragraph of the section titled "Local flexibility persists under idealized and noisy LD cycles", it would be helpful for the authors to reference S12 Fig after the last sentence that starts "However, ELF4/LUX appeared more synchronized..."

      3) In the first paragraph of the section titled "Cell-to-cell coupling maintains global communication under noisy light-dark cycles", the authors refer to a "Table 1" but I think they mean to refer to Table S1"

      4) In Fig. 1, panel C is described as demonstrating the cell-to-cell coupling through the "level of CCA1/LHY". This phrasing is vague and we think could be improved to the "mRNA level of CCA1/LHY".

      Significance

      This work would be broadly interesting to other researchers studying cell-to-cell signaling and coupling of circadian rhythms in plants and other species where spatial waves of gene expression have been observed (i.e., mice and humans). Additionally, the computational modeling aspect of this work was easily interpretable for someone outside this expertise. Our expertise lies in plant circadian biology.

    1. Reviewer #2:

      Extracting ion channel kinetic models from experimental data is an important and perennial problem. Much work has been done over the years by different groups, with theoretical frameworks and computational algorithms developed for specific combinations of data and experimental paradigms, from single channels to real-time approaches in live neurons. At one extreme of the data spectrum, single channel currents are traditionally analyzed by maximum likelihood fitting of dwell time probability distributions; at the other extreme, macroscopic currents are typically analyzed by fitting the average current and other extracted features, such as activation curves. Robust analysis packages exist (e.g., HJCFIT, QuB), and they have been put to good use in the literature.

      Münch et al focus here on several areas that need improvement: dealing with macroscopic recordings containing relatively low numbers of channels (i.e., hundreds to tens of thousands), combining multiple types of data (e.g., electrical and optical signals), incorporating prior information, and selecting models. The main idea is to approach the data with a predictor-corrector type of algorithm, implemented via a Kalman filter that approximates the discrete-state process (a meta-Markov model of the ensemble of active channels in the preparation) with a continuous-state process that can be handled efficiently within a Bayesian estimation framework, which is also used for parameter estimation and model selection.

      With this approach, one doesn't fit the macroscopic current against a predicted deterministic curve, but rather infers - point by point - the ensemble state trajectory given the data and a set of parameters, themselves treated as random variables. This approach, which originated in the signal processing literature as the Forward-Backward procedure (and the related Baum-Welch algorithm), has been applied since the early 90s to single channel recordings (e.g., Chung et al, 1990), and later has been extended to macroscopic data, in a breakthrough study by Moffatt (2007). In this respect, the study by Münch et al is not necessarily a conceptual leap forward. However, their work strengthens the existing mathematical formalism of state inference for macroscopic ion channel data, and embeds it very nicely in a rigorous Bayesian estimation framework.

      The main results are very convincing: basically, model parameters can be estimated with greater precision - as much as an order of magnitude better - relative to the traditional approach where the macroscopic data are treated as noisy but deterministic (but see my comments below). Estimate uncertainty can be further improved by incorporating prior information on parameters (e.g., diffusion limits), and by including other types of data, such as fluorescence. The manuscript is well written and overall clear, and the mathematical treatment is a rigorous tour-de-force.

      There are several issues that should be addressed by the authors, as listed below.

      1) I think packaging this study as a single manuscript for a broad-audience is not optimal. First, the subject is very technical and complex, and the target audience is probably small. Second, the study is very nice and ambitious, but I think clarity is a bit impaired by dealing with perhaps too many issues. The state inference and the bayesian model selection are very important but completely different issues that may be better treated separately, perhaps for a more specialized readership where they can be developed in more detail. Tutorial-style computational examples must be provided, along with well commented/documented code. The interested readers should be able to implement the method described here in their own code/program.

      2) The authors should clearly discuss the types of data and experimental paradigms that can be optimally handled by this approach, and they must explain when and where it fails or cannot be applied, or becomes inefficient in comparison with other methods. One must be aware that ion channel data are very often subject to noise and artifacts that alter the structure of microscopic fluctuations. Thus, I would guess that the state inference algorithm would work optimally with low noise, stable, patch-clamp recordings (and matching fluorescence recordings) in heterologous expression systems (e.g., HEK293 cells), where the currents are relatively small, and only the channel of interest is expressed (macropatches?). I imagine it would not be effective with large currents that are recorded with low gain, are subject to finite series resistance, limited rise time, restricted bandwidth, colored noise, contaminated by other currents that are (partially) eliminated with the P/n protocol with the side effect of altering the noise structure, power line 50/60 Hz noise, baseline fluctuations, etc. This basically excludes some types of experimental data and experimental paradigms, such as recordings from neurons in brain slices or in vivo, oocytes, etc. Of course, artifacts can affect all estimation algorithms, but approaches based on fitting the predicted average current have the obvious benefit of averaging out some of these artifacts.

      The discussion in the manuscript is insufficient in this regard and must be expanded. Furthermore, I would like to see the method tested under non-ideal but commonly occurring conditions, such as limited bandwidth and in the presence of contaminating noise. For example, compare estimates obtained without filtering with estimates obtained with 2, 3 times over-filtering, with and without large measurement noise added (whole cell recordings with low-gain feedback resistors and series resistance compensation are quite noisy), with and without 50/60 Hz interference. How does the algorithm deal with limited bandwidth that distorts the noise spectrum? How are the estimated parameters affected? The reader will have to get a sense of how sensitive this method is to artifacts.

      3) A better comparison with alternative parameter estimation approaches is necessary. First of all, explain more clearly what is different from the predictor-corrector formalism originally proposed by Moffatt (2007). The manuscript mentions that it expands on that, but exactly how? If it is only an incremental improvement, a more specialized audience is more appropriate.

      Second, the method proposed by Celentano and Hawkes, 2004, is not a predictor-corrector type but it utilizes the full covariance matrix between data values at different time points. It seems to me that the covariance matrix approach uses all the information contained in the macroscopic data and should be on par with the state inference approach. However, this method is only briefly mentioned here and then it's quickly dismissed as "impractical". I am not at all convinced that it's impractical. We all agree that it's a slower computation than, say, fitting exponentials, but so is the Kalman filter. Where do we draw the line of impracticability? Computational speed should be balanced with computational simplicity, estimation accuracy, and parameter and model identifiability. Moreover, that method was published in 2004, and the computational costs reported there should be projected to present day computational power. I am not saying that the authors should code the C&H procedure and run it here, but should at least give it credit and discuss its potential against the KF method.

      The only comparison provided in the manuscript is with the "rate equation" approach, by which the authors understand the family of methods that fit the data against a predicted average trajectory. In principle, this comparison is sufficient, but there are some issues with the way it's done.

      Table 3 compares different features of their state inference algorithm and the "rate equation fitting", referencing Milescu et al, 2005. However, there seems to be a misunderstanding: the algorithm presented in that paper does in fact predict and use not only the average but also - optionally - the variance of the current, as contributed by stochastic state fluctuations and measurement noise. These quantities are predicted at any point in time as a function of the initial state, which is calculated from the experimental conditions. In contrast, the KF calculates the average and variance at one point in time as a projection of the average and variance at the previous point. However, both methods (can) compare the data value against a predicted probability distribution. The Kalman filter can produce more precise estimates but presumably with the cost of more complex and slower computation, and increased sensitivity to data artifacts.

      Fig. 3 is very informative in this sense, showing that estimates obtained with the state inference (KF) algorithm are about 10 times more precise that those obtained with the "rate equation" approach. However, for this test, the "rate equation" method was allowed to use only the average, not the variance.

      Considering this, the comparison made in Fig 3 should be redone against a "rate equation" method that utilizes not only the expected average but also the expected variance to fit the data, as in Milescu et al, 2005. Calculating this variance is trivial and the authors should be able to implement it easily (and I'll be happy to provide feedback). The comparison should include calculation times, as well as convergence.

      4) As shown in Milescu et al, 2005, fitting macroscopic currents is asymptotically unbiased. In other words, the estimates are accurate, unless the number of channels is small (tens or hundreds), in which case the multinomial distribution is not very well approximated by a Gaussian. What about the predictor-corrector method? How accurate are the estimates, particularly at low channel counts (10 or 100)? Since the Kalman filter also uses a Gaussian to approximate the multinomial distribution of state fluctuations, I would also expect asymptotic accuracy. Parameter accuracy should be tested, not just precision.

      5) The manuscript nicely points out that a "rate equation" approach would need 10 times more channels (N) to attain the same parameter precision as with the Kalman filter, when the number of channels is in the approximate range of 10^2 ... 10^4. With larger N, the two methods become comparable in this respect.

      This is very important, because it means that estimate precision increases with N, regardless of the method, which also means that one should try to optimize the experimental approach to maximize the number of channels in the preparation. However, I would like to point out that one could simply repeat the recording protocol 10 times (in the same cell or across cells) to accumulate 10 times more channels, and then use a "rate equation" algorithm to obtain estimates that are just as good. Presumably, the "rate equation" calculation is significantly faster than the Kalman filter (particularly when one fits "features", such as activation curves), and repeating a recording may only add seconds or minutes of experiment time, compared to a comprehensive data analysis that likely involves hours and perhaps days. Although obvious, this point can be easily missed by the casual reader and so it would be useful to be mentioned in the manuscript.

      6) Another misunderstanding is that a current normalization is mandatory with "rate equation" algorithms. This is really not the case, as shown in Milescu et al, 2005, where it is demonstrated clearly that one can explicitly use channel count and unitary current to predict the observed macroscopic data. Consequently, these quantities can also be estimated, but state variance must be included in the calculation. Without variance, one can only estimate the product i x N, where i is unitary current and N is channel count. This should be clarified in the manuscript: any method that uses variance can be used to estimate i and N, not just the Kalman filter. In fact, the non-stationary noise analysis does exactly that: a model-blind estimation of N and i from non-equilibrium data. Also, one should be realistic here: in some circumstances it is far more efficient to fit data "features", such as the activation curve, in which case the current needs to be normalized.

      7) I think it's great that the authors develop a rigorous Bayesian formalism here, but I think it would be a good idea to explain - even briefly - how to implement a (presumably simpler) maximum likelihood version that uses the Kalman filter. This should satisfy those readers who are less interested in the Bayesian approach, and will also be suitable for situations when no prior information is available.

      8) The Bayesian formalism is not the only way of incorporating prior knowledge into an estimation algorithm. In fact, it seems to me that the reader would have more practical and pressing problems than guessing what the parameter prior distribution should be, whether uniform or Gaussian or other. More likely one would want to enforce a certain KD, microscopic (i)reversibility, an (in)equality relationship between parameters, a minimum or maximum rate constant value, or complex model properties and behaviors, such as maximum Popen or half-activation voltage. A comprehensive framework for handling these situations via parameter constraints (linear or non-linear) and cost function penalty has been recently published (Salari et al/Navarro et al, 2018). Obviously, the Bayesian approach has merit, but the authors should discuss how it can better handle the types of practical problems presented in those papers, if it is to be considered an advance in the field, or at least a usable alternative.

      9) Discuss the practical aspects of optimization. For example, how is convergence established? How many iterations does it take to reach convergence? How long does it take to run? How does it scale with the data length, channel count, and model state count? How long does it take to optimize a large model (e.g., 10 or 20 states)? Provide some comparison with the "rate equation method".

      10) Here and there, the manuscript somehow gives the impression that existing algorithms that extract kinetic parameters by fitting the average macroscopic current ("fitting rate equations") are less "correct", or ignorant of the true mathematical description of the data. This is not the case. Published algorithms that I know of clearly state what data they apply to, what their limitations are, and what approximations were made, and thus they are correct within that defined context and are meant to be more effective than alternatives. Some quick editing throughout the manuscript should eliminate this impression.

      11) The manuscript refers to the method where the data are fitted against a predicted current as "rate equations". I don't actually understand what that means. The rate equation is something intrinsic to the model, not a feature of any algorithm. An alternative terminology must be found. Perhaps different algorithms could be classified based on what statistical properties are used and how. E.g., average (+variance) predicted from the starting probabilities (Milescu et al, 2005), full covariance (Celentano and Hawkes, 2004), point-by-point predictor-corrector (Moffatt, 2007).

    1. “These are (1) a providential vision, in which the natural world has a purpose, to serve the human needs richly, but only if people do their part by filling it up with labor and development; (2) a Romantic vision, in which a key part of the world’s value is aesthetic and spiritual, found in the inspiration of mountain peaks, sheer canyon walls, and deep forests; (3) a utilitarian picture, in which nature is a storehouse of resources requiring expert management, especially by scientists and public officials; and (4) an ecological view of the world as being formed of complex and interpenetrating systems, in which both sustenance and poison may travel through air, water, and soil, and in and out of flesh, as each thing becomes something else.”

      CONTEXTUALIZE:

      In an interview with Landscape Architecture Magazine, Jedidiah Purdy discusses two statements in the preface of his book, This Land is Our Land. The first: "Land is perennially the thing we share that holds us apart." Second: "We have made a world that overmasters us." He explains in the interview, "Who people are on the land and how they can use it, what claims they have to it- is, in our history- the original way that people get sorted into different social fates. Do you own? Do you take the profit? Do you labor? Are you tied to the land?...That division is a way of sorting out and ranking interdependence. Together and apart are inseparable there"(LA MAG, July 2020). "It is the great achievement of human beings to build a world in which we have all these powers that we don't naturally have- we're so helpless- and yet that built world tells us how to live in it in a way that actually radically constrains and gives a very damaging form to our inhabiting the kind of larger living world" (LA MAG, July 2020). In this interview Purdy refers to the land as "...what determines circumstance of individuals' socioeconomic conditions; forming and modifying class, labor, economics, and value of the human race. In After Nature, Purdy describes human beings as what determines the formation of landscape according to what is valued and what is ignored. The two relationships described embody the definition of the Anthropocene era, which, according to Purdy in After Nature, is to emphasize what we think is most important in that relationship (between humans and nature)... Because we shape everything, from the upper atmosphere to the deep seas, there is no more nature that stands apart from human beings" (Purdy, 2015).

      RELATE: "A brief sampling might note the ill-fated hydrological reengineering of Tenochtitlan, the replacement of community forests by scientifically managed imperial woodlots, the substitution of Cartesian-grid, monocrop planting for native polycultures adapted to local soils and rains, the violent suppression of women's practical healing knowledge by an all-male elite, the new enclosures of landscapes and forests by today's agro-efficiency engineers and would-be "global" conservation organizations acting in the name of nature and the best interests of "humanity" (McAfee, 2016). In the era of the Anthropocene, both scarcity and abundance are caricatured into megaprivelege and megapoverty more than ever before. The impact of land and the reciprocated impact on the land is more obvious and more likely to be either addressed or ignored by the multiplicity of divisions within the human race, globally. Even if the changing landscape is ignored, the dependence human beings have on the land for natural resources, for space, and for inspiration is only increasing. The land, in response, relies on the honorable actions of human beings. The Anthropocene era defines the transition from reciprocity in relationship to toxic codependence.

      McAfee, Kathleen. “The Politics of Nature in the Anthropocene” In: “Whose Anthropocene? Revisiting Dipesh Chakrabarty’s ‘Four Theses,’” edited by Robert Emmett and Thomas Lekan, RCC Perspectives: Transformations in Environment and Society 2016, no. 2, 65–72.

    1. other agents, very much like ourselves

      Maybe robot rights is the wrong question, or even in the short term dangerous, but it may be heading in the right direction. If robots can do these things, then why don't they get rights...

      What about the biosphere, or communities?

      Why are we even having this debate about robot rights? If that's the wrong question, then maybe it's still trying to address a serious issue that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later. Cog Sci, computer science, and so on, affect the foundations of what humans can do. Literally speaking we don't have it but as a thought experiment it's valid b/c we have things that are close enough.

      As a philosophical issue, if we respond to this as trolling, then the whole thing becomes a flame war rather than thinking about how Cog Sci and so on has helped us think about what it means to be human.

      What then does it mean to have human dignity in a situation where we have current technology? Where do things like rights go w/ embeddedness?

      Maybe there's some continuous thread from rights of kings to rights of man and beyond — what if we take the fundamental unit to be the community, in which case, then we get different conclusions. Maybe even Burke has something like this — the thing about the isolated individual was the community. Communities can have have special communities this is why you get such things as rights of kings: this is why the king gets special rights. It wasn't just that it was exploiting kings rampaging around with other responsibilities.

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      Reply to the reviewers

      Reviewer #1 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)):

      The authors generated and analyzed a great amount of single-cell RNA FISH data over time on circadian genes (Nr1d1, Cry1, Bmal1), and performed model selection/fitting to explain the observed mRNA distributions. They decomposed the mRNA variability into distinct sources, and showed that intrinsic noise (transcription burst) dominates the variance. Therefore, looking at transcript counts may not be feasible to estimate single-cell circadian phase. However, the study is quite descriptive and ends up being a bit dissatisfying, so if the authors could improve this aspect by perhaps analyzing a mechanism on cell-specific burst size (F5), gene-specific dependence on cell size (beta), or the positive/negative gene-pair correlations (rho), it would help quite a bit in this regard. The model selection/fitting itself was not really sufficient to compensate for this, as it stands .

      We thank the reviewer for appreciating the new smFISH data, the analyses performed, and the consequences regarding phase inference from single cell snapshots.

      The reviewer suggests “perhaps analyzing a mechanism on cell-specific burst size (F5), gene-specific dependence on cell size (beta), or the positive/negative gene-pair correlations (rho)”, and we have thus added a new Results paragraph (lines 281-316) and two new Supp Figures 13 and 14 to directly address this point.

      Specifically, we have added a dynamic, stochastic model of the circadian clock in order to add mechanistic insight into the parameters of the preferred model M4. Concerning \rho, in the initial manuscript we suggested that the correlations of cell-specific burst sizes (described by the parameter \rho) in the preferred model M4 could result from the underlying network topology. To substantiate this claim, we have now added an analysis of a stochastic model of the clock that includes gene-gene interaction amongst the core-clock genes. The core-clock network involves variables (such as protein levels), parameters (such as mRNA/ protein half-lives) and additional genes (such as Clock) that are not directly measurable in our experiments; and thus offering a detailed mechanistic mathematical model for our data is therefore not realistic. We therefore developed a simplified mathematical model for the three measured genes to explore the underlying mechanisms that could control the parameter \rho, as the referee suggests. As a starting point, we used the circadian clock gene network topology for Nr1d1, Cry1 and Bmal1 as modelled in Relógio et al. (Relógio et al., 2011) (see new Supplementary Material). To keep the model close to the inference framework, we used oscillatory functions for the burst frequency while the transcription rate (and hence the burst size) for each gene is affected by the protein levels of the other genes in the network. Using stochastic simulations we show that, for particular configurations of feedback where the negative repression of Nr1d1 by CRY1 is high, the network can generate positive mRNA correlation between Bmal1/Cry1 mRNA and negative correlation between Nr1d1/Cry1mRNA, as observed in our data (Figure 2C). Furthermore, using the same inference framework as for our data on the simulated mRNA distributions, the obtained \rho is positive for Bmal1/Cry1 and negative for Nr1d1/Cry1, which was also found for our data (Figure 3C). Even though the model is clearly a simplified representation of the clock, these simulations give credence to the scenario that the \rho parameter obtained from the data is a signature of the underlying network topology.

      While the emphasis of the paper is certainly on parameter inference of the single-cell RNA FISH data, we believe the addition of this dynamic model provides more mechanistic insight into the results of the model fitting and hence significantly more depth to the article.

      \*Specific comments:** *

      1.It is hard to distinguish the RNA FISH signals (Figure 1A, 2B). It is probably technically challenging as the mRNAs are of low abundance. I think it may help if they adjust the contrast for the cytoplasm stain or just delineate the cell boundaries.

      Thank you for pointing this out, and we agree that our rendering of the FISH images was not optimal and have now significantly improved it (see new Figure 1A and 2B). Considering the other reviewers’ comments related to the images, we have now 1) added the cell contours as requested; 2) use red/green for the smFISH signal in the pairs of genes; 3) we have improved the contrast to make it easier to distinguish the RNA FISH signals.

      2.In Figure 2C, the authors showed gene-pair correlations with cells of all sizes. Could the authors do a size-dependent extrinsic-noise filtering (Padovan-Merhar, Dev. Cell, 2015; Hansen et al., 2018, Cell Systems) to better dissect the correlations?

      We used negative binomial distributions to directly model the number of mRNA in the cells, which is a natural choice given that the raw smFISH are integer counts. The model incorporates cell size dependencies in a unified framework, which predicts the joint distribution of raw counts, which is why we showed raw counts in the main figure. That being said, as the referee suggests, it can be useful for exploratory purposes to see the relationship between the measured genes while regressing out the contribution of cell area, and we have now added this analysis as Supp Figure 9. On line 156-161 we write:

      “To also estimate the correlation between genes while accounting for cell area, we regressed out the area for each gene and recalculated the correlation coefficients [37,38]. Since all genes are positively correlated with area (Fig. 2A), this processing shifted the correlations for both pairs of genes. Specifically, the correlation coefficients for the area-filtered mRNA counts decreased but remained positive for Bmal1/Cry1 and became more negative for Nr1d1/Cry1(Supp Figure 9).”

      3.For fitting model M3, as the authors pointed out, there are many local minima. Is the fitting score truly sufficient to eliminate the possibility for partial synchrony especially considering that the authors didn't show how effective the Dex treatment was to synchronize the circadian phase?

      Thank you for this comment. In fact, we didn't mean to fully eliminate the possibility of imperfect synchronization, but have tried our best to address it both experimentally and with modeling.

      Experimentally, in addition to the Dex treatment, we also compared with a condition in which we entrained the cells using temperature cycles, which is a standard in the field to achieve the best synchronization. We obtained a fold change of 2.1, which was in the range of previous studies (Saini, et al, 2012) and was slightly higher than with Dex synchronisation (1.6). Given that the improvement was not high and that it was important for us to study the system under free-running conditions and not in an entrained state (i.e. phase locking, which distorts the free dynamics and noise characteristics of the oscillator), we used the Dex protocol.

      Model 3 was used as a computational approach to correct for the individual phases. In addition to the difficult optimisation landscape, the challenge with model M3 also resides in the difficulty of estimating an individual phase for each cell, as the two mRNA counts measured in each cell do not contain sufficient phase information. This could potentially be resolved by either measuring more genes simultaneously, but is, however, beyond the scope of the present manuscript. We have added discussion on this to the text on lines 244-248:

      “Thus, it was apparently difficult to use model M3 to correct the individual phase for each cell, likely due to the fact that the two mRNA counts measured in each cell do not contain sufficient phase information, and that the global optimisation problem contains many local minima. This could potentially be improved by measuring more genes simultaneously.”

      We have also added a new Results section (lines 305-316) and Supp Figure 14 to show that imperfect synchrony alone cannot explain the correlation structure observed in our data. Indeed, if two genes have a similarly phased oscillation, the expression of the two genes will be positively correlated (as shown in the new Supp Figure 14). Similarly, when the oscillations are in anti-phase, negative correlations will be found. Given that Nr1d1 and Cry1 are closer in phase than Bmal1 and Cry1, one would expect that the correlation between Nr1d1 and Cry1 (once accounting for area) would be more positive than for Bmal1 and Cry1, which was not found in the data (area-corrected correlations shown in Supp Figure 9). It therefore seems unlikely that the observed correlations could be caused by imperfect synchrony alone. Together with our simulations of the gene network (described above), we therefore argue that gene-gene interactions are a more plausible mechanistic explanation of the correlations observed in our measured bivariate mRNA distributions.

      4.Regarding model M4, the authors added a cell-specific noise term without specifying the contributing factors. Typically adding degrees of freedom should improve fitting and make it easier for a model to fit, why not in this case? Can the authors provide some explanations/mechanisms.

      We believe there has been a misunderstanding regarding model M4. By adding parameters, model M4 is indeed easier to fit. There is even a problem of overfitting whereby the burst frequency becomes unrealistically high and the model effectively fits a Poisson distribution to each individual cell. To avoid this, we lock the burst frequency values to the posterior mean values from model M2. After describing model M4, we write (lines 260-265):

      “When all parameters are free, we noticed that the burst frequency can become unrealistically high due to a tendency to overfit to individual cells, and we therefore locked the burst frequency to the posterior mean values from model M2. The PSIS-LOO scores overall favoured model M4 (Fig. 3B), and the predicted joint probability density shows good similarity to the observed data (Fig. 3D) (all time points shown in Supp figure 11).”

      Regarding the above comment in the reviewer’s summary on contributing factors of model M4 we added a simple dynamical model that attempts to explain at least one possible mechanism of generating correlations in cell-specific bursting parameters (see above).

      5.The authors should include the number (range) of cells analyzed in the figure legends.

      We have now added the number of cells used at each time point to the legend of Figure 1D. To respond to Reviewer #2 we have also added details on the number of smFISH replicates used at each time point. The number of cells for each replicate is shown in Supp Figures 2-5.

      Reviewer #1 (Significance (Required)):

      Overall, we felt conflicted about the manuscript. On one hand, the authors generated and analyzed a great amount of single-cell RNA FISH data over time on circadian genes. On the other hand, the manuscript was a bit dissatisfying/descriptive. If the authors could provide and analyze some sort of mechanisms on cell-specific burst size (F5), gene-specific dependence on cell size (beta), or the positive/negative gene-pair correlations (rho) it should help improve the manuscript.

      We thank the review for the suggestion to expand on the mechanistic interpretation, which we have followed. In addition, we would like to emphasise that a similar smFISH analysis of the core circadian oscillator has never been done, and we believe our data represents a significant contribution to the field. Moreover, our quite generic probabilistic inference framework for smFISH using mixture models to describe intrinsic (transcriptional bursting) and extrinsic fluctuations is also novel and the code provided (written using the Stan probabilistic programming language) might find a wide applicability.

      Concerning the mechanistic description, as described above, we added a stochastic, dynamic model of gene expression and propose that gene-gene interactions within the core-clock network topology represent a plausible mechanism for generating correlated burst parameters between genes, which are a feature of the preferred model M4 found during inference. We additionally added an explanatory figure to argue that, given the phase relationship between genes, imperfect synchronisation alone cannot explain the observed correlations that we observe between the pairs of genes. Together, this analysis provides more mechanistic insight into the underlying factors controlling the gene-gene relationships in our measured bivariate mRNA distributions.

      \*Referees cross-commenting** *

      I agree with Reviewer #3 regarding expanding the discussion to include the Shah & Tyagi and Raj et al citations on buffering. However caution should be exercised regarding ref 26 as it is quite controversial and subsequent analyses came to different conclusions (PMID: 30359620 and 30243562). The general consensus is that nuclear buffering of transcript noise (proposed in ref 26) is not a general phenomenon (ref 27 is specific to the calcium response pathway). In fact, the presence and evolution of specific pathways to buffer transcriptional noise, such as protein-protein mechanisms (Shah & Tyagi) or extended half-life proteins (Raj et al. and others), argues that transcript fluctuations are not probably buffered in general.

      Following the suggestion of Reviewer #3, we have expanded the Discussion to include the references cited (Shah & Tyagi, Raj and others).

      Previous work from our lab is also nuancing the conclusions from references 26 and 27. Specifically, buffering effects are expected to be highly gene-specific (3’UTR), and in fact we have not seen those with our unstable construct during live-cell imaging (Suter et al., 2011; Zoller et al., 2015). We have also added text in order to explicitly state that subsequent papers have nuanced the general claims in references 26 and 27. In the text we write (lines 335-342):

      “One explanation for the low intrinsic fluctuation in these studies is that transcriptional fluctuations are filtered by nuclear retention, though other reports suggest that Fano factors (variance/mean, a measure of overdispersion compared to the Poisson distribution) can be even larger in the cytoplasm than in the nucleus [38]. In the cells used here, the strong signature of transcriptional bursting and high intrinsic noise is consistent with live imaging of a Bmal1transcriptional reporter in the same cell line under similar growth conditions, where intrinsic noise was estimated to be 4-times larger than extrinsic noise [23].”.

      Reviewer #2 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)):

      \*Summary:** *

      The authors study experimentally and computationally the dynamic transcription of circadian clock genes over time in individual cells with single molecule RNA-FISH with the aim to understand how different noise sources contribute to single cell transcription variability and basic functions of circadian clocks. The authors integrate experiments with computational modeling to understand biology.

      \*Major comments:** *

      This study has some major limitations that need to be addressed to test the model usefulness, to understand noise sources and to gain biological insights into circadian clocks.

      We thank this reviewer for the constructive feedback which enabled us to significantly strengthen the revised manuscript.

      The limitations are on the experiments, the computational implementation of the modeling and the integration of experiments with models.

      Although the experimental datasets contain several hundred cells per time point for multiple time points, only a single replica experiment is presented. From the presented data it is not clear how reproducible these temporal patterns are and if indeed differences between timepoints can be resolved if multiple biological replica experiments have been analyzed. To address this point at least three biological experiments needs to be presented and analyzed for each of the genes. Plotting the SEM on the means in figure 1B is misleading because several hundred cells have been measured which automatically makes the error small. The SEM just describes how well we can determine the mean from a distribution. Instead a mean and std from the biological replicas need to be plotted to show how experimental variability in experiments is resulting in the described expression pattern. This is similar to RNA-seq data or RT-PCR from multiple replica.

      We certainly agree that demonstrating reproducibility is important. Note that our smFISH data is from three independent cell culture dishes and microscopy slides, which included independent cell synchronization. This was described in the Methods but we agree that the data presentation was not showing the individual replicas, which we have now added. In Figure 1B, we now show the mean of each replicate for each time point. While the reviewer suggested displaying the mean and standard deviation across replicates, we show all data points at each time point to make it even more transparent. The mRNA distribution of each replicate is also shown in Supp Figures 2-5, together with individual quantification of mean, coefficient of variation and number of cells.

      In addition, to further demonstrate the reproducibility of the temporal patterns we have performed an additional independent experiment on four time points. This experiment shows that the oscillatory patterns for Nr1d1 and Cry1are clearly significant and reproducible (new Supp Figure 7). The combination of the replicates shown for the main experiment (Supp Figures 2-5) and the new replicate experiment (Supp Figure 7) shows that the oscillatory temporal patterns for the mean mRNA levels are robust and reproducible, and in fact similar as those found in bulk analyses (Ukai-Tadenuma et al., 2011; Hughes et al., 2009), which is expected.

      It is also not clear how good the cell segmentation works and how does cell segmentation influence the analysis. In figure 1A show the segmentation of the cell boundary together with the membrane stain.

      Thanks to this and other reviewers’ comments, we have now significantly improved the presentation of the FISH images. We have now 1) added the cell contours as requested; 2) used red/green for the smFISH signal in the pairs of genes; 3) we have improved the contrast to make it easier to distinguish the RNA FISH signals.

      We have also added Supp Figure 1 to show that the cell segmentation we used is reliable. In fact, as we had described, we used the sum Z-stack projections of the red channel (Wu et al., 2018), which we found provides the most accurate cell segmentation. We now show in Supp Figure 1 that the obtained segmentation shows convincing agreement with the cell autofluorescence .

      The authors use the RNA mean and RNA-FISH distributions and combine this data to build and compare different models. How do you know that the given data fulfils the central limit so that a model describing the mean is an adequate approach? To test this point, the authors should show through subsampling from the data and the model that indeed their data sets have enough cells to fulfil the central limit theorem.

      This comment reflects a misunderstanding of our approach, which we now try to better explain. In our inference framework we use a negative binomial (NB) distribution (and mixtures of NBs) to model the full distribution of mRNA counts, and our approach is therefore not based exclusively on the mean of the distribution. The estimation of model parameters and comparison of models is performed using the PSIS-LOO optimisation procedure (see below). The mixture model of NB binomials makes a few assumptions which we had clearly stated. In fact it captures both bursty transcription (in the limit of short bursts as is biologically plausible, which yields the NB distribution), and cell-to-cell variability (extrinsic noise) captured by the mixture. The suitability of the NB to model bursty transcription is established (Raj et al., 2006), and it is parameterized by a mean and a dispersion coefficient, such that the CV of the distribution is the inverse of the burst frequency (Zoller et al., 2015). Therefore the mean is indeed an important parameter of the model, but we do not see the relationship with the CLT. The used probabilistic inference (PSIS-LOO: Pareto-Smoothed Importance Sampling Leave-One-Out, Vehtari et al. 2017, see below) is established and state-of-the-art for selecting models of the appropriate complexity and we are not aware of a similar previous quantitative model for smFISH analysis.

      We have now added significantly more explanations both on the general approach as well as the methodological details in a fully-revised Methods section to avoid further misunderstanding.

      A strength of the manuscript is that several competing and biologically meaningful models have been generated. However, the manuscript lacks rigor in terms of how fitting and model selection is performed. It is not clear how good the models fit the data. To address this point, the authors should visually compare the model fits to the data and plot their fit errors as a function of model complexity.

      We fully agree that comparing different models using a model selection approach is a powerful methodology, in fact it is arguably the most systematic way to approach modeling problems in quantitative biology. Model selection is an active research area and there have been significant developments recently. Here, we used a state-of-the-art and established Bayesian approach (PSIS-LOO: Pareto-Smoothed Importance Sampling Leave-One-Out, Vehtari et al. 2017), which is certainly rigorous and more objective than visual comparison. The PSIS-LOO is conceptually similar to other approaches of model performance such as AIC or WAIC, and the entire field of model selection aims at establishing rigorous methods to assess the tradeoff between fit errors and model complexity. In PSIS-LOO, this is done by using pareto-smoothed importance sampling to estimate the expected log pointwise predictive density for a new dataset using leave-one-out cross-validation. The PSIS-LOO is the currently recommended metric for measuring model performance in Bayesian analysis (Vehtari et al., 2017) and is considered superior to other approaches such as computations of Bayes factors since it is less sensitive to model priors (Gelman et al. 2013). The performance of the models as measured with PSIS-LOO is shown in Figure 3B. As already mentioned, we have added further details as to how the fitting and model selection is performed in a revised Methods section. We agree that visual comparison is useful to gain intuition and this is why we showed the bivariate distributions in Figure 3D and in Supp Figure 11.

      Regarding the comment on “fit error”, note also that we probabilistically model the full mRNA distribution for each gene. In each cell, there is a likelihood score that measures the likelihood of observing the measured mRNA count given the modelled probability distribution. As our approach is based on this likelihood, the notion of “fitting error” needs to be replaced by the log likelihood (‘fitting error’ is mathematically equivalent to a log-likelihood when the noise model is Gaussian, which is not the case here).

      Another limitation is that the models have not been validated for example by using them to make predictions. One type of prediction could be to fit the model to one biological replica and then predict the other replica (cross validation). Another prediction would be to take the distribution fitted to the experimental data and then compare the model mean to the experimental mean.

      Thank you for this comment. As explained above, we used the state-of-the-art PSIS-LOO to measure the predictive performance of the models, which approximates the result of leave-one-out cross-validation using the full data set. To further assess the predictive capabilities of the model, we have now also added a “leave-replicate-out” cross-validation, as the reviewer suggests (new Supp Figure 12). The aim of our “leave-replicate-out” cross-validation was to test how well the predictions of each model generalise to independent cells that are not in the training set. To do this, we trained each model while omitting the data from one gene on a test slide. We then calculated the likelihood score of the test slide using the parameters from the training set, and repeated this for all slides. Similarly to the PSIS-LOO, the results of the leave-replicate-out cross-validation convincingly show that model M4 has the highest predictive performance. This is now described in the updated text on lines 265-271.

      The results from fitting and prediction should be plotted as a function of model complexity. This kind of analysis will illustrate how model complexity is supported by the data.

      As already mentioned, we used state-of-the-art algorithms to analyze prediction vs. complexity. With the above addition, we now have two methods of calculating the predictive performance of each model: the approximate leave-one-out score as measured with PSIS-LOO and the leave-replicate-out cross-validation. For each model, the PSIS-LOO score is plotted in Figure 3B and the leave-replicate-out cross-validation score is shown in Supp Figure 12.

      In the method section on models, a biological motivation must be presented to justify the different model assumption.

      Thank you for pointing out that the biological justification of the models needed to be expanded. In addition to the improved justifications already provided in the Results section, we have now updated the Methods section such that a biological motivation is included for each model.

      How do the models that fit the distributions describe the mean?

      As explained above, the inference is performed on the entire distributions, using a family of distributions (mixtures of NBs) which are parameterized in a biologically relevant manner (transcriptional bursting + extrinsic noise). The mean and variance of the distribution are now described on lines 585-586 in addition to Figure 3A.

      It is necessary to list model parameters for each of the models, their description, their parameter values, their parameter uncertainty and units of each parameter.

      Thank you, this has now been added as Supplementary Tables 2-5.

      It is not clear to me how the joint probability in figures 2,4, S2 and S4 have been used to fit the model.

      Again, the joint distributions are modeled using mixtures of NBs and the inference is performed on the entire dataset at once using a log-likelihood approach. This uses all the data at once, and it is embedded in a Bayesian model selection method. The way that the joint probability is used is now clarified in the revised Methods section and in the Results section (lines 208-214):

      “For both models M1 and M2, the likelihood of observing the data given the parameters of the model is evaluated using the model-specific NB distribution and the mRNA counts for both genes in each cell. This is performed for both Bmal1/Cry1 and Nr1d1/Cry1 pairs across all time points, and this likelihood is combined with model priors to define the posterior parameter distribution for each model (Methods). We applied Hamiltonian Monte Carlo sampling within the STAN probabilistic programming language to sample the posterior distribution and infer model parameters 40.”

      How do the models make sense in the context of the fact that human genes exist as a diploids?

      This is a good point, although note though that the 3T3 cells are from mice and not humans. 3T3 cells are tetraploid, and it turns out that under the justified assumption that the bursts are short (Zoller et al., 2015; Suter et al., 2011), the number of alleles rescales the burst frequency, i.e. the effective (observed) burst frequency equals the number of alleles times the burst frequency per allele, but it does not change the shape of the distributions. On line 580-582 we have now written: “Since 3T3 cells are tetraploid, and, again assuming that the bursts are short, the inferred burst frequency for tetraploid cells will be approximately four times that of a single allele.”

      The variance decomposition is shortly described but no results are presented to show how this is done. This should be better explained.

      The variance decomposition we used is not a new result; in fact, we used the analytical results of Bowsher, C. G. & Swain, P. S. “Identifying sources of variation and the flow of information in biochemical networks” (PNAS, 2012). The mathematical proofs of the formula we use are contained within that reference; however, we have re-written this section to make it clearer to the reader (lines 688-718).

      \*Minor comments:** *

      In figure 3A, it is not clear to me what these different plots relate to the models. It is also not clear what are equations that describe each model.

      The Methods section has now been improved to show the full data-generating mechanism for each model, and each model has its own section title to make it easier to find. We have also improved the legend for Figure 3 to make the relationship to each model clearer.

      The legends in figure 3 are not very informative. More details need to be presented to understand this figure.

      Thank you for pointing this out, and we have now re-written the figure legend for Figure 3 to make the figure clearer.

      Reviewer #2 (Significance (Required)):

      This is an interesting and important topic with the potential to have general implication of how to model periodic single cell gene expression data and eventually better understand circadian clocks. This study will expand on other modeling studies of circadian clocks and has the potential to advance the field (PMCID: PMC7229691). I personally have done similar analysis and experiments in another system and biological context which has demonstrated the power of this approach if implemented rigorously. I am not an expert in circadian clocks in human cells.

      We thank the reviewer for appreciating the implications for the circadian and single cell gene expression community. Note that to our knowledge, modeling smFISH counts using mixtures of negative binomials combined with Bayesian model selection has not been done. It is both highly relevant biologically (combines intrinsic and extrinsic fluctuations in a rigorous way), general and its applicability extends far beyond the circadian oscillator. Therefore, this approach for quantitative smFISH data analysis also fills an important methodological gap.

      \*Referees Cross commenting** *

      Reviewer #1:

      I agree with the assessment that model fitting and model selection was not sufficient. But I disagreed that the data is enough. Although many cells and time points are analyzed, there is no evidence of how reproducible each mRNA distribution can be measured at each time point. I think reproducibility is key and will also help with the model fitting and identification.

      Regarding the point on reproducibility, we have made the following four changes:

      1. We have added an independent 4 time-point experiment to show that the oscillatory patterns of the distributions are reproducible (Supp Figure 7).
      2. In Figure 1 we now also show the mean of each replicate for the main experiment (Figure 1B).
      3. We also show the mRNA distributions of each replicate in Supp Figures 2-5.
      4. We have added the “leave-replicate-out” cross-validation to show that that the model performance of the preferred model generalises to independent slides that were not included in training (Supp Figure 12). In responding to Reviewer #1 regarding the modeling, we have now also added a simplified dynamical model of circadian clock expression to add mechanistic insight into our proposed models. Overall, we have significantly expanded the description of the model selection approaches to help readers who are less familiar with Bayesian model selection methods.

      Reviewer #3:

      Regarding the red background, my understanding is that this comes from the probe hybridization. This is maybe because the probe concentration has not been optimized or the number of probes per gene is low and the signal to noise is not so good.Or it could be auto fluorescent background. In this case a different fluorophore needs to be used to avoid this problem.

      Thank you for those comments, and we agree with all reviewers that the presentation of the images needed to be improved. It turned out that in Figure 1, we had shown the cell mask in red so it is clearly not related to probe concentration or autofluorescence. We have now removed the cell mask channel from the main images which allows highlighting better the smFISH signals. All smFISH images for Figures 1 and 2 have been much improved, and we’ve added a new Supp Figure 1 to show the performance of our cell segmentation.

      Reviewer #3 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)):

      In this paper Nicholas et al image mRNAs encoding the key controllers of circadian rhythms, Rev-erba, Cry and Bmal1 in single cells over time. It was shown earlier that single cells exhibit circadian rhythms using reporter genes. A large number of studies have shown that transcription is an inherently stochastic process, which raises a question as to how single cells are able to achieve their rhythms on the face of this noise. Their results show that the number of mRNAs for the three genes exhibit the expected periodicity, but this periodicity is associated with significant cell-to-cell variation. They also explore to what extent this variability derives from stochastic transcription vs other sources of variation that are extrinsic to the genes. The results are interesting and experimental and modeling results are important (however this reviewer is not able to judge the veracity of mathematics that underlay the models).

      We thank this reviewer for appreciating the importance of our work.

      \*Some of the concerns that arose are listed below:** *

      1.The images show an annoying red background. If the red is HCS cell mask, it should be removed, and RNA presented on grey scale. This will make a better presentation. The red hue also appears in fig 2 b but here it is one of the RNA. I suggest in Fig 2 one RNA can be presented in green and the other in red, while the nuclei in blue.

      Thank you for this comment. We had indeed shown the cell mask in the red channel and now removed it. Together with the other suggestions and comments from the reviewers, we implemented the following changes: 1) added the cell contours as requested; 2) use red/green for the smFISH signal in the pairs of genes; 3) we have improved the contrast to make it easier to distinguish the RNA FISH signals. The presentation of the images is now much improved.

      2.This paper and a few others talk about the cell size contributing to the cell-to-cell variability in mRNA numbers. Where does it come from physically? One can imagine based on the cell cycle stage there could be more than two copies of then gene in a cell, which will yield more RNAs, but they say that their cells don't have much cell cycle variability. Perhaps a clearer discussion is called for rather than just being polite to other investigators.

      The referee is right that several studies observed empirically that larger cells show more mRNA molecules in smFISH experiments (Padovan et al., 2015; Kempe et al., 2015). In Padovan et al. (2015), the authors found that transcriptional burst size changes with cell volume and burst frequency with cell cycle. The main theory for transcription scaling with cell volume is to maintain transcript concentration. Using cell fusion experiments, they showed that cellular size can directly and globally affect gene expression by modulating transcription. Furthermore, they proposed that the mechanism underlying the global regulation integrates both DNA content and cellular volume to produce the appropriate amount of RNA for a cell of a given size, which is consistent with a model whereby a factor limiting for transcription is sequestered to the DNA. We used these results to propose a model whereby burst size scales with area, and we found an increase in predictive performance (compare M2 with M1 in Figure 3B). While our model selection supported the inclusion of cell area, the variance decomposition showed that the fraction of variance due to cell area ranged from 4.2% for Nr1d1 to 17.6% for Bmal1. We have now expanded the introduction to discuss this in more depth (lines 73-80) as requested.

      3.References 26 and 27 are cited for 10-80% of variance due to gene extrinsic sources. These references actually deny that there is a significant transcriptional noise in most genes. Again, stronger discussion is called for.

      As mentioned in the reply to Reviewer 1, previous work from our lab is also nuancing the conclusions from references 26 and 27. Specifically, buffering effects are expected to be highly gene-specific (3’UTR), and in fact we have not seen those with our unstable construct during live-cell imaging (Suter et al., 2011; Zoller et al., 2015). We have also added text in order to explicitly state that subsequent papers have nuanced the general claims in references 26 and 27. In the text we write (lines 335-342):

      “One explanation for the low intrinsic fluctuation in these studies is that transcriptional fluctuations are filtered by nuclear retention, though other reports suggest that Fano factors (variance/mean, a measure of overdispersion compared to the Poisson distribution) can be even larger in the cytoplasm than in the nucleus [38]. In the cells used here, the strong signature of transcriptional bursting and high intrinsic noise is consistent with live imaging of a Bmal1transcriptional reporter in the same cell line under similar growth conditions, where intrinsic noise was estimated to be 4-times larger than extrinsic noise [23].”.

      4.The results raise a very important question, whether and to what extent the transcriptional noise propagates to the next step of gene regulation and are there buffering mechanisms in the cell. For example, Raj et al, Variability in gene expression underlies incomplete penetrance, Nature 2010, show that alternative pathways serve to buffer the impact of gene expression noise. Similarly, Shah and Tyagi, Barriers to transmission of transcriptional noise in a c-fos c-jun pathway, Mol Syst Biol, 2013, show that variability in mRNA is buffered at protein level and the level of protein-protein complexes. Furthermore, they show that to the extent those vary, the chromatin intrinsically buffers against the fluctuations in numbers of transcription factors. Mention of these and other studies will enrich the paper.

      We have modified the Discussion section and now discuss these papers (and a few more). We thank the reviewer for the suggestions, which will help the reader to have a broader overview of noise buffering in gene expression and indeed enrich the paper.

      Reviewer #3 (Significance (Required)):

      Significance is high. Quality is high.

      \*Referees Cross-Commenting** *

      I agree with the comments made by other reviewers particularly about references 26 and 27. The major conclusions of reference 26 were questioned by Hansen et al 2018. At the bottom of page 7 the authors are qualifying their results in the light of references 26 and 27. Perhaps now there is less of a need to do so.

      As mentioned above, we have added the following sentence citing the Hansen paper to make it clear to the reader that key conclusions of the references 26 and 27 are disputed (lines 335-342):

      “One explanation for the low intrinsic fluctuation in these studies is that transcriptional fluctuations are filtered by nuclear retention, though other reports suggest that Fano factors (variance/mean, a measure of overdispersion compared to the Poisson distribution) can be even larger in the cytoplasm than in the nucleus [38].

      References

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      Hughes ME, DiTacchio L, Hayes KR, Vollmers C, Pulivarthy S, Baggs JE, Panda S, Hogenesch JB. 2009. Harmonics of circadian gene transcription in mammals. PLoS Genet 5. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1000442

      Kempe H, Schwabe A, Cremazy F, Verschure PJ, Bruggeman FJ. 2015. The volumes and transcript counts of single cells reveal concentration homeostasis and capture biological noise. Mol Biol Cell 26:797–804. doi:10.1091/mbc.E14-08-1296

      Padovan-Merhar O, Nair GP, Biaesch AG, Mayer A, Scarfone S, Foley SW, Wu AR, Churchman LS, Singh A, Raj A. 2015. Single Mammalian Cells Compensate for Differences in Cellular Volume and DNA Copy Number through Independent Global Transcriptional Mechanisms. Mol Cell 58:339–352. doi:10.1016/j.molcel.2015.03.005

      Raj A, Peskin CS, Tranchina D, Vargas DY, Tyagi S. 2006. Stochastic mRNA synthesis in mammalian cells. PLoS Biol4:e309. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0040309

      Relógio A, Westermark PO, Wallach T, Schellenberg K, Kramer A, Herzel H. 2011. Tuning the mammalian circadian clock: Robust synergy of two loops. PLoS Comput Biol 7:1–18. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002309

      Saini C, Morf J, Stratmann M, Gos P, Schibler U. 2012. Simulated body temperature rhythms reveal the phase-shifting behavior and plasticity of mammalian circadian oscillators. Genes Dev 26:567–580. doi:10.1101/gad.183251.111

      Suter DM, Molina N, Gatfield D, Schneider K, Schibler U, Naef F. 2011. Mammalian Genes Are Transcribed with Widely Different Bursting Kinetics. Science (80- ) 332:472–474. doi:10.1126/science.1198817

      Ukai-Tadenuma M, Yamada RG, Xu H, Ripperger JA, Liu AC, Ueda HR. 2011. Delay in feedback repression by cryptochrome 1 Is required for circadian clock function. Cell 144:268–281. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2010.12.019

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      Referee #1

      Evidence, reproducibility and clarity

      The authors generated and analyzed a great amount of single-cell RNA FISH data over time on circadian genes (Nr1d1, Cry1, Bmal1), and performed model selection/fitting to explain the observed mRNA distributions. They decomposed the mRNA variability into distinct sources, and showed that intrinsic noise (transcription burst) dominates the variance. Therefore, looking at transcript counts may not be feasible to estimate single-cell circadian phase. However, the study is quite descriptive and ends up being a bit dissatisfying, so if the authors could improve this aspect by perhaps analyzing a mechanism on cell-specific burst size (F5), gene-specific dependence on cell size (beta), or the positive/negative gene-pair correlations (rho), it would help quite a bit in this regard. The model selection/fitting itself was not really sufficient to compensate for this, as it stands .

      Specific comments:

      1.It is hard to distinguish the RNA FISH signals (Figure 1A, 2B). It is probably technically challenging as the mRNAs are of low abundance. I think it may help if they adjust the contrast for the cytoplasm stain or just delineate the cell boundaries.

      2.In Figure 2C, the authors showed gene-pair correlations with cells of all sizes. Could the authors do a size-dependent extrinsic-noise filtering (Padovan-Merhar, Dev. Cell, 2015; Hansen et al., 2018, Cell Systems) to better dissect the correlations?

      3.For fitting model M3, as the authors pointed out, there are many local minima. Is the fitting score truly sufficient to eliminate the possibility for partial synchrony especially considering that the authors didn't show how effective the Dex treatment was to synchronize the circadian phase?

      4.Regarding model M4, the authors added a cell-specific noise term without specifying the contributing factors. Typically adding degrees of freedom should improve fitting and make it easier for a model to fit, why not in this case? Can the authors provide some explanations/mechanisms.

      5.The authors should include the number (range) of cells analyzed in the figure legends.

      Significance

      Overall, we felt conflicted about the manuscript. On one hand, the authors generated and analyzed a great amount of single-cell RNA FISH data over time on circadian genes. On the other hand, the manuscript was a bit dissatisfying/descriptive. If the authors could provide and analyze some sort of mechanisms on cell-specific burst size (F5), gene-specific dependence on cell size (beta), or the positive/negative gene-pair correlations (rho) it should help improve the manuscript.

      Referees cross-commenting

      I agree with Reviewer #3 regarding expanding the discussion to include the Shah & Tyagi and Raj et al citations on buffering. However caution should be exercised regarding ref 26 as it is quite controversial and subsequent analyses came to different conclusions (PMID: 30359620 and 30243562). The general consensus is that nuclear buffering of transcript noise (proposed in ref 26) is not a general phenomenon (ref 27 is specific to the calcium response pathway). In fact, the presence and evolution of specific pathways to buffer transcriptional noise, such as protein-protein mechanisms (Shah & Tyagi) or extended half-life proteins (Raj et al. and others), argues that transcript fluctuations are not probably buffered in general.

    1. mm 58 Better than Human "communist man" won't work, no matter how vigorous the indoc-trination program is. A culturally produced characteristic could sat-isfy all four criteria if it was inculcated early enough in the individual's development and was strongly supported by peer pressure and social practices. So traits that are the product of nurture, if they satisfy (l)-(4), could be considered part of human nature. Given how important culture has become for defining who we are and how we differ from other animals, this makes good sense. Using a notion of human nature that makes room for cultural traits is useful for evaluating worries about biomedical enhancements changing or destroying human nature. Sometimes, those who have these worries are concerned about biological changes per se, but some-times they worry about biological changes destroying cultural traits that they think are very valuable. For example, as we'll see later, Bush's Council on Bioethics and its chairman, the physician-bioethicist Leon Kass, think of human nature as including certain very specific relationships between men and women and between children and parents. They worry that if biomedical enhancements become wide-spread, these valuable relationships will be damaged. We needn't read them as saying that these relationships are purely biological; they may be culturally evolved relationships, though they're based in biology. Bush's Council apparendy thinks these relationships are so vital to a good human life that they are in effect part of our nature or what's natural for us. They worry that biomedical enhancements, especially genetic enhancements, will destroy these relationships and replace them with relationships that are unnatural, not really human. The Moral Imperialist Bait and Switch There's something fishy about the way the Council proceeds. Why do they think the way to stress that something's highly valuable is CHANGING HUMAN NATURE? 59 I Co say that it's part of human nature or natural human relations? ' That would only make sense if human nature or natural human I relations are always good. If human nature and natural human rela-tions are simply what we are like because of our evolutionary his-• tory, then there's no reason to believe they're good. In fact, what we ; learned about evolution in chapter 2 should make us think that at \ least some of nature, including the part of nature we call human I nature, isn't good. Why should we think it's any different with cultural traits? Anthropologists provide plenty of evidence that some deeply entrenched social practices are not only morally disgusting, but downright destructive. Here's one example among many. Among the Ilahita Arapesh, a tribe in New Guinea, there's a deeply entrenched I social practice requiring men to gorge themselves even when this means that their wives and children are chronically hungry and mal-I nqurished. This behavior is very stressful for the men, who sometimes I become physically sick as a result. But the social taboo on sharing food equitably with your wife and children is so strong that men con-tinue to act in a way that literally makes them ill and condemns their families to misery. Whether this practice was ever valuable seems dubious, but it certainly isn't now. It's an abomination. Female genital mutilation (female genital cutting, for the politically correct) may be easier to explain as an adaptation. Perhaps the first women to undergo this ghastiy procedure achieved a gain in reproductive fitness through the mechanism of sexual selection. In evolutionary terms, the excision of the clitoris served as a signal to the male that this woman was not likely to spread other guys' genes (mainly because she wouldn't enjoy sex enough to fool around). But once the practice became universal, it obviously couldn't play this role in sexual selection: If all women have it, it can't signal that any particular woman is special. Yet a woman who refrains from the practice would be at a reproductive disadvantage, because no one

      "human nature"'s definition usually refers to learned cultural values which can be harmful

    Annotators

    1. ³Ma\bHVHULRXV. DRFWRU WHOO PH, aW P\ aJH, PHaVOHV FaQ NLOO. ́TKLV ZaV WKH ILUVW WLPH I UHaOL]HG WKaW P\ IaWKHU FRXOG GLH. I ORRNHG XS WKHZRUG ³NLOO ́ LQ HYHU\ GLFWLRQaU\ aQG HQF\FORSHGLa aW VFKRRO, WU\LQJ WRXQGHUVWaQG ZKaW LW UHaOO\ PHaQW, WKaW P\ IaWKHU FRXOG bH HUaGLFaWHG IURPP\ OLIH

      I feel like these few lines, in a way, frame the whole relationship of Ka and her father, a way that many people can relate to. Although the "natural" way of life is for children to be alive for the passing of their parents, it is an idea that seems so far away to most lucky children, that when they hear of the possibility, they shudder. They think it could never truly happen. What is then more interesting is that it kind of seems like the daughter is in that same denial. She (a few sentences up) admits that her father may even be mentally ill, but has not seen the signs, besides the prison nightmares, but that alone could be a sign enough. This type of denial we have as kids, follows us. It is what keeps us in denial about our biggest fears.

    1. Reviewer #3:

      In this manuscript, Sachella et al examine the contributions of the lateral habenula (LHb) to fear conditioning. They use 3 different paradigms: (1) a contextual fear conditioning paradigm, (2) a cued fear conditioning paradigm, (3) a combination paradigm where both context and cues can predict shocks. They also manipulate the LHb in several ways: (1) using muscimol, (2) using inhibitory optogenetics, (3) using excitatory optogenetics. The results are thought-provoking and would represent a novel contribution to the field, but I am left confused about some of the major points. My suggestions for improvement/clarification of the manuscript are as follows:

      Major Comments:

      1) Some important points need to be brought up in the introduction in order to frame the problem the authors are addressing and motivate the study. First, the introduction needs more background on separate circuits controlling cued vs contextual fear conditioning (hippocampus, amygdala). This only comes up in the discussion. Readers also need more background on connections between known structures for fear conditioning and the LHb. There should also be explicit discussion of the well characterized connections between LHb and dopamine neurons, including how LHb inputs help generate reward prediction errors that may be important for fear conditioning. The idea that prediction errors contribute to the authors' observations could be foreshadowed here.

      2) In general, the muscimol experiments are nicely done. However, muscimol is always administered during training. I am left wondering whether LHb activity is required during the initial learning of the association or for consolidation later. It would be ideal to also include a test of muscimol infusion immediately following the FC training, during a memory consolidation period. This is important because the authors at times seem to argue that the LHb is important specifically for memory consolidation, but later in the discussion claim that activity during the training (related to prediction errors) is an explanation for their results.

      3) I'm struggling with the interpretation of the experiments in Figures 3 + 4 using the cue + context FC paradigm and talking about "reconsolidation." These are really key to the paper so making sure the experiments are clear is a must. From the cue + context test, it seems that having both cues + contexts available for memory provides a much stronger memory. I am uncertain about why the authors think this is so and whether the effect is independent of the LHb? For the "reconsolidation" experiment, I can't figure out what's new. The no-reconsolidation group should look like Figure 2 muscimol group, and it mostly does. The reconsolidation group should look like the Figure 3 muscimol group, and it mostly does. So this looks to me more like a replication of Figures 2+3 (with no vehicle control) than anything else. What did we learn that could not be learned from the experiments in Figures 1-3? The suggestion is that "FC training under inactivation of the LHb creates a cued memory whose retrieval depends on contextual information." (lines 154-155). I don't disagree with this interpretation necessarily but it seems vague, and there is no circuit-level insight as to the mechanism.

      4) The ArchT experiments, as the authors already recognize, are problematic because of potential heating and other artifacts. 25s of continuous 10mW green light is a lot. I am not left with much confidence in interpreting these experiments and therefore I am not sure why they are included in the paper. There are other methods of optogenetic inhibition that would be better suited perhaps, or the results could be replicated with chemogenetics, where the authors could ensure DREADD viruses did not spread into the medial habenula.

      5) The oChIEF experiments are interesting, but again very difficult to interpret. There is no data showing what the stimulation does to LHb firing, which is a concern given the very long light stimulation (through the whole experiment). Therefore, it is unclear whether the authors' hypothesis that the light stimulation interferes with normal function is correct. The design here also does not take advantage of the temporal precision of optogenetics.

    1. Examples: "John suffers from cerebral palsy." "John is inflicted with cerebral palsy." "John is physically challenged." Impact: These terms immediately suggest that the person with the condition has a poor quality of life. While having a disability may have an impact on one's well-being, many people have still managed to live productive and fulfilling lives. Some have even turned their situations into a positive, such as Rick Hansen, Christopher Reeve, Temple Grandin, and more. With this in mind, it makes little sense to automatically generalize all people with disabilities as "suffering." Instead, saying something simple like "John has cerebral palsy" or "John uses a wheelchair" would be a drastic improvement. It treats the person's condition as-is, without any judgment or assumptions about quality of life.

      the language that we use to describe disabilities can influence both how others see people with disabilities, but also impact how people view themselves.

    1. Without question, we don't have the same old Antigua in mind.)

      At face value, one may think the Mill Reef Club missing the old Antigua might be a good thing, but it does not help native Antiguans at all. While the natives miss the culture and appreciate the aspects of daily life, the Mill Reef Club misses the amenities and sense of escapism Antigua provided for them. Like tourists, they glorify the dirt roads and other "raw" aspects of Antigua, but they do not appreciate it enough to bring about improvement. They do not see Antigua as a home, but as a place that serves to benefit themselves.

    1. Readers and consumers of texts will have to get used to not knowing whether the source is artificial or human. Probably they will not notice, or even mind—just as today we could not care less about knowing who mowed the lawn or cleaned the dishes. Future readers may even notice an improvement, with fewer typos and better grammar. Think of the instruction manuals and user guides supplied with almost every consumer product, which may be legally mandatory but are often very poorly written or translated. However, in other contexts GPT-3 will probably learn from its human creators all their bad linguistic habits, from ignoring the distinction between “if” and “whether”, to using expressions like “beg the question” or “the exception that proves the rule” incorrectly.

      Getting habituated to text production as just another task that machines can do

    1. All refl ect incidents in which African-Americans were mistreated, assaulted or arrested for conduct that would be ignored if they were white

      we like to think we're behind slavery and racial inequality but we're not. while we may not have the same black codes as they did hundred years ago, they are still built into our system one way or another

    1. On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. Inthat case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, suchas his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be inthe hands of a tiny elite—just as it is today, but with two differences.

      I still think that we have control over this type of stuff today.

    Annotators

    1. These plants are poorly understood by landscape architects and by those who love gardens.

      Contextualize

      Introducing exotic plants to a natural landscape can bring a different texture level to the site and bring an unexpected habitat to the existing landscape. This habitat may be useful or harmful to the existing condition, human has a plan to it but no power to control. One crucial element to remember when bringing in exotic plant species to the natural landscape is respecting the natural landscape and species. In the article, Wilde, Gandhi, and Colson state that “Recent ecological studies have found that landscaping with exotic plant species can reduce biodiversity on multiple trophic levels. To support biodiversity in urbanized areas, the increased use of native landscaping plants has been advocated by conservation groups and US federal and state agencies. A major challenge to scaling up the use of native species in landscaping is providing ornamental plants that are both ecologically functional and economically viable. Depending on ecological and economic constraints, accelerated breeding approaches could be applied to ornamental trait development in native plants. This review examines the impact of landscaping choices on biodiversity, the current status of breeding and selection of native ornamental plants, and the interdisciplinary research needed to scale up landscaping plants that can support native biodiversity”. There are chances of having negative impacts on the natural landscape when bringing in exotic species. Paying respect to the natural landscape is one of the keys to work on landscape design.

      Wilde, H., Gandhi, K., & Colson, G. (2015, January 28). State of the science and challenges of breeding landscape plants with ecological function. Retrieved November 12, 2020, from https://www.nature.com/articles/hortres201469

      Relate

      Marx believes that humans need to respect nature during landscape design because there are so many uncertainties when bringing in exotic plant species into an environment. That is the right way to consider the relationship between the natural environment and outcoming plants. However, as a landscape architect, they should think about what the role of landscape architecture is? How does it communicate with the general public? What is the value of it? There are a handful of elements that landscape architects need to consider on the design to lead to the question: is it necessary to bring exotic plant species? After researching, studying, and discovering about the area site and alien plant species, whether bring in exotic plant species will be an easy decision to make. Also, evaluated the risk of exotic plant species is necessary. Ferrell It is hard to identify the line Cooper described between human development and nature. Only humans can learn and discover through it to figure out what the line is? How are we balance out the relation with nature? Getting human, educated, and informed is something fundamental to do. Therefore, enough knowledge could help humans to figure out the balance and have respect for nature.

    1. “We may disagree with some of their tactics, but there probably isn’t a single Indian organization anywhere that would disagree with those 20 points. A lot of Indians out there are watching the protest and saying ‘right on!’”

      "Pigeonholing" is endemic to the media and human nature, and I think this is definitely something to be aware of today. When a group of people act out with a set of goals or ideas that go against a media outlet's agenda, the media outlet will take advantage on any potentially controversial actions (or actions that they can spin as controversial) done by those people and use it to discredit the goals or ideas of that group. Media outlets aren't the only ones guilty of this; we as individuals and even governments are! That being said, I am glad that the New York Times article included this quote. "Ideas are bulletproof," and creating discomfort has been used throughout history by underrepresented voices to be heard.

    1. We shouldn’t be cruel to animals, i.e. we shouldn’t harm animals unnecessarily
      1. I completely disagree with this statement as I once read in an article to which I totally agree too. A living thing needs to have certain characteristics to be counted as a living thing. These may include, speech, movement, reproduction, breathing, etc. As for animals, they have all these characteristics. The voice they take out makes us realize weather they're in pain or not. Moreover they're able to move if in danger. As for plants, the only 2 qualities they have are reproduction and breathing in one way or the other. So rather than considering cruelty towards animals, we should think twice before plucking out a plant and eating it.
    1. Doctors and nurses have much more expertise in managing cases even in using nonmedical interventions like proning, which can improve patients’ breathing capacity simply by positioning them facedown. Health-care workers are also practicing fortified infection-control protocols, including universal masking in medical settingsOur testing capacity has greatly expanded, and people are getting their results much more quickly. We may soon get cheaper, saliva-based rapid tests that people can administer on their own, itself a potential game changer.

      Similarly good news, but long-term effects persist in some patients, I think. Again, people may see all the good news as reason to ignore social distancing and mask rules.

    1. In the last 2–3 years, I’ve observed the phrase “Diversity of Thought” gain momentum among many tech leaders and beyond. Proponents of this approach argues the way we think and express our opinions, our eclectic personalities, the myriad of leadership styles and Myer-Briggs results, are just as, if not more, important than demographic diversity that focuses on one’s gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, disability, etc.

      while the idea of [[diversity of thought]] may have started off a little more innocent (or not...), it's changed over the years to uphold the status quo, while distracting from [[DEI]] efforts that are aimed at improving representation, and lived experience

    1. We account for it by the supposition that his metaphysical views, carefully excluded from his scientific work, are the results of an earlier and less severe training than that which has secured to us his valuable positive contributions to the theory of Natural Selection.   Mr. Wallace himself is fully aware of this contrast, and anticipates a scornful rejection of his theory by many who in other respects agree with him. The doctrines of the special and prophetic providences and decrees of God, and of the metaphysical isolation of human nature, are based, after all, on barbaric conceptions of dignity, which are restricted in their application by every step forward in the progress of science.  And the sense of security they give us of the most sacred things is more than replaced by the ever-growing sense of the universality of inviolable laws, -- laws that underlie our sentiments and desires, as well as all that these can rationally regard in the outer world.  It is unfortunate that the prepossessions of religious sentiment in favor of metaphysical theories should make the progress of science always seem like an indignity to religion, or a detraction from what is held as most sacred; yet the responsibility for this belongs neither to the progress of science nor to true religious sentiment, but to a false conservatism, an irrational respect for the ideas and motives of a philosophy which finds it more and more difficult with every advance of knowledge to reconcile its assumptions with facts of observation.

      This sums up the entire point of the article. Wright says that Wallace makes good points on Natural Selection, however wavers when he begins to define things he does not understand as non-scientific or metaphysical. This article seems to not just be an argument for Darwin and Wallace’s natural selection theories, but a rebuke of Wallace’s ideas on will and his assertion of those things he does not understand like consciousness and feeling being placed under the banner of “will”. This may be the greatest contribution of this article, the defense of science in the time where science and religion were still intermingled and becoming frayed. Psychology should always be used in scientific terms, things like feeling and consciousness are difficult to explain as every individual experiences these things differently but they should be looked at through the lens of science and not as some mystical force which has predetermined/preprogrammed how we feel, act, and think.

    2. which seems to us erroneous, that all causation is reducible to the conversions of equivalent physical energies.  It may be trite (at least we are not prepared to dispute the assumption) that every case of real causation involves such conversions or [p. 122] changes in forms of energy, or that every effect involves changes of position and motion.  Nevertheless, every case of real causation may still involve also another mode of causation. A much simpler conception than our author's theory, and one that seems to us far more probable is that the phenomena of conscious volition involve in themselves no proper efficiencies or forces coming under the law of the conservation of force, but are rather natural types of causes, purely and absolutely regulative, which add nothing to, and subtract nothing from, the quantities of natural forces.   No doubt there is in the actions of the nervous system a much closer resemblance than this to a machine.  No doubt it is automatically regulated, as well as moved, by physical forces; but this is probably just in proportion as its agency -- as in our habits and instincts -- is removed from our conscious control. 

      This seems to be one of the key points Wright is trying to make with this article. It is almost as if he was influenced by those before him which worked with the nervous system. Thinking about the nervous system as a machine (very William James-ian) he basically says here that our nervous systems have evolved to the point which we do not have to consciously think about them for them to do their jobs, sort of in the way which we automatically breathe and have a heartbeat. Giving agency to parts of the body which it seems that humans have evolved to not need to regulate and it moves and operates by physical forces not metaphysical ones. Does this idea still hold true, it would seem correct as electrical impulses sent out from the brain do operate our entire body almost without any “will” from the user.

    3. We may not be able to understand how such regulation is possible; how sensations and other mental conditions can restrain, excite, and combine the conversions of physical forces in the cycles into which they themselves do not enter; though there is a type of such regulation in the principles of theoretical mechanics, in the actions of forces which do not affect the quantities of the actual or potential energies of a system of moving bodies, but simply the form of the movement, as in the rod of the simple pendulum.  Such regulation in the sensitive organism is more likely to be an ultimate inexplicable fact; but it is clear that even in a machine the amounts of the regulating forces bear no definite relations to the powers they control, and might, so far as these are directly concerned, be reduced to nothing as forces; and in many cases they are reduced to a minimum of the force of friction.  They must,[p. 121 however, be something in amount in a machine, because they are physical, and, like all physical forces, must be derived in quantity from pre-existing forms of force.  To infer from this that the Will must add something to the forces of the organism is, therefore, to assume for it a material  nature. But  Mr. Wallace escapes, or appears to think (as others think who hold this view) that he escapes, from complete materialism by the doctrine of the freedom of the Will.  Though he makes the Will an efficient physical force, he does not allow it to be a physical effect.  In other words, he regards the Will as an absolute source of physical energy, continually adding, though in small amounts, to the store of the forces of nature; a sort of molecular leakage of energy from an absolute source into the nervous system of animals, or, at least, of men.

      Wright talking here about materialism over what Wallace hypothesized is being compared to a machine here. After the thoughts on sensation which most materialist say are just atoms discharging against one another, Wright begins to focus on this idea that Wallace theorized was “Will”. Wright is correct in saying that Will is just another name for materialism and Wallace doesn’t really escape what materialism is by citing it as “Will”.

    4. We say, and say truly, that a stone has no sensation, since it exhibits none of the signs that indicate the existence of sensations.   It is not only a purely objective existence, like everything else in nature, except our own individual self-consciousness, but its properties indicate to us no other than this purely objective existence, unless it be the existence of God.  To suppose that its properties could possibly result in a sensitive nature, not previously existing or co-existing with them, is to reason entirely beyond the guidance and analogies of experience. It is a purely gratuitous supposition, not only metaphysical or transcendental, but also materialistic; that is, it is not only asking a foolish question,[p. 119] but giving a still more foolish answer to it.  In short, the metaphysical problem may be reduced to an attempt to break down the most fundamental antithesis of all experience, by demanding to know of its terms which of them is the other. To this sort of fatuity belongs, we think, the mystical doctrine which Mr. Wallace is inclined to adopt, "that FORCE is a product of MIND"; which means, so far as it is intelligible, that forces, or the physical antecedents and conditions of motion (apprehended, it is true, along with motion itself through our sensations and volitions), yet bear to our mental natures the still closer relation of resemblance to the prime agency of the Will; or it means that "all force is probably will-force." Not only does this assumed mystical resemblance, expressed by the word "will-force," contradict the fundamental antithesis of subject and object phenomena (as the word "mind-matter" would), but it fails to receive any confirmation from the law of the correlation of the physical forces.

      This point that Wright is making, trying to use scientific reasoning to understand and ultimately cut through Wallace’s argument for the more “mystical” explanations in evolutionary science is very interesting. While a bit hard to process, it does seem as if the idea here is to discount any argument of the supernatural using what Wright knows as the order of nature. For example: we know what a rock is made of, we know it is not sentient, and therefore has a purely objective existence. All of these things can be observed and scientifically studied, which is what Wright is trying to hammer on here. Stating that the question of if the rock has sensation is not only foolish but any answer to explain sensation in a rock would be equally if not more foolish. This is important as Wright is seemingly being a scientific purest here, almost saying that there is no room for God in scientific pursuit taking all of the metaphysical out of psychology.

    1. As a consequence, the organization soon noticed the familiar set of symptoms indicating deeper problems. The most visible symptom was a surge in the number of support issues. Maybe that could be resolved by hiring more testers or even expand with a first line support?

      While the business may see the bugs come in, churn, unhappy customers - and think that we may need to solve by adding more engineering people, we should be considering other options.

    1. It is true that moral rules are often enforced much more strictly than the rules of etiquette, and our reluctance to press the non-hypothetical "should" of etiquette may be one reason why we think of the rules of etiquette as hypothetical imperatives. But are we then to say that there is nothing behind the idea that moral judgments are categorical imperatives but the relative stringency of our moral teaching

      6

    2. In writing about imperatives Kant seems to be thinking at least as much of statements about what ought to be or should be done, as of injunctions expressed in the imperative mood. He even describes as an imperative the assertion that it would be "good to do or refrain from doing something"' and explains that for a will that "does not always do something simply because it is presented to it as a good thing to do" this has the force of a command of reason. We may therefore think of Kant's imperatives as statements to the effect that something ought to be done or that it would be good to do it. The distinction between hypothetical imperatives and cate- gorical imperatives, which plays so important a part in Kant's ethics, appears in characteristic form in the following passages from the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals

      2

    1. (Hypothesis didn't recognize the text so I couldn't add a normal annotation): "Good evening. I'm sorry to -- bother you, but we just thought we'd better let you know that we haven't got anything left. We sent up all we had. There's no more food down here (111)."

      In Ben's communication with someone on the upper level, he shows a clear subordination to whoever it is. The pause after saying "sorry" made me think he had a momentary thought of: "I didn't sign up for this, why am I apologizing?" This is a fleeting thought though, if one at all, because he goes on to explain their inability to provide anything more. Without even knowing why, he's taken on the responsibility of giving Gus' things to an unknown "higher power." This bit of dialogue made it very obvious that the play is highlighting a blind adherence to authority, even if it's nonsensical to the viewer. We may even question our own judgement of it -- the hidden authority doesn't give us the space to clearly judge it. It can come off as humorous or frustrating that these orders have made the men panic.

    1. “If that girl got out of the seat when she was told, there’d be no problem. But apparently she had no respect for the school, no respect for her teacher, probably has no respect at home or on the street, and that’s why she acted the way she did”

      This may be controversial but I think think there should be a perspective citing both her actions and how she was victimized but placing emphasis on the way she was victimized as a result. If she would have gotten out of her seat, there would have been a strong likelihood we would have never heard about this story. However, due to the fact that she did not and the officer used excessive force to remove her, clearly making her a victim in the situation.

      I could equate it to driving. If you stop at a stop sign for less than three seconds, that's against the law. Say one stops at a stop sign for less than three seconds but due that action they get involved in a hit-and-run accident that leaves them inquired. Could stopping at that stop sign for the full three seconds changed the outcome? Possibly, but being involved in the accident doesn't make them any less of a victim.

    1. Three Stages of Existence

      1. State of Nature

      • Man's nature is not shaped by the society.
      • Understanding this state sheds light on social experience can shape men.
      • Man is unsocial; it has native knowledge and has not acquired other knowledge.
      • Man is independent, cannot be influenced by others.
      • Man is innocent, is leaning to self-preservation, is lacking interest, his
      • Man cannot return to its primeval state.

      2. Social Dependence

      • As new needs arise, man needs the service of other men.
      • Possessions & division of labor = evils of social life.

        > A man with possessions is a man with something to lose, and a man who is dependent on the activities of others is also dependent upon their dispositions.

      • Everyone is connected in circumstantial dependence & undesirable comparison

        • unequal circumstances may cause the "state of war"; it is where the government must exist to protect the rich's property and the poor's rights.
      • Social existence stay and cannot return to primitive nature.

      3. Social Contract/ Community

      • Men should overcome conflicts that may dissemble men.
      • Men must think that the goal is not to outdo each other but is to establish mutual connection.
      • General will must manifest thru democracy, only by abolishing unequal privileges and partial combinations

        > all institutions and practices that mediated the direct relationship of man to community or that divided man's loyalty—were declared illegitimate.

      • Better constitution = better influence

      • Men as we know them are formed by society, they are malleable, and their social and political participation is potentially inherently re-warding.

    Annotators

    1. Author Response

      Summary: This study tackles a difficult problem of understanding the basis for hippocampal theta rhythms through reduction of a highly detailed model, seeking to validate a reduced model that would be more amenable to analysis. The reviewers appreciated the attention to this challenging problem and the substantial work that went into it, but had several fundamental concerns about the methodology, interpretation, and reporting.

      We appreciate the detailed feedback provided to us by the reviewers and editors and we are pleased that there was an appreciation for the attention we have given to this challenging problem and the substantial work that went into it. We would like to thank the reviewers for their efforts.

      This feedback helped us realize that there was possibly too much presented in this single paper and moving forward, we will split the work into two papers. While we agree with some of the feedback, we think that some aspects were misunderstood, which may be partially due to the extensiveness of the submitted paper. Below we provide general responses to the points raised, leaving specifics for elsewhere.

      Reviewer #1:

      This study takes two existing models of hippocampal theta rhythm generation, a reduced one with two populations of Izhikevich neurons, and a detailed one with numerous biophysically detailed neuronal models. The authors do some parameter variation on 3 parameters in the reduced model and ask which are sensitive control parameters. They then examine control of theta frequency through a phase response curve and propose an inhibition-based tuning mechanism. They then map between the reduced and detailed model, and find that connectivity but not synaptic weights are consistent. They take a subset of the detailed model and do a 2 parameter exploration of rhythm generation. They compare phenomenological outcomes of the model with results from an optogenetic experiment to support their interpretation of an inhibition-based tuning mechanism for intrinsic generation of theta rhythm in the hippocampus.

      This statement summarizes our work to a certain extent but it misses a key aspect – the ‘mapping’ between the minimal (that this reviewer refers to as ‘reduced’) and detailed model is what is used to rationalize and motivate the subsequent extensive 2-parametric exploration in a ‘piece’ of the detailed model (which we termed the segment model). We will aim to write this more clearly in an edited version.

      General comments:

      1) The paper shows the existence of potential rhythm mechanisms, but the approach is illustrative rather than definitive. For example, in a very lengthy section on parameter exploration in the reduced model, the authors find some domains which do and don't exhibit rhythms. Lacking further exploration or analytic results, it is hard to see if their interpretations are conclusive.

      We agree that these are interpretations (not meant to be conclusive), but the goal was to use the minimal model to develop further insight as we did with a hypothesis development presented in the middle of the paper.

      2) The authors present too much detail on too few dimensions of parameters. An exhaustive parameter search would normally go systematically through all parameters, and be digested in an automated manner. For reporting this, a condensed summary would be presented. Here the authors look at 3 parameters for the reduced model and 2 parameters in the detailed one - far fewer than the available parameter set. They discuss the properties of these parameter choices at length, but then pick out a couple of illustrative points in the parameter domain for further pursuit. This leaves the reader rather overwhelmed on the one hand, and is not a convincing thorough exploration of all parameters of the system on the other.

      See above.

      3) I wonder if the 'minimal' model is minimal enough. Clearly it is well- supplied with free parameters. Is there a simpler mapping to rate models or even dynamical systems that might provide more complete insights, albeit at the risk of further abstraction?

      We agree that models can be even more minimal, but the goal here was not to further analyse the minimal model through simpler mappings or otherwise. Rather, it was to exploit linkages between the minimal model and detailed models to help understand how theta rhythms could be generated in the biological system (Goutagny et al. 2009 intrinsic theta), using a piece of the detailed model as a ‘biological proxy’.

      4) Around line 560 and Fig 12 the authors conclude that only case a) is consistent with experiment. While it is important to match data to experiment, here the match is phenomenological. It misses the opportunity to do a quantitative match which could be done by taking advantage of the biological detail in the model.

      5) The paper is far too long and is a difficult read. Many items of discussion are interspersed in the results, for example around line 335 among many others.

      We will split the paper into two.

      Reviewer #2:

      In this work Chatzikalymniou et al. use models of hippocampus of different complexities to understand the emergence and robustness of intra-hippocampal theta rhythms. They use a segment of highly detailed model as a bridge to leverage insights from a minimal model of spiking point neurons to the level of a full hippocampus. This is an interesting approach as the minimal model is more amenable to analysis and probing the parameter space while the detailed model is potentially closer to experiment yet difficult and costly to explore.

      We completely agree.

      The study of network problems is very demanding, there are no good ways to address robustness of the realistic models and the parameter space makes brute force approaches impractical. The angle of attack proposed here is interesting. While this is surely not the only approach tenable, it is sensible, justified, and actually implemented. The amount of work which entered this project is clear. I essentially accept the proposed reasoning and the hypotheses put forward. The few remarks I have are rather minor, but I think they merit a response.

      1) l. 528-530 "This is particularly noticeable in Figure 9D where theta rhythms are present and can be seen to be due to the PYR cell population firing in bursts of theta frequency. Even more, we notice that the pattern of the input current to the PYR cells isn't theta-paced or periodic (see Figure 10Bi)."

      This is a loose statement. When you look at the raw LFP theta is also not apparent (e.g. Figure 9.Ei or Fi). What happens once you look at the spectrum of the activity shown in 10.Bi? Do you see theta or not?

      We agree – to be done.

      2) l. 562 "This implies that the different E-I balances in the segment model that allow LFP theta rhythms to emerge are not all consistent with the experimental data, and by extension, the biological system."

      This is speculative. We do not know how generic the results of Amilhon et al. are. They showed what you can find experimentally, not what you cannot find experimentally. I agree with the statement from l.581, though : "Thus, from the perspective of the experiments of Amilhon et al. (2015) theta rhythm generation via a case a type pathway seems more biologically realistic ..."

      We agree – to edit accordingly.

      3) There are several problems with access to code and data provided in the manuscript.

      l. 986, 1113 - osf.io does not give access l. 1027 - bitbucket of bezaire does not allow access l. 1030 - simtracker link is down l. 1129, 1141 - the github link does not exist (private repo?)

      Our apologies that all of these were not made public as intended.

      4) l. 1017 - Afferent inputs from CA3 and EC are also included in the form of Poisson-distributed spiking units from artificial CA3 and EC cells.

      Not obvious if Poisson is adequate here - did you check on the statistics of inputs? Any references? Different input statistics may induce specific correlations which might affect the size of fluctuations of the input current. I do not think this would be a significant effect here unless the departure from Poisson is highly significant. Any comments might be useful.

      We were simply using the same input protocol setup done by Bezaire et al. 2016.

      5) l. 909 - "Euler integration method is used to integrate the cell equations with a timestep of 0.1 msec."

      This seems dangerous. Is the computation so costly that more advanced integration is not viable?

      Our apologies as the timestep was erroneously reported. At initial stages of the project, larger stepsizes were attempted to speed up computation. The stepsize/integration used were as in minimal model of Ferguson et al. (2017). That is, Euler integration with a 0.04ms stepsize for the cell simulations and Runge-Kutta for network simulations.

      Reviewer #3:

      [...] I have a number of methodological issues with the paper. First, both models should be validated against experimental evidence given that the experimental results exist. The validation of a "minimal" model with data from another model is circumstantial and useful to link two models, but in no way is a scientific validation, in my opinion. Second, the model reduction arguments are simply taken as a piece of a large model. This is in now way a systematic reduction, which the authors should provide. In the absence of that, the two models are simply two different models. Third, it is not clear what aspects of the mechanisms cannot be investigated using the larger models that require the reduced models, given that the models do not necessarily match. Fourth, the concept of a minimal model should be clearly explained. They used caricature (toy) models of (2D quadratic models, aka Izhikevich models) combined with biophysically plausible descriptions of synapses. The model parameters in 2D quadratic models are not biophysical as the authors acknowledge, but they can be related to biophysical parameters through the specific equations provided in Rotstein (JCNS, 2015) and Turquist & Rotstein (Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience, 2018). In fact, they can represent either h-currents or M-currents. I suggest the authors determine this from these references. In this framework, the dynamics would result from a combination of these currents and persistent sodium or fast (transient) sodium activation. Fifth, from the original paper (Ferguson et al., 2017) their minimal model has 500 PV and 10000 PYR cells (I couldn't find the number of PV cells in this paper, but I assumed they were as in the original paper). This is not what I would call a minimal model. It is minimal only in comparison with the more detailed model. While this is a matter of semantics, it should be clarified since there are other minimal model approaches in the literature (e.g., Kopell group, Erdi group). Related to these models, it is typically assumed that the relationship between PYR to PV is 5/1. This is certainly not holy, but seems to have been validated. Here it is 20/1. Is there any reason for that? Sixth, the networks are so big that it is very difficult to gain some profound insight. What is it about the large networks and their contribution to the generation of theta activity that cannot be learned from "more minimal" networks?

      The published minimal model (Ferguson et al. 2017) used experimental data constraints on EPSC and IPSC ratios to come up with the prediction of connectivity. As this connectivity was found in the detailed model (with empirically determined connections), this can be considered a form of validation for the minimal model’s predictions if one considers the detailed as a ‘biological proxy’.

      We agree that the segment model is not a systematic reduction of the detailed model. The segment model reasonably represents a ‘piece’ of the CA1 microcircuit that was experimentally shown to be possible to be able to generate oscillations on its own (see Goutagny et al. 2009 Supplementary figure 11). This was the assumption in determining the network size of the previously published minimal model. A large network is needed in order to appropriate capture the very large EPSCs relative to IPSCs that are present in the experiment. This is the essence of why smaller network sizes cannot be justified.

      Because of these concerns and the development of the paper, I believe the paper is about the comparison between two existing models that the authors have constructed in the past and the parameter exploration of these models.

      We do not fully agree with this statement. The minimal model was constructed by us (Ferguson et al. 2017), but the detailed model was painstakingly constructed in a state-of-the-art fashion by Bezaire et al. 2016. We used a ‘piece’ of this detailed model (see above) so that we could make ‘links’ with the minimal model in understanding the generation of intrinsic theta rhythms. This ‘piece’ also allowed us to do the extensive exploration for the additional results presented. The paper is about taking advantage of the comparison and linkage of minimal and detailed models to show how theta rhythms are generated and their frequencies controlled.

      I find the paper extremely difficult to read. It is not about the narrative, but about the organization of the results and the lack (or scarcity) of clear statements. I can't seem to be able to easily extract the principles that emerge from the analysis. There are a big number of cases and data, but what do we get out of that?. Perhaps creating "telling titles" for each section/subsection would help, where the main result is the title of the section/subsection. I also find an issue with the acronyms. One has to keep track of numbers, cases, acronyms (N, B), etc. All that gets in the way of the understanding. I believe figures would help.

      Another confusing issue in the paper is the use of the concept of "building blocks". I am not opposed to the use of these words, on the contrary. But building blocks are typically associated with the model structure (e.g., currents in a neuron, neurons in a network). PIR, SFA and Rheo are a different type of building blocks, which I would call "functional building blocks". They are building blocks in a functional world of model behavior, but not in the world of modeling components. For example, PIR can be instantiated by different combinations of ionic currents receiving inhibitory inputs. Also, the definitions of the building blocks and how they are quantified should be clearly stated in a separate section or subsection.

      The concept of building blocks was directly taken from Gjorgjieva et al. 2016 as cited in Ferguson et al. 2017 when we first used it, but also cited in the present paper, but for a different point.

      I disagree with the authors' statement in lines 214-216, related to Fig. 4. They claim that "From them, we can say that the PYR cell firing does not speci1cally occur because of their IPSCs, as spiking can occur before or just after its IPSCs." Figure 4 (top, left panel) suggests the opposite, but instead of being a PIR mechanism, it is a "building-up" of the "adaptation" current in the PYR cell. (By "adaptation" current I mean the current corresponding to the second variable in the model. If this variable were the gating variable of the h-current, it would be the same type of mechanism suggested in Rotstein et al. (2005) and in the models presented in Stark et al. (2013).) The mechanism operates as follow: the first PV-spike (not shown in the figure) causes a rebound, which is not strong enough to produce a PYR spike before a new PV spike occurs (the first in the figure), this second PV-spike causes a stronger rebound (it is super clear in the figure), which is still not strong enough to produce a PYR-spike before the new PV-spike arrives, this third PV spike produces a still stronger rebound, which now causes a PYR spike. The fact that this PYR spike occurs before the PV spike is not indicative of the authors' conclusions, but quite the opposite.

      The authors should check whether the mechanistic hypothesis I just described, which is consistent with Fig. 4 (top, left panel), is also consist with the rest of the panels and, more generally, with their modeling results and the experimental data and whether it is general and, if not, what are the conditions under which it is. If my hypothesis ends up not being proven, then they should come up with an alternative hypothesis. The condition the authors' state about the parameter "b" and PIR is not necessarily general. PIR and other phenomena are typically controlled by the combined effect of more than one parameter. As it stands, their basic assumption behind the PRC is not necessarily valid.

      The subsequent hypothesis (about PYR bursting) is called to question in view of the previous comments. The experimental data should be able to provide an answer.

      See above.

      The authors should provide a more detailed explanation and justification for the presence of an inhibitory "bolus". What would the timescale be? Again, the data should provide evidence of that. In their discussion about the PRC, the authors essentially conclude what they hypothesis, but this conclusion is based on the "bolus" idea. The validity of this should be revised.

      The discussion about degeneracy of the theta rhythm generation is interesting. However, because of the size and complexity of the models, this degeneracy is expected. Their minimal modeling approach does not help in shedding any additional light. In addition, the authors' do not discuss the intrinsic sources of degeneracy and how they interact with the intrinsic ones.

      The last two sections were difficult to follow and I found them anecdotal. I was expecting a deeper mechanistic analysis. However, I have to acknowledge that because of my difficulty in following the paper, I might have missed important issues.

      These last sections are where the ‘piece’ of the detailed model (that we termed the segment model) - a ‘biological proxy’ - essentially shows that the theta rhythm is initiated from the pyramidal cells and that the frequency is controlled by the net input to the pyramidal cells.

      The discussion is extensive, exhaustive and interesting. But it is not clear how the paper results are integrated in this big picture, except for a number of generic statements.

      The proposal that the hippocampus has the circuitry to produce theta oscillations without the need of medial septum input has been proposed before by Gillies et. (2003) and the models in Rotstein et al. (2005) and Orban et al. (2005). But the idea from this work is not that the hippocampus (CA1) is a pacemaker, but rather what we now call a "resonator". To claim that the MS is simply an amplificatory of an existing oscillator is against the existing evidence.

      We agree that many models show theta generation without explicit mention of the medial septum. However, what our modelling work shows is how the intrinsic theta rhythm is generated – it is initiated by the pyramidal cells (large enough network size with some recurrent connections) and the control of the theta frequency (LFP) is due to the net input to the pyramidal cells – this is the main claim of the paper. This is explicitly in reference to an intrinsic theta rhythm experimental context. From there, we suggest that MS and other inputs could amplify an already existing intrinsic rhythm in the CA1 microcircuit.

      References:

      Bezaire, M. J., Raikov, I., Burk, K., Vyas, D., & Soltesz, I. (2016). Interneuronal mechanisms of hippocampal theta oscillation in a full-scale model of the rodent CA1 circuit. ELife, 5, e18566. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.18566

      Ferguson, K. A., Chatzikalymniou, A. P., & Skinner, F. K. (2017). Combining Theory, Model, and Experiment to Explain How Intrinsic Theta Rhythms Are Generated in an In Vitro Whole Hippocampus Preparation without Oscillatory Inputs. ENeuro, 4(4). https://doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0131-17.2017

      Gjorgjieva, J., Drion, G., & Marder, E. (2016). Computational implications of biophysical diversity and multiple timescales in neurons and synapses for circuit performance. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 37, 44–52. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conb.2015.12.008

      Goutagny, R., Jackson, J., & Williams, S. (2009). Self-generated theta oscillations in the hippocampus. Nature Neuroscience, 12(12), 1491–1493. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2440

    2. Reviewer #2:

      In this work Chatzikalymniou et al. use models of hippocampus of different complexities to understand the emergence and robustness of intra-hippocampal theta rhythms. They use a segment of highly detailed model as a bridge to leverage insights from a minimal model of spiking point neurons to the level of a full hippocampus. This is an interesting approach as the minimal model is more amenable to analysis and probing the parameter space while the detailed model is potentially closer to experiment yet difficult and costly to explore.

      The study of network problems is very demanding, there are no good ways to address robustness of the realistic models and the parameter space makes brute force approaches impractical. The angle of attack proposed here is interesting. While this is surely not the only approach tenable, it is sensible, justified, and actually implemented. The amount of work which entered this project is clear. I essentially accept the proposed reasoning and the hypotheses put forward. The few remarks I have are rather minor, but I think they merit a response.

      1) l. 528-530 "This is particularly noticeable in Figure 9D where theta rhythms are present and can be seen to be due to the PYR cell population firing in bursts of theta frequency. Even more, we notice that the pattern of the input current to the PYR cells isn't theta-paced or periodic (see Figure 10Bi)."

      This is a loose statement. When you look at the raw LFP theta is also not apparent (e.g. Figure 9.Ei or Fi). What happens once you look at the spectrum of the activity shown in 10.Bi? Do you see theta or not?

      2) l. 562 "This implies that the different E-I balances in the segment model that allow LFP theta rhythms to emerge are not all consistent with the experimental data, and by extension, the biological system."

      This is speculative. We do not know how generic the results of Amilhon et al. are. They showed what you can find experimentally, not what you cannot find experimentally. I agree with the statement from l.581, though : "Thus, from the perspective of the experiments of Amilhon et al. (2015) theta rhythm generation via a case a type pathway seems more biologically realistic ..."

      3) There are several problems with access to code and data provided in the manuscript.

      l. 986, 1113 - osf.io does not give access<br> l. 1027 - bitbucket of bezaire does not allow access l. 1030 - simtracker link is down l. 1129, 1141 - the github link does not exist (private repo?)

      4) l. 1017 - Afferent inputs from CA3 and EC are also included in the form of Poisson-distributed spiking units from artificial CA3 and EC cells.

      Not obvious if Poisson is adequate here - did you check on the statistics of inputs? Any references? Different input statistics may induce specific correlations which might affect the size of fluctuations of the input current. I do not think this would be a significant effect here unless the departure from Poisson is highly significant. Any comments might be useful.

      5) l. 909 - "Euler integration method is used to integrate the cell equations with a timestep of 0.1 msec."

      This seems dangerous. Is the computation so costly that more advanced integration is not viable?

    1. PDF version <img class="" alt="Supporters attend a campaign rally for U.S. President Donald Trump" src="//viahtml3.hypothes.is/proxy/im_///media.nature.com/lw800/magazine-assets/d41586-020-02948-4/d41586-020-02948-4_18498916.jpg"> A New Jersey campaign rally for US President Donald Trump, who has espoused herd immunity as a strategy to deal with the pandemic.Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty In May, the Brazilian city of Manaus was devastated by a large outbreak of COVID-19. Hospitals were overwhelmed and the city was digging new grave sites in the surrounding forest. But by August, something had shifted. Despite relaxing social-distancing requirements in early June, the city of 2 million people had reduced its number of excess deaths from around 120 per day to nearly zero.In September, two groups of researchers posted preprints suggesting that Manaus’s late-summer slowdown in COVID-19 cases had happened, at least in part, because a large proportion of the community’s population had already been exposed to the virus and was now immune. Immunologist Ester Sabino at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, and her colleagues tested more than 6,000 samples from blood banks in Manaus for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2.“We show that the number of people who got infected was really high — reaching 66% by the end of the first wave,” Sabino says. Her group concluded1 that this large infection rate meant that the number of people who were still vulnerable to the virus was too small to sustain new outbreaks — a phenomenon called herd immunity. Another group in Brazil reached similar conclusions2.Such reports from Manaus, together with comparable arguments about parts of Italy that were hit hard early in the pandemic, helped to embolden proposals to chase herd immunity. The plans suggested letting most of society return to normal, while taking some steps to protect those who are most at risk of severe disease. That would essentially allow the coronavirus to run its course, proponents said. Rethinking herd immunity But epidemiologists have repeatedly smacked down such ideas. “Surrendering to the virus” is not a defensible plan, says Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Such an approach would lead to a catastrophic loss of human lives without necessarily speeding up society’s return to normal, he says. “We have never successfully been able to do it before, and it will lead to unacceptable and unnecessary untold human death and suffering.”Despite widespread critique, the idea keeps popping up among politicians and policymakers in numerous countries, including Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. US President Donald Trump spoke positively about it in September, using the malapropism “herd mentality”. And even a few scientists have pushed the agenda. In early October, a libertarian think tank and a small group of scientists released a document called the Great Barrington Declaration. In it, they call for a return to normal life for people at lower risk of severe COVID-19, to allow SARS-CoV-2 to spread to a sufficient level to give herd immunity. People at high risk, such as elderly people, it says, could be protected through measures that are largely unspecified. The writers of the declaration received an audience in the White House, and sparked a counter memorandum from another group of scientists in The Lancet, which called the herd-immunity approach a “dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence”3.Arguments in favour of allowing the virus to run its course largely unchecked share a misunderstanding about what herd immunity is, and how best to achieve it. Here, Nature answers five questions about the controversial idea.What is herd immunity?Herd immunity happens when a virus can’t spread because it keeps encountering people who are protected against infection. Once a sufficient proportion of the population is no longer susceptible, any new outbreak peters out. “You don’t need everyone in the population to be immune — you just need enough people to be immune,” says Caroline Buckee, an epidemiologist at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts.Typically, herd immunity is discussed as a desirable result of wide-scale vaccination programmes. High levels of vaccination-induced immunity in the population benefits those who can’t receive or sufficiently respond to a vaccine, such as people with compromised immune systems. Many medical professionals hate the term herd immunity, and prefer to call it “herd protection”, Buckee says. That’s because the phenomenon doesn’t actually confer immunity to the virus itself — it only reduces the risk that vulnerable people will come into contact with the pathogen.But public-health experts don’t usually talk about herd immunity as a tool in the absence of vaccines. “I’m a bit puzzled that it’s now used to mean how many people need to get infected before this thing stops,” says Marcel Salathé, an epidemiologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.How do you achieve it?Epidemiologists can estimate the proportion of a population that needs to be immune before herd immunity kicks in. This threshold depends on the basic reproduction number, R0 — the number of cases, on average, spawned by one infected individual in an otherwise fully susceptible, well-mixed population, says Kin On Kwok, an infectious-disease epidemiologist and mathematical modeller at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The formula for calculating the herd-immunity threshold is 1–1/R0 — meaning that the more people who become infected by each individual who has the virus, the higher the proportion of the population that needs to be immune to reach herd immunity. For instance, measles is extremely infectious, with an R0 typically between 12 and 18, which works out to a herd-immunity threshold of 92–94% of the population. For a virus that is less infectious (with a lower reproduction number), the threshold would be lower. The R0 assumes that everyone is susceptible to the virus, but that changes as the epidemic proceeds, because some people become infected and gain immunity. For that reason, a variation of R0 called the R effective (abbreviated Rt or Re) is sometimes used in these calculations, because it takes into consideration changes in susceptibility in the population. A guide to R — the pandemic’s misunderstood metric Although plugging numbers into the formula spits out a theoretical number for herd immunity, in reality, it isn’t achieved at an exact point. Instead, it’s better to think of it as a gradient, says Gypsyamber D’Souza, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. And because variables can change, including R0 and the number of people susceptible to a virus, herd immunity is not a steady state.Even once herd immunity is attained across a population, it’s still possible to have large outbreaks, such as in areas where vaccination rates are low.

      I think this is super important. There is a large population of people in the United States who are against vaccinations. And we need to keep this in mind when looking at the backlash that this could cause when determining herd immunity. If there are enough people not getting vaccinations, the spread of the virus could be prolonged and outbreaks could be increased. I have even heard rumors and gossip about how once a vaccination is created, our government is going to force its citizens to take it. It will definitely be interesting to see what happens in the coming months to years.

    1. The question arises as to whether utilitarian objects communicate meaning in theway great artworks do:does a wooden chair designed by the 20thcentury architect Frank Lloyd Wright carry meaningin the same way a painting by Rembrandt does? Theanswer is probably not, but this does notmean that Wright’s chair is devoid of meaning. Rather, its meaning is of a different kind. Rembrandt’s painting may speak tous of a mother’s love for her child, or the poignancy of the painter observing his face as he ages. Wright’s chair, in turn, speaks to us on its most basic level of a certainbody posture and way of sitting, its form and style suggesting perhaps a certain style of human interaction. If we dig into history, we may discover that Wright’s designs reflected the social climate of his moment in history, and his relation to the Arts and Crafts movement that responded against the perceived sterility of industrially-produced furniture and other goods.

      Do a little research on Rembrandt's paintings and Frank Lloyd Wright's designs as described in https://flwright.org/researchandexplore/furnitureanddecorativearts. Do you think Wright would welcome a Rembrandt painting into his interior designs? Why or why not?

    1. I thought this was extremely interesting. To begin, I agree greatly with the line in the beginning that states, "Whenever new approaches or techniques are being advocated, a very understandable ill-humor overcomes those who feel they may have to modify or to reconsider well-established pedagogical habits." I think this is accurate because many times, I've had English teachers complain or explain how new techniques or way of teaching literature are difficult to adapt to and requires them to change their logic on a lot and break old habits. I also thought that noting that their response feeds off of " moral indignation." Truthfully, whether they believe it or not, I find that a lot of teachers do teach the way they do or explain things the way they do based off of their morals and values. They aren't on the Supreme Court, so it is okay. Another thing that stuck out to me in this piece was the line, " Perhaps the most difficult thing for students and teachers to realized is that their appreciation is measured by the analytical rigor of their own discourse about literature, a criterion that is not primarily or exclusively aesthetic." Basically what I get form that after a bit of deciphering is that we appreciate the literature we are able to accurately discuss, and the more interested we are in our discussion about certain literature, the greater appreciation we have for it. It is not always an aesthetic, because it doesn't have to be something that necesarrily draws you in to imply an "aesthetic," yet it is merely a piece of literature that you are able to discuss based off of how much effort you put into analyzing it. I also liked how the author discussed how teaching English is not a "substitution for the teaching of theology, ethics, psychology, or intellectual history." I think it does indeed have to do with close reading. I've personally always thought of those subjects as completely seperate, however, it's interesting to see another viewpoint and understand why and how those possibilities could arise.

    1. Summary: In this well done manuscript, the authors examine the bHLH transcription factor TWIST1 and its interacting proteins in neural crest cell development using an unbiased screen. Given the important role of neural crest cells in craniofacial and cardiac developmental defects, the data are both useful and important.

      The major problem is the claim that the regulation reported here is important for neural crest specification / induction. This cannot be the case, as Twist 1 starts to be expressed in mouse only during the delamination step according to published single cell data. The premigratory Zic/Msx positive neural crest shows no expression of Twist1 before EMT markers kick in. The authors need to deal with this. It would be important to show in vivo expression data analysis and bring the conclusions in line with the timing in neural crest development.

      Reviewer #1:

      This excellent study is focused on the mechanisms of action of Twist1 in the neural crest cells and on the identification of core components of the Twist1 network. The authors performed an in-depth experimental study and sophisticated analysis to identify Chd7/8 as the key partners of Twist 1 during NCC development. This identification and corresponding predictions later appeared consistent with experimental in vivo data including single and combinatorial gene knockout mouse models with phenotypes in the cranial neural crest. Overall, this study is important for the field. However, I disagree with some secondary interpretations the authors give to their results. At the same time, the major conclusions stay solid. Below I discuss the most critical points.

      1) Chd7, Chd8 and Whsc1 are ubiquitously expressed. Thus, the specificity of regulation is achieved via interactions with other, more cell type- and stage-specific, factors. This would be good to mention.

      2) The authors suggest: "The phenotypic data so far indicate that the combined activity of TWIST1-chromatin regulators might be required for the establishment of NCC identity. To examine whether TWIST1- chromatin regulators are required for NCC specification from the neuroepithelium and to pinpoint its primary molecular function in early neural differentiation, we performed an integrative analysis of ChIP-seq datasets of the candidates".

      • This is a strange assumption, given that Twist1 is expressed only starting from the NCC delamination stage in mouse cranial neural crest (Soldatov et al., 2019). It does not seem to correlate with premigratory NCC identity and the situation inside of the neural tube. The authors conclude: "Therefore, combinatorial binding sites for TWIST1, CHD7 and CHD8 may confer specificity for regulation of patterning genes in the NECs." Or, alternatively, they may confer the control of mesenchymal phenotype, downstream migration and fate biasing etc. I do not think the authors have good arguments to bring up induction or patterning of NCCs at the level of the neural tube.
      • I have a good suggestion for the authors: I would extract the regulons from Soldatov et al. single cell data and run the binding site proximity check for the individual genes belonging to the gene modules /regulons specific to delamination and early NCC migration stages. I am curious, if the proximity of binding sites of Twist1-related crowd would rather correlate with genes from these specific regulons as compared to randomly selected regulons from the entire published single cell dataset. Randomization/bootstrapping analysis are welcomed. So far, being an excellent study, this paper does not solve a problem of downstream (of Twist1) gene expression program in the neural crest cells. At the same time, this is what the author can try to obtain with their DNA binding data in combination with published single cell data. Repression of Sox2 and upregulation of Pdgfra (reported in Figure 4) might be a part of this downstream program being in line with the published single cell gene expression data (Soldatov et al., 2019).
      • The authors conclude the paragraph: "Therefore, combinatorial binding sites for TWIST1, CHD7 and CHD8 may confer specificity for regulation of patterning genes in the NECs". Again, this is not a good or plausible explanation based on specificity of expression of suggested patterning genes (or visualized genes are poorly selected). Additionally, although I believe the obtained results are important and of a good quality, I would not call them "developmentally equivalent to ectomesenchymal NCCs" or other NCCs. This is because the in vitro system will never reflect the embryonic in vivo development with high accuracy (especially when it comes to patterning and positional identity). This might explain that some prominent binding positions and interpretations the authors give do not correspond to the gene expression logic during neural crest development. Besides, Twist1 and Chd7/8 are naturally expressed in many other cell types and might target non-NCC genes (Vegfa?). This does not reduce the value of the data, but it is good to mention for the community.

      3) Figure 2: Twist1-/+ Chd8-/+ is repeated two times in panel B (but the embryos look differently), although the authors most likely meant to show Twist1-/+ Chd7-/+ in the second case. If this is indeed the case, the authors should also show a phenotype of Chd7 KO.

      4) The authors write: "Impaired motility in Twist1, Chd8 and Whsc1 knockdowns was accompanied by reduced expression of EMT genes (Pdgfrα, Pcolce, Tcf12, Ddr2, Lamb1 and Snai2) (Figure 6D, S3D) and ectomesenchyme markers (Sox9, Spp1, Gli3, Klf4, Snai1), while 375 genes that are enriched in the sensory neurons located in the dorsal root ganglia (Ishii et al., 2012) were upregulated (Sox2, Sox10, Cdh1, Gap43; Figure 6E).

      • From the list of genes characterizing EMT, I can agree only on Pdgfra and Snai2, the rest is unspecific for EMT, and appears rather ubiquitous or specific to different cell populations (non-EMT).
      • From the list of suggested ectomesenchyme markers, I cannot pick any gene that would be a bit specific for ectomesenchyme (within neural crest lineage) except for Snai1. Sox9 is broadly expressed also in the trunk neural crest, Spp1 and Klf4 are not expressed in early mouse ectomesenchyme, Gli3 is too broad and non-selective. I suggest to select other gene sets (check the expression with online PAGODA app from Soldatov et al): http://pklab.med.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/R/rook/nc.p63-66.85-87.dbc.nc/index.html
      • The choice of DRG genes is also non-optimal, as Sox10 is pan-NCC, Sox2 is expressed in early migrating crest and satellite glial cells of DRG and Schwann cell precursors, Gap43 and Cdh1 are not specific enough. These genes clearly suggest the beginning of neuro-glial fates or trunk neural crest bias. To be more precise and for claiming sensory neurons, the authors should come up with pro-neuronal genes such as neurogenins, NeuroD, Isl1, Pou4f1, Ntrk and many others.

      Still, overall, I agree with the author's main conclusions.

      5) The authors write: "The genomic and embryo phenotypic data collectively suggest a requirement of TWIST1- chromatin regulators in the establishment of NCC identity in heterogeneous neuroepithelial 403 populations". Again, I do not think the authors can claim anything related to the establishment of NCC identity. NCC identity, in broad sense, includes NCC induction within the neural tube, at both trunk and cranial levels. In mice, Twist1 is not expressed in trunk NCCs at all. At a cranial level, Twist1 is expressed too late to be a NCC inducing or patterning gene. As I mentioned earlier, it comes up during delamination.

      6) Figure 7G only partly corresponds to the positioning of the NCC markers in a mouse embryo. Id1 and Id2 are broadly expressed throughout all phases of NCC development and in the entire dorsal neural tube beyond the NC region. Mentioning Otx2 as a NCC specifier is strange. At the same time, Msx1, Msx2, Zic1 are excellent genes! Tfap2 is a bit too late, but still ok. Please keep in mind, Msx1/2, Zic1 are expressed before Twist1, and, thus, Twist1 can be downstream of this gene expression program. Also, these genes become downregulated quite soon upon delamination, whereas Twist1/Chd7/8 expression stays (in vivo). Expression pattern of Tfap2a better corresponds to Twist1, although Tfap2a comes a bit before Twist1, and, besides, Tfap2a is expressed independently of Twist1 in trunk NCC. Despite such gene expression divergence, Twist1-based networks might provide positive feedback loops stabilizing the expression of other transcriptional programs that were originally induced by other factors. It might be good mentioning this to the readers. This "stabilizing role" of the Twist1 network can be a really important one. Given the incremental and combinatorial nature of the phenotype in vivo - this is most likely the case. I believe these points are important to reflect in the discussion section.

      Reviewer #2:

      This manuscript, by Fan et. al, is a comprehensive look into the bHLH protein TWIST1 and its interacting proteins in neural crest cell differentiation. The study employs an unbiased screen where a TWIST1-BirA fusion is used in conjunction with biotin linking to collect Twist protein transcriptional complexes. (BioID-Proximity-labeling, TWIST1-CRMs). The work appears carefully done and the data and impact of this study are high given the nature of NCCs being involved as key players in craniofacial and cardiac developmental defects. The association of TWIST1 with the chromatin helicases CHD7 & 8 is important to understand as numerous TWIST1 loss-of-function studies indicate that its role in NCCs clearly is required for normal NCC function.

      The NCC cell line O9-1 is used to collect the data. Genetic interactions between TW1, Chd7, Chd8 and Whsc1 are tested in genome edited ESCs. Overall, this is a well-executed, interesting and important study.

      Reviewer #3:

      Using BioID, the authors identified more than 140 proteins that potentially interact with transcription factor Twist1 in a neural crest cell line. Most of these 140 Twist1-interactomes do not overlap with the 56 known Twist1 binding partners during neural crest cell development (see below). By focusing on several strong Twist1 binding partner candidates (particularly a novel candidate CHD8), the authors found:

      1) Twist1 interacts with these proteins via its N-terminal protein domain as demonstrated by co-IP.

      2) Compound heterozygous mutation of Chd8, Chd7 or Whsc and Twist1 displayed more severe phenotype compared to heterozygous mutation of Twist1 alone, for example, more significant reduction of the cranial nerve bundle thickness.

      3) ChIPseq analysis of Twist1 and CHD8 and key histone modifications revealed that the binding of Chd8 strongly correlates with those of Twist1, to active enhancers that are also labeled by H3K4me3 and H3K27ac.

      4) The binding of CHD8 requires the binding of Twist1, but not vice versa.

      5) Twist1-Chd8 regulatory module represses neuronal differentiation, and promotes neural crest cell migration, and potentially their differentiation into the non-neuronal cell types.

      The authors use an impressive array of different techniques, both in vitro and in vivo, and yield consistent results. The manuscript is nicely written. The findings are nuanced, but the major conclusions are largely expected.

      Critiques:

      • As the title states, the three key TWIST interacting factors that most of the study focuses on are chromatin regulators. However, the consequence of mutating these factors at the epigenetic level was not directly addressed, including the level of active histone modification, the accessibility of the Twist1/CDH co-bound promoters/enhancers, and the position of nucleosomes.
      • CRISPR-generated ESCs and chimera technology were used effectively to generate mutants. In comparison, the analysis of the phenotypes was rather cursory and can benefit from more in-depth molecular analysis. The altered genes found in mutant NEC and NCC in the last section of the study, especially, should be validated in mutants.
      • Across the manuscript, there were jumps from NCC to NEC and back. It will be important to justify why a certain cell type is selected for each analysis, focusing on the biological question at hand.
      • Using BioID, the authors detected 140 different proteins that interact with Twist1. However, only 4 of them overlap with the 56 known Twist1 partners (Figure 1A). This result suggests that BioID identified almost a distinct set of Twist1-interacting proteins, compared to the published results. The authors need to discuss the discrepancy, and the underlying reasons.
      • The authors show that Twist1 colocalizes with Cdh8, and is required for the binding of Cdh8, thus suggesting that Twist1-Cdh8 form a regulatory module. Given the degenerate nature of bHLH factor binding motifs, it is likely that the binding of Twist1, and subsequently the binding of Cdh8, are dictated by other transcription factors. Therefore, a motif enrichment analysis should be done among the Twist1/Cdh8 co-binding sites, and compare those motifs enriched in Twist1-only and Cdh8-only binding sites.
      • The increasing expression of DRG neurons genes in Twist1/Cdh8 mutants suggests a possible transition from cranial NC to trunk NC. Therefore, the authors should examine the expression of marker genes accordingly.
    1. ventually, a different fixation overtook extreme weather, and another after that. Such is the pattern of categorical learners. It may have been sharks before the Titanic, or the other way around—I’ve forgotten. Two years have passed since we saw “Nature’s Fury”; a year and a half since our president led the US to withdraw from the Paris climate accords. The boy is seven now, what Jesuits call “the age of reason.” The girl is five and learning to read. If current trends continue, the world is projected to be 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels by the time they reach their late twenties. The scientific community has long held two degrees Celsius to be an irreversible tipping-point. Two degrees of global warming, according to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), marks climate catastrophe.

      I was surprised that this paragraph is exactly regarding the topic I wrote for my social commentary essay. Writing my essay, I learned so much about what disaster would happen and how the end of the world comes as result of global warming. Intuitionally, we could think the increase of 1 or 2 degree is not a big deal. We could think it is 'just' 2 degrees but is isn't just marginal increase. Our earth is very sensitive to climate change so if the increase of climate really happens, weather anomalies such as heat waves, heavy rains, and fine dust will occur more and more frequently and drought will be everywhere resulting us to lose all the food resources. Unless any food-substitution is invented, we are all put the death because of famine. This is very serious problem. Since I am reading this article after writing my essay, my fury and anxiety penetrate deeply into my heart. Now I once more awakened why we should confront the global warming issue.

    1. In Global Catastrophic Risks 2016, we referred to a number used in the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change: a 0.1% annual chance of human extinction. Stern uses this as a modelling assumption for discussing discount rates. There is a small amount of discussion of this figure in the Stern Review. It is clear that Stern did not intend the figure as an estimate. We’ve had a critique of our use of the figure forwarded to us, and we think its analysis is useful. We had no intention of using this figure in a misleading way, and we agree that we made a mistake in how we presented this figure. We should have been clearer about what the status of the number in the Stern Review was and about how we intended to use the comparison. Throughout the rest of the report, we are very explicit that we do not believe it is possible to make robust probability estimates of extinction or catastrophic risk and do not attempt to (except for asteroid and super-volcano risk). This mistake does not affect the validity of the main points of the report – that global catastrophic risks are worth addressing and that there are things we can do to address them. In our report, we originally wrote that: “It is easy to be misled by the apparently low probabilities of catastrophic events. The UK’s Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change suggested a 0.1% chance of human extinction each year, similar to some rough estimates of accidental nuclear warfare. At first glance, this may seem like an acceptable level of risk. Moreover, small annual probabilities compound significantly over the long term. The annual chance of dying in a car accident in the United States is 1 in 9,395. However, this translates into an uncomfortably high lifetime risk of 1 in 120. Using the annual 0.1% figure from the Stern Review would imply a 9.5% chance of human extinction within the next hundred years.” We were aware that the Stern Review used this figure merely as a modelling assumption, and were trying to give a concise accurate statement. Our intention in using the figure from the Stern Review was not to try to pin down an accurate estimate of the likelihood of global catastrophe, but to demonstrate that existing serious analysis treats the 0.1% probability as a plausible modeling assumption, which would have consequences that are interesting and non-intuitive. We also had a full-page summary pull-quote, which said: “The UK’s Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change suggested a 0.1% chance of human extinction each year. If this estimate is correct, a typical person is more than five times as likely to die in an extinction event as in a car crash.” This implies more confidence in the 0.1% figure than either we felt or expect the Stern Review to have felt, and more than our argument required. The car crash comparison was picked up in The Atlantic, which reported it as an unconditional claim and emphasised it in their article. We did not intend to argue that the 0.1% figure was an accurate estimate of extinction risk (as we did not plan to offer an estimate of extinction risk), so this was inadvertently misleading to Atlantic readers. We believe that in general The Atlantic stood out by doing an excellent job of engaging constructively with our work. We are also sorry in particular that we allowed the word ‘estimate’ to enter the soundbite on the full page. This error occurred at a late stage in the editing; the word was introduced to avoid an ambiguity, but not subjected to proper review. We have carefully reviewed our language concerning the Stern Review, and written to our partners at the Global Challenges Foundation who published the report to change this to: “The probabilities of these catastrophic events are low but not negligible. Moreover, small annual probabilities compound significantly over the long term. We do not know of a robust estimate of the annual probability of global catastrophic risk. Nor do we believe that we are able to create a robust estimate because the uncertainties in key parameters are so large. However, for extinction risks some experts have suggested that a 0.1% annual chance of extinction is within the range of plausible orders of magnitude. A 2008 Oxford survey of expert judgement on the topic implied an average annual extinction risk over the next century of around 0.2%. [1] The UK’s Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change used 0.1% as an upper bound modeling assumption for annual extinction risk. Now let’s suppose that the chance of extinction were 0.1% per year and consider the consequences. It may seem at first glance that this would be an acceptable level of risk. However, that would mean an individual would be more than five times as likely to die in an extinction event than a car crash. Moreover, these small annual probabilities add up, so that the chance of extinction within the next century under this scenario is 9.5%.  A global catastrophe, which involves the death of 10% of the global population, is more likely than an event that involves human extinction. As a result, even if 0.1% were on the high side for extinction risk, it might be of the appropriate order of magnitude for global catastrophic risk.” We are also correcting a citation and adding a citation to [1] Sandberg, A. & Bostrom, N. (2008): “Global Catastrophic Risks Survey”, Technical. Report #2008-1, Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University: pp. 1-5. We are also making the corresponding changes in the one-page soundbite and will also write to The Atlantic to inform them of the inadvertent inaccuracy in the article, and offer to help in correcting the nuance of the article.

      Beautiful example of a detailed (and reasonable) correction after the horse has bolted i.e. the report is out there, being used in media etc. I came across via 3 hyperlink trail from the report of an otherwise very admirable foundation where i found the claim "a typical person today is five times more likely to die in an extinction event than a car crash." There link took me to the Atlantic which had added an errata at the top (no doubt some time after their article was out) which took me to here.

      I also find the correction somewhat dubious:

      We do not know of a robust estimate of the annual probability of global catastrophic risk. Nor do we believe that we are able to create a robust estimate because the uncertainties in key parameters are so large. However, for extinction risks some experts have suggested that a 0.1% annual chance of extinction is within the range of plausible orders of magnitude. A 2008 Oxford survey of expert judgement on the topic implied an average annual extinction risk over the next century of around 0.2%. [1] The UK’s Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change used 0.1% as an upper bound modeling assumption for annual extinction risk.

      The experts they cite are, guess what, Sandberg and Bostrom from the very same organization they are associated with (Future of humanity). Their number seems IMO too high. A 0.2% risk per annum => 20% chance of total extinction in the next 100y (and where do these point estimates come from anyway!).

      Furthermore, this is not a constant risk as with say a car crash (where the risk exists every time i drive).

    1. Many students believe that intelligence is fixed, that each person has a certain amount and that's that. We call this a fixed mindset, and, as you will see, students with this mindset worry about how much of this fixed intelligence they possess. A fixed mindset makes challenges threatening for students (because they believe that their fixed ability may not be up to the task) and it makes mistakes and failures demoralizing (because they believe that such setbacks reflect badly on their level of fixed intelligence

      I too used to believe this as a student in high school, and in high school i did not try things i thought i was gonna fail, i loved this passage, its also sad to think that there a lot of students out there that do not try something they could be good at.

    1. Note: This rebuttal was posted by the corresponding author to Review Commons. Content has not been altered except for formatting.

      Learn more at Review Commons


      Reply to the reviewers

      We thank the reviewers for their feedback and constructive comments to our work. We provide here a point-by-point response to the comments of Reviewers #1, #2 and #3 (text in grey and italic).

      Responses written in plain text correspond to Reviewer comments that have been addressed in the revised version of the manuscript provided at this stage of the review process (referred-to as “revised version I” below).

      Reponses written in bold text correspond to comments that need further experiments. The list of experiments we intend to perform to address these comments is provided in a separate document (Revision plan). The results of these additional experiments will be included in a later revised version of the manuscript referred-to as “revised version II” below.

      Reviewer #1

      The manuscript addresses an important topic, the posttranscriptional maturation of ribosomes. This topic is inherently interesting because we normally think of ribosome biogenesis as a sequential series of steps that automatically proceeds and cannot be "accelerated" in physiological conditions, but only "delayed" in the presence of genetic mutations. In short, the manuscript proposes that RIOK2 phosphorylation by the action of RSK, below the Ras/MAPK pathway promotes the synthesis of the human small ribosomal subunit.

      I honestly admit that I have some difficulties in reviewing this manuscript. The quality of the presented data is, in generally, good. However, overall I find the whole manuscript preliminary and I am not much convinced of the conclusions. Several aspects are superficially analyzed. In short, I think that most of the conclusions are not fully supported by the data because shortcuts are present. A list of all the aspects that I found wrong are listed.

      Biological issue

      1. _The authors claim that the effects of the inhibition of the maturation of ribosomes by acting on a pathway upstream of RIOk2 are limited to the 40S subunit. This is far from being a trivial point, for the following reason. RIOK2 is known to affect the maturation of 40S ribosomes. Hence, the fact that using an upstream inhibitor of the MAPK pathway such as PD does not inhibit 60S processing in reality would argue against a biologically relevant control in ribosome maturation (of the MAPK patheay). Have the authors considered this? In a way, also, given the fact that the mutants confirm a role in 18S final maturation, it is a bit complex to put all the data in a clear biological context.

      We agree that we put more emphasis on the effects on the pre-40S pathway than on the pre-60S pathway in the original manuscript but we did not claim that the effects of PD or LJH inhibitors of the MAPK pathway are restricted to the 40S subunit. We described that the effect of PD or LJH on the 32S was less severe than on the 30S, and we did mention variations of the 12S intermediate. These changes are in the same range of amplitude as the changes in the 21S and 18S-E intermediates in the small subunit pathway. The Northern blot data concerning the pre-60S pathway were placed in the supplementary material of the original manuscript, which may have left the reader with an impression of lesser emphasis. We rephrased this part in the present revised version I of the manuscript (Page 6, Line 26) and we now show the pre-40S and pre-60S intermediates on the same figures (Figures 1A and 1C).

      In addition, we will probe more exhaustively the intermediates of the pre-60S pathway in the revised version II of the manuscript as described in the revision plan. These data will be complemented with metabolic labeling experiments to provide a more dynamic analysis of the pre-rRNA processing defects resulting from inactivation of the MAPK pathway. Furthermore, as requested by Reviewer #2 (see below), we will quantify more accurately these data.

      A number of specific issues will be concisely described.

      Manuscript very well written. Data do not always support the strong conclusions. Low magnitude of the observed effects.

      In introduction the authors make a general claim that ribosome biogenesis is one of the most energetically demanding cellular activities. This statement lingers in the literature since 15 years but in reality it has never been formally proved for mammalian cells, and certainly not for HEK293 cells. The original statement, to my knowledge, can be traced by some obscure statement referred to the yeast case and then repeated as a truth. In conclusion, beside being a very banal observation, it should be referenced.

      We agree with this comment of Reviewer #1. The original statement has been proposed by Jonathan R. Warner (Warner, 1999, TiBS and references therein) and data from the Bähler group also supported this statement (Marguerat et al., 2012, Cell). However, these data were indeed referring to yeast (S. cerevisiae and S. pombe). In the present revised version I of the manuscript, we introduced the reference of a review providing quantitative data of ribosome biogenesis in human cells (Lewis & Tollervey, 2000, Science) and we modified the problematic sentence as follows:” Growing human cells produce around 7500 ribosomal subunits per minutes (Lewis and Tollervey 2000), which represents a significant expenditure of energy.” (Page 4, Line 1).

      Growth factors, energy status are not cues but are proteins or metabolites (introduction).

      We agree with this comment of Reviewer #1. We changed the text accordingly in the revised version I of the manuscript (Page 4, Line 8).

      Authors write about mTOR without making statements on mTORC1/2. This is very obsolete. Also I am not sure that the choice of Geyer et al., 1982, and subsequent papers makes much sense. At the very minimum TOP mRNA concepts and mTORC1 must be defined.

      We provide more details on the mTOR pathway in the revised version I of the manuscript according to Reviewer #1’s suggestions (Page 4, Line 13 and Page 5, Line 3).

      The authors claim that their work fills a major gap between known functions of MAPK and cytoplasmic translation. I would not be so sure about it.

      Our original sentence stated that “our work fills a major gap between currently known functions of MAPK signaling in Pol I transcription and cytoplasmic translation”. Indeed, although MAPK signaling was known to regulate Pol I transcription and cytoplasmic translation, the impact of the pathway on the post-transcriptional steps of ribosome synthesis, namely pre-ribosome assembly and maturation, has been very little investigated and remains poorly understood. Our data provides the first example of a detailed mechanism of regulation of the maturation of pre-ribosomal particles by the MAPK pathway. Reviewers #2 and #3 seem to agree with this point:

      Reviewer #2: “However, there is a lacking mechanistic connection of signaling pathways to pre-rRNA processing and maturation steps of ribosome biogenesis. The authors set out to provide a specific example of a direct target of MAPK signaling, RSK that regulates pre-rRNA maturation through the phosphorylation of a ribosome assembly factor (RIOK2), offering for the first time providing mechanistic insight into MAPK regulation of pre-rRNA maturation.

      Reviewer #3: “With these provisos, the work is technically good and will be of considerable interest to the field. The post-transcriptional regulation of ribosome synthesis is increasingly recognized a significant topic.

      Results. Authors start with a major mistake, i.e. that PMA selectively stimulates the MAPK pathway. Perhaps it stimulates, certainly it does not do it selectively.

      We agree with this comment of Reviewer #1. We removed the term “selectively” in the problematic sentence (Page 6, Line 8).

      RIOK2 phosphosites are first found by bioinformatics analysis. It should be noted that the predicted phosphosite (S483) is found only in a limited set of datasets from MS databases. The actual importance of this site would not emerge from unbiased studies. Also, there are many other phosphosites that were not analyzed in this study.

      We agree with Reviewer #1 that phosphorylation of S483 of RIOK2 has been detected in a limited number of mass spectrometry datasets, but these datasets have been reported in high impact journals (Nature Methods, Mol Cell Proteomics, Science), attesting of the quality of these studies

      As mentioned by Reviewer #1, there are several other phosphosites within RIOK2 that were not analyzed in our study. We provided the list of these phosphosites in Supplementary Table S1 of the original manuscript. Besides T481 and S483, none of the other sites belong to consensus motifs recognized by ERK or RSK at medium and high stringency. They are therefore less relevant to our study. We only analyzed phosphorylation at S483 because: (i) our mass spectrometry analysis revealed that S483 is the only phosphosite in RIOK2 whose level increases upon MAPK activation but not in the presence of the MAPK inhibitor PD184352 (Figure 2B); (ii) our in vitro kinase assay showed that the phosphorylation level of RIOK2 by RSK is residual when S483 is replaced by a non-phosphorylatable alanine (Figure 3D); (iii) our data presented in Figure 2C further show that mutation of T481 to an alanine does not prevent RIOK2 phosphorylation on RxRxxS/T motifs upon stimulation of the MAPK pathway.

      We clarified this point in the relevant part of the result section of the revised version I of the manuscript (Page 7, Lines 16 and 24, Page 8, Line 17 and Page 9, Line 5).

      Throughout the paper the authors use the word strongly, significantly, but the actual effects seem in general quite marginal.

      We agree with Reviewer #1 that some of the phenotypes described in the manuscript are modest, in particular the phenotypes resulting from the S483A mutation of RIOK2, which is not aberrant for a point mutation. We rephrased several sentences throughout the manuscript to soften the formulation in the description and interpretation of the data and in the conclusions.

      Discussion. The authors claim that they provide solid evidence on MAPK signalling to ribosome maturation. At the very best this is circumstantial evidence for the 40S maturation.

      We rephrased the sentence accordingly (Page 16, Line 5): “Our study provides evidence that MAPK signaling applies another level of coordination during ribosome biogenesis, by directly regulating pre-40S particle assembly and maturation.

      Figure 1.

      Unclear why LJH should increase P-ERK.

      A negative feedback loop has been described in the MAPK pathway whereby RSK activation partially inhibits ERK phosphorylation (Saha et al., 2012, Horm Metab Res; Dufresne et al., 2001, MCB; Schneider et al., 2011, Neurochem; Re Nett et al., 2018, EMBO Rep). Inactivation of RSK with LJH alleviates this inhibition, which results in increased phosphorylation levels of ERK.

      We added this information in the revised version of the manuscript along with the corresponding references (Page 6, Line 17).

      General lack of quantitation (sd, replicates, bars). Experiment done only on a single cell line in a single experimental setup.

      As also requested by Reviewer #2 (Major comment 1.), we applied in the revised version I of the manuscript RAMP quantifications to all Northern blot data. We included error bars corresponding to biological replicates.

      Furthermore, in order to validate the impact of the MAPK pathway on pre-ribosome assembly and maturation, we plan to perform the same experiments using PD inhibitors in different cell lines and we will provide a figure with accurate RAMP quantifications, error bars and statistical significance, in the revised version II of the manuscript (see revision plan).

      Very different effects on 21S by LJH, PMA and siRNA for RIOK2. Overall the message given by the authors is to me mysterious.

      We assume that the reviewer wanted to point out the difference between PMA, PMA+LJH and shRNA for RSK since we did not perform RNAi targeting RIOK2. We agree with this comment. We believe that this difference is likely due to experimental setups that are different between both experiments. In the experiment using inhibitors, we assessed short-term effects of RSK inhibition after acute stimulation of the MAPK pathway (starved cells stimulated with PMA), while in the experiment using shRSK, we monitored long term effects of RSK depletion in serum-growing cells in which other signaling pathways are also active. Prolonged RSK depletion is likely to induce pleiotropic cellular effects, which would interfere with ribosome biogenesis both directly and indirectly. These differences probably explain the variable effects on the 21S intermediate. However, in both experiments we do observe an accumulation of the early 30S intermediate, consistent with the phenotype observed when ERK is inactivated (PD inhibitor), therefore indicating that RSK regulates some post-transcriptional stages of ribosome biogenesis.

      To make our results clearer we have withdrawn the experiments using shRSK to avoid the risk of showing indirect effects due to the prolonged absence of RSK. Instead, we included RAMP analyses with error bars from 2 biological replicates using PD and LJH inhibitors (Figure 1B).

      Figure 2.

      Several red flags. For instance in 2C the loaded levels of RIOK2-HA loaded are clearly less than the ones of the other genotypes, hence the conclusion on P-RIOK2 is not convincing.

      Our aim in this experiment was to compare the impact of PMA treatment on the phosphorylation levels of different RIOK2 mutants (T481A, S483A, double mutant). For a given mutant, the levels of RIOK2 loaded in the two conditions (i.e. not stimulated and PMA stimulated) are very similar and we therefore assume that our conclusions are valid.

      We nevertheless plan to repeat these experiments and quantify the data for the revised version II of the manuscript.

      Staining with anti-P RIOK2 lacks controls, how can be sure that the signal is due to the phosphate? Phosphatase treatment?

      We fully agree with Reviewer #1 and we did perform an experiment showing that the phosphorylation signal disappears following treatment of the protein extracts with λ-phosphatase. We did not show these data in the original version of the manuscript because of space limitations. We added these data in the supplementary material of the revised version I of the manuscript (Supplementary Figure S2B) and amended the text accordingly (Page 7, Line 24)

      Why FBS does not lead to ERK staining in HEK293? There are plenty of growth factors in FBS that should lead to ERK phosphorylation. I do not understand this experiment.

      We agree with this comment. Addition of serum to starved cells does lead to ERK and RSK phosphorylation but with a much lesser efficiency compared to stimulation by EGF and PMA. ERK phosphorylation is barely visible on the exposure shown in Figure 2D but RSK-phosphorylation is clearly observed, although the signal is much weaker compared to EGF and PMA treatments. It is common to observe a stronger response with purified PMA and EGF (see Carrière et al., 2011, JBC ; Ray et al., 2013, Oncogene). There are indeed several growth factors in the serum, but the most abundant (Insulin, IGF1, TGF) are present at ng/ml concentration, while EGF is used at 25 µg/ml in Figure 2D. Moreover, they are not very strong activators of the Ras/MAPK pathway, and it is also possible that after 20 min of FBS treatment the phosphorylation is in the decreasing phase.

      In the present revised version I of the manuscript, we included a set of western blots from another experiment showing the same results but of better quality to make the effects more visible (Fig. 2D). We also provided quantifications of phosphorylation of RIOK2 and associated statistical analyses (Fig. 2E).

      Figure 3. In vitro phosphorylation, if I understood, it relies on a truncated version of RIOK2. Why? Is the folding of the full length protein not permissive to in vitro phosphorylation?

      We did not test phosphorylation of the full length RIOK2 protein in vitro because RIOK2 has been reported to auto-phosphorylate (Zemp I. et al., 2009, JCB) and we were concerned that this auto-phosphorylation activity of RIOK2 in addition to RSK phosphorylation may render this experiment inconclusive.

      HA-RSK3 is less?

      It was reported that RSK3 is insoluble when over-expressed (Zhao et al., 1996, JBC), which explains the lower levels of protein recovered in our soluble extract. The information was present in the legend of Figure but we transferred it to the main text of the result section in the present revised version I of the manuscript (Page 10, Line 3).

      Figure 4. Immunofluorescence is low mag, difficult to understand.

      We agree with Reviewer #1. We modified the FISH experiment figure to show cells with a higher magnification and we provided more details in the text (Page 12, Lines 20-25) to facilitate the understanding of the data.

      I really like the experiments with RIOK2 mutants, however I wonder what about protein levels after the knock-in? Given the 18S phenotype overlap between the phenotype of the RIOK2 loss of function with the S483A, testing protein level becomes of the utmost importance.

      We checked RIOK2 protein levels and observed that the mutations do not decrease the level of RIOK2. On the contrary, the mutations slightly increase RIOK2 levels. Therefore, we are pretty confident that the phenotypes resulting from expression of RIOK2 mutants do not result from defects in the global accumulation of the protein. These data have been added to Figure 4C of the revised version I of the manuscript and we amended the text accordingly (Page 12, Line 5).

      Figure 5. Low quality IFL.

      Our aim in preparing this figure was to show many cells in the different images to show that the effect of our mutation was homogenous at the level of cell populations. The drawback is that cells are small and look blurred. We improved the quality of the figure in this revised version I of the manuscript with new images from the same experiment, showing less cells with a higher magnification.

      Hard to think that histogram quantitation of nuclear versus cytoplasmic staining are reliable in the absence of fractionation, better quantitation, experiment done in other cell lines and so on.

      We provide in this revised version I of the manuscript a supplementary figure explaining the procedure we used to quantify the fluorescence data (Supplementary Fig. S7).

      Furthermore, to confirm this result using other experimental conditions and cell lines, we will transfect HEK293 and HeLa cells with plasmids expressing GFP-tagged RIOK2 WT or the S483S mutant and we will compare the kinetics of nuclear import of both proteins upon inhibition of pre-40S particle export by leptomycin B using fluorescence microscopy and GFP quantifications. Second, we will transfect HeLa cells with plasmids expressing HA-tagged RIOK2 WT or S483A and perform fractionation assays to monitor their presence in both cytoplasmic and nuclear compartments. We will include these data in the revised version II of the manuscript.

      However, very beautiful Fig. 5E perhaps the best of the paper shows also mobility shift driven by S483, thus supporting posttranslational modifications.

      We thank Reviewer #1 for this comment. We added the note on the evidence of RIOK2 post-translational modification in the result section (Page 14, Line 9).

      Fig. 6. IFL studies are really impossible to interpret.

      We improved the quality of the figure with new images from the same experiment, showing less cells with a higher magnification. NOB1 IF data and quantifications have been transferred to the supplemental material (Supplemental Fig. S4A and S4B) to clarify the figure. In addition, we provided more explanations on the principle of this experiment and expected results in the text (Page 15, Line 9).

      The effects on RIOK2 release (this figure) and 18S maturation (Fig. 5) are very clear and of great quality.

      We thank Reviewer #1 for this comment.

      Overall conclusions. The manuscript tends to overinflate the meaning of several experiments. What to me is very clear and interesting is that the the authors provide clear evidence that S483A mutants have a defect in 40S maturation. Whether this is due to MAPK signalling, is only circumstantial. I would suggest to build up on the strong findings and eliminate ambiguous data.

      We do not fully agree with this comment of Reviewer #1. If mutation S483A were simply a partial loss of function mutation, this would not be of strong interest for the subject of this manuscript. It would just indicate that S483 is important for RIOK2 function independently of its phosphorylation status. Our data show that the impact of S483 mutation on pre-rRNA processing and other phenotypes is different depending on whether the serine is converted to an alanine (phosphorylation mutant) or to an aspartic acid (phospho-mimetic mutation). These data are a strong indication that what matters is not simply the serine residue by itself but its phosphorylation status.

      Reviewer #1 (Significance (Required)):

      The paper deals with an important topic, namely whether a regulation of ribosome maturation exists, and how it is mechanistically regulated. In this context, the analysis of the ERK pathway is highly needed considered that most works deal with effects of the PI3K-mTOR pathway, and the parallel, yet important RAS-ERK pathway, is less understood.

      As a final note, we should consider that S6K downstream of mTOR, and ribosomal S6K, downstream of ERK have been considered to share some substrates.

      We introduced this information in the revised version of the manuscript (Page 19, Line 20). A related comment has been raised by Reviewer #3 (see below, Caveat #2).

      The manuscript is interesting, but several statements given by the authors are rather superficial. An example, listed in the previous section, relates to the linguistic usage of mTOR kinase, instead of detailing whether we are dealing with mTORc1 or mTORc2.

      We agree with this comment of Reviewer #1. Given that the main focus of this manuscript is the regulation by the MAPK pathway, we had chosen to put less emphasis on mTOR in the introduction. However, we added more precise information on mTOR in the present revised version I of the manuscript to address this comment (Page 4, Line 13 and Page 5, Line 3).

      A second gross mistake is the definition of PMA as a stimulator of the ERK pathway. If this is certainly true, this is historically not correct as seminal papers by the group of Parker define this drug as a stimulator of conventional PKC kinases. In short, this paper is a step back in knowledge from the perspective of the literature context.

      We are a bit confused by this comment because seminal papers from the Parker group clearly state that PMA activates the MAPK pathway via PKC (Adams and Parker, 1991, FEBS Lett.; Ways et al., 1992, JBC; Whelan et al., 1999, Cell Growth Differ.). We agree, as mentioned earlier by Reviewer #1, that PMA is not specific to MAPK, a comment that has been addressed above.

      All people interested to the crosstalk between ribosome maturation and signaling pathways will be certainly read this manuscript.

      My expertise is within the ribosome biology and signalling field.

      Reviewer #2 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)):

      There have been mechanistic connections of various signaling pathways to regulation ribosome biogenesis steps including rDNA transcription by RNA polymerase I and III, ribosomal protein transcription, and differential mRNA translation efficiency. However, there is a lacking mechanistic connection of signaling pathways to pre-rRNA processing and maturation steps of ribosome biogenesis. The authors set out to provide a specific example of a direct target of MAPK signaling, RSK that regulates pre-rRNA maturation through the phosphorylation of a ribosome assembly factor (RIOK2), offering for the first time providing mechanistic insight into MAPK regulation of pre-rRNA maturation.

      The authors observe slight pre-rRNA processing defects upon the use of RSK inhibitors and RSK depletion. They identified several candidate ribosome assembly and modification factors containing the canonical RSK substrate motif, including the RIOK2 kinase. Phosphorylation at this motif was verified to be specifically phosphorylated by RSK1 and 2 isoforms in cells and in an in-vitro kinase assay. The authors produced RIOK2 knock-in eHAP1 cell lines expressing non-phosphorylatable or phosphomimetic versions of RIOK2, observing slowed cellular proliferation, decreases in global translation, slight pre-rRNA processing abnormalities, but not changes in overall mature 18S rRNA levels. More specifically, the authors defined the inability of RIOK2 to be phosphorylated leads to defects in RIOK2 dissociation from the pre-40S ribosomal subunit in an in-vitro assay, and inability for it to be recycled for reuse in pre-ribosome export from the nucleus to the cytoplasm by immunofluorescence.

      Overall, the authors provide an interesting mechanism of MAPK regulation of a ribosome assembly factor RIOK2. However, they fail to provide the necessary reproducibility, controls, quantification, and consistent results between experiments to support their hypotheses.

      Major Comments:

      1. The northern blots reported throughout the manuscript are lacking proper reproducibility and quantification. First, the northern blots are lacking a loading control, which is necessary to report fold changes that are being measured across treatments. Please include a proper loading control (i.e. 7SL or U6 RNAs). Additionally, more rigorous analysis of the pre-rRNA precursor levels through ratio analysis of multiple precursors (RAMP) (Wang et al 2014) can be completed to provide a clearer depiction on which precursor(s) are accumulating. It is unclear for the Figure 1 northern blots if there were replicates completed and what the error bars represent in Figure 1B. Please report replicates, so that statistical analysis can be completed on the differences in precursor relative abundance. This need is emphasized by the small changes observed in pre-rRNA levels (less than 2 fold) between conditions.

      As mentioned above (Reviewer #1), we applied in the revised version I of the manuscript RAMP quantifications to all Northern blot data. These quantifications are shown as separate panels in the figures of the revised manuscript.

      Furthermore, we are planning to repeat the Northern blot experiments of Figure 1 to obtain biological replicates in other cell lines. We will probe the membranes to detect the 7SL RNA as a loading control in all these experiments. We will perform RAMP analyses on all these Northern blot experiments to provide more accurate quantifications of the pre-rRNA levels in the different conditions. These data will be included in the revised version II of the manuscript.

      1. The western blots reported throughout the manuscript are lacking proper reproducibility and quantification. For example, the western blots validating RSK1 and RSK2 depletion in Figure 1C lack a proper loading control. Additionally, it is unclear if there are replicates completed and there is lack of statistical analysis to determine if the changes are significant. Please include loading controls, replicates, and quantification of the western blots throughout the manuscript.

      We have included actin levels as loading controls in several figures (Figures 2D, 3A, 3C, 3E, 4C) of the revised version I of the manuscript. We also added phosphorylated Rps6 at Ser235/36 to monitor RSK activity in Figures 1A, 2D, 3A.

      We provided quantifications and associated statistical analyses of phosphorylation of RIOK2 presented in Figures 3A and 3C of the revised version I of the manuscript. We also included quantifications of the in vitro phosphorylation assays presented in Figures 3F and 3G.

      We are nevertheless planning to repeat and quantify more accurately the western blot experiments presented in Figures 2A, 2C and 3E of the revised version I of the manuscript. These data will be included in the revised version II of the manuscript.

      1. Please report the full bioinformatic analysis of the RSK substrate motif search among human AMFs including other AMFs found in this search. A sorted list format would be valuable for the reader to understand other potential RSK substrates involved in ribosome biogenesis.

      We understand the request of Reviewer #2. Providing the full list of AMFs identified in our bioinformatic screen would be valuable for the reader, mostly because it would make clearer that RSK seems to be regulating multiple stages of the pre-ribosome maturation pathway, therefore that RSK inhibition induces pleiotropic defects in ribosome synthesis. However, we are currently working on a more global study of the impact of MAPK regulation on the post-transcriptional steps of ribosome synthesis that we would like to publish in a near future.

      1. The authors report that RSK inhibition/depletion leads to accumulation of the 30S pre-rRNA, yet mutation of its target site on RIOK2 or RIOK2 depletion leads to an accumulation of the 18S-E pre-rRNA. Additionally, the phosphomimic mutation of RIOK2 leads to an accumulation of 30S, the opposite of the expected result. Please elaborate on this discrepancy in processing defects observed across experiments.

      In contrast to RIOK2 which is specifically involved in the late, cytoplasmic stages of the maturation of the pre-40S particles, RSK regulates ribosome biogenesis at multiple levels. Upon activation of the MAPK pathway, RSK activates Pol I transcription in the nucleoli and promotes translation of mRNAs encoding ribosomal proteins and AMFs. In addition, our bioinformatic screen identified several AMFs at different stages of the maturation pathway of both ribosomal subunits as potential targets of RSK. These considerations imply that RSK inhibition is expected to impact ribosome biogenesis at multiple levels (Pol I transcription, availability of RPs and AMFs, export of the pre-ribosomal particles, probably several maturation steps) whereas RIOK2 inactivation more specifically delays 18S-E processing in the cytoplasm. In terms of processing, RSK inhibition induces a significant accumulation of the 30S intermediate. This is another evidence that RSK regulates pre-rRNA processing at several stages. This phenotype might result, as recently described in yeast (Yerlikaya et al., 2016, MCB), from an inhibition of RPS6 phosphorylation which affects its early incorporation into pre-ribosomes, although this has not been demonstrated in human cells. This 30S precursor accumulation affects production of the downstream intermediates and we strongly believe that this precludes accumulation of 18S-E even if the activity of RIOK2 is affected. Given the broad implication of RSK at different stages of ribosome biogenesis, it is biologically relevant to observe that inactivation of RSK does not result in the same processing defects as inactivation of RIOK2.

      We nevertheless tried to make this point clearer in the present revised version I of the manuscript. We added in the supplementary material a diagram (Supplementary Fig. S1C) showing all the known and hypothetical targets of ERK and RSK in ribosome synthesis to provide the readers with a global view of the function of RSK in this process and refer to this figure in the introduction and results. In the introduction, we also emphasize more on the multiple aspects of the regulation of ribosome synthesis by ERK and RSK (Page 4, Line 18).

      Concerning the phospho-mimetic mutant, it does accumulate slightly the 45S and 30S intermediates contrary to the non-phosphorylatable mutant but this is not totally unexpected. RIOK2 is incorporated into pre-ribosomes in the nucleus, at a stage that remains unclear, and constitutive RIOK2 phosphorylation may interfere with this recruitment and affect processing at an earlier stage. This point has been addressed in the discussion of the revised version I of the manuscript (Page 18, Line 7).

      Are there similar results for RSK depletion/inhibition and RIOK2 release from the pre-40S and inability to import into the nucleus? If so, this could provide phenotypic consistency between these two proteins in the proposed pathway to further support the hypothesis.

      We performed the same experiments as reported in Figure 6C to try to demonstrate a cytoplasmic retention of RIOK2 after leptomycin B treatment upon ERK inhibition (PD treatment). We also performed IF and cell fractionation experiments upon PD treatment. In all cases, we failed to observe the expected result. We strongly believe that we are facing here the same problem as described above for the previous comment of Reviewer #2. ERK and thus RSK inhibition leads to accumulation of the early, nucleolar 30S intermediate, indicating that the processing pathway is significantly blocked at an early stage preceding formation of the pre-40S particles in which RIOK2 is recruited. This early blockage most likely explains why we do not see the same phenotypes. We discussed this comment in the discussion section of the revised version I of the manuscript (Page 18, Line 19).

      1. Mature levels of 18S rRNA are not altered in the RIOK2 mutant cell lines. This could be due to compensation in these mutant cell lines since RIOK2 is essential.

      We agree with Reviewer #2 that compensation mechanisms may operate to restore mature 18S rRNA levels despite RIOK2 mutation. On the other hand, although RIOK2 is indeed essential, we may expect that the point mutation of S483 only partially affects RIOK2 function and delays the maturation of pre-40S particles but not to a sufficient extent to impact the mature 18S rRNA levels. This has been observed by others (Montellese et al., 2017, NAR; Srivastava et al., 2010, MCB).

      We added this point in the discussion section of the revised version I of the manuscript (Page 19, Line 9).

      Please report the mature 18S rRNA levels upon shRNA depletion and RSK inhibitors to provide insight into if this pathway significantly alters mature 18S rRNAs as a mechanism for the altered translation and proliferation observed.

      We will probe the levels of the mature 18S and 28S rRNAs in these experiments and the results will be included in Figure 1 of the revised version II of the manuscript.

      Minor Comments:

      1. Figure 1A lower: The authors use an RSK inhibitor LJH685, that does not inhibit RSK phosphorylation S380. Therefore, another verification of RSK inhibition must be used besides RSK-pS380 abundance as for PD184352 inhibition. Please validate the usage of this RSK inhibitor in the experiments by inclusion of quantification of a direct downstream substrate of RSK, such as YB1-pS102 quantification.

      We agree with Reviewer #2. We have probed the membrane with anti-RPS6 and anti-phosho-RPS6 antibodies to show the effect of LJH treatment on RPS6 phosphorylation. These data have been added to Figure 1A in the revised version I of the manuscript and the text has been updated (Page 6, Line 16).

      1. Page 7, Lines 8-12: The authors state that RSK knockdown led to increases in the 45S, while the LJH685 treatment led to no changes in 45S levels due to differences in growth conditions. Please elaborate more on how growth conditions would alter 45S pre-rRNA levels. It would be expected that stimulation of the MAPK pathway would increase pre-rRNA transcription compared to steady state growth conditions. However, pre-rRNA processing northern blots are only measuring steady state levels of the precursors. Thus, an rDNA transcription assay would need to be completed to evaluate these differences.

      We do observe that PMA treatment of starved cells induces an increase in 45S precursor levels, consistent with an increase in transcription but we agree that northern blot experiments measure the steady-state levels of the intermediates.

      To address this comment, we propose to perform short pulse labelings with ortho-phosphate to assess synthesis of the 45S precursor independently of its processing in the different conditions. These data will be included in the revised version II of the manuscript.

      1. Figure 2C: Please quantify these results to properly evaluate the role of these two phosphorylation sites in MAPK signaling.

      We will repeat these experiments and quantify the results in the new version of Figure 2C.

      1. Please include the RIOK2 pS483 antibody generation methodology used in this study.

      We added this information in the Materials and Methods section of the revised version I of the manuscript (Page 21, Line 22).

      1. In vitro kinase assay methods: Is the recombinant RSK1 the human version of the protein? Please clarify in methods.

      Human recombinant RSK1 has been purchased from SignalChem. The information has been added in the revised version I of the manuscript (Page 30, Line 5).

      1. Figure 4B: Please include statistical analysis of the puromycin incorporation assay.

      We performed a statistical analysis of this assay out of 3 replicates. This analysis has been included in the present revised version I of the manuscript (Figure 4B).

      1. Page 13, Line 18: Please explain why RIOK2 co-IP with NOB1 is important.

      We added this explanation in the result section of the revised version I of the manuscript (Page 14, Line 3).

      1. In vitro dissociation assay: There is no control for pulldown of entire pre-40S particles and not just NOB1 protein. Thus, it is unclear if RIOK2 is dissociating from NOB1 or entire pre-40S particles. Please reference previous literature of the methodology of this experiment if applicable. Additionally, please include controls, such as western blotting of ribosomal proteins or northern blotting of rRNA in the pulldown fraction used.

      We agree with Reviewer #2. We have probed the membranes with antibodies detecting LTV1 and ribosomal protein RPS7 to show that the entire pre-40S particle is indeed pulled down. These additional data have been added in Figure 6A of the revised version I of the manuscript and the text has been amended accordingly (Page 14, Line 20).

      1. Page 16, Lines 10-12: The authors state "RSK facilitates the release of RIOK2 and other AMFs", however the only other AMF in this study was NOB1. Please reword appropriately that most likely facilitates release of RIOK2 and other AMFs in a RIOK2 dependent or independent manner if it also phosphorylates other AMFs which possess the motif.

      We agree with Reviewer #2 and we changed the text accordingly (Page 16, Line 11) but we did not introduce the hypothesis that RIOK2 may target directly other AMFs of late pre-40S particles which possess the motif because our in silico screen did not identify consensus RXRXXS/T motifs in any of these factors.

      Reviewer #2 (Significance (Required)):

      This manuscript is significant due to the lack of mechanistic connection of cellular signaling pathways to pre-rRNA processing. There have been, for the most part, no mechanistic connection of signaling pathways to pre-rRNA processing regulation and none for direct targets of MAPK signaling (Reviewed in Gaviraghi et al 2019). They provide the groundwork for analysis of MAPK signaling in regulation of an assembly factor and inclusion of their motif analysis could provide RSK signaling targets' regulation of specific steps of ribosome biogenesis that remain to be elucidated.

      Although the research delves into a specific mechanism, its audience could be far reaching as it is in the ribosome biogenesis field and MAPK signaling, which have broad implications in cancer and developmental diseases.

      Reviewer #3 (Evidence, reproducibility and clarity (Required)):

      The authors report that inhibition of MAPK signaling via RSK is associated with modest alterations in the relative abundance of human pre-rRNA species, that are most marked for 30S but also visible for 21S - although not clearly shown for 18S-E.

      RIOK2 has two closely spaced sites predicted as RSK targets, one of which was confirmed to be MAPK sensitive and shown to be an RSK substrate in vitro. Substitution of Ser483 with Ala was associated with reduced growth and 18S-E accumulation, consistent with impaired NOB1 cleavage activity. RIOK2-S483A also showed greater pre-ribosome association in vivo and consistent with this, more stable association in vitro and increase cytoplasmic residence. These effects are clear, although the data do not directly demonstrate their linkage to loss of RSK phosphorylation.

      The mutations were apparently generated directly in the genome of haploid cells, potentially raising concerns that the introduction of a deleterious mutation might have been accompanied by compensatory mutations elsewhere. However, three cells line gave similar results, mitigating this concern.

      Specific comments:

      1. To help the reader, the authors should directly discuss why they think the data on MAPK inhibition did not reveal a clearer pre-18S cleavage phenotype, as would have been expected for loss of RIOK2 activity.

      This comment is similar to major comment #4 of Reviewer #2.

      Please refer to the above response.

      1. Fig. S3: The degree of RSK depletion with the siRNAs appears very modest, as are the effects on RIOK2-P. Moreover, the double depletion is not clearly better than single depletions. These data should probably be supported by quantitation or withdrawn._

      We agree with Reviewer #3 that the effects shown in this figure are modest but we originally chose to show these data because their further supported the role of RSK in RIOK2 phosphorylation at S483 in complement to Figure 3.

      We have withdrawn this figure from the present revised version I of the manuscript.

      1. Fig. 5D: For 18S-E recovery with RIOK2, is the ratio adjusted for the increase in 18S-E abundance in the mutant - ie is recovery increased when adjusted for the increased pre-rRNA abundance?_

      In these experiments, the tagged versions of RIOK2 WT and S483A have been expressed ectopically from plasmids in cells expressing the endogenous wild-type protein. RIOK2 S483A does not behave as a dominant negative mutant in these conditions and does not induce 18S-E accumulation, as shown in the northern blot analysis of the 18S-E levels in the cell lysates (lower panel). This information is indicated in the revised version I of the manuscript (Page 13, Line 26).

      Reviewer #3 (Significance (Required)):

      Overall, the analyses on the phenotype of RIOK2-S483A, and the demonstration that this site is an RSK target, appear convincing.

      Caveats are

      1) the phenotype seen on inhibition of RSK, would not have implicated RIOK2 as the obvious candidate for the factor responsible for the observed processing defects;

      We agree with this comment, which has also been raised by Reviewer #2 (Major comment 4.). We provide several evidence in the manuscript that RSK phosphorylates RIOK2 on S483 in vivo and in vitro (Figure 3). However, as explained above in response to Reviewer #2, we cannot correlate the in vivo phenotypes resulting from RSK or RIOK2 inactivation for biological reasons. As mentioned in the introduction, RSK regulates multiple substrates at different stages of ribosome biogenesis (Translation of RPs and AMFs, Pol I transcription, pre-ribosome maturation and export), whereas RIOK2 is specifically implicated in the cytoplasmic maturation of pre-40S particles. Inactivation of RSK is therefore expected to induce pleiotropic defects in ribosome biogenesis, and in particular early defects (Reduced Pol I transcription, 30S precursor accumulation) that preclude observation of the expected phenotype linked to RIOK2 inactivation, i.e. 18S-E accumulation.

      We nevertheless tried to clarify this point as described in the response to Reviewer #2, major comment 4.

      2) the RIOK2-S483A phenotype is not demonstrated to be RSK dependent. This raises the possibility that, although RSK can phosphorylate S483, the effects of the mutation are not due to the loss of this modification.

      As mentioned by Reviewer #3, our data show that RSK can phosphorylate RIOK2 S483 in vitro and in vivo (Figure 3). We believe that Figure 4C strongly suggests that the accumulation of the 18S-E in cells expressing RIOK2 S483A mutant is due to the loss of S483 phosphorylation, since mutation of S483 to an aspartic acid (S483D), generally considered as a mutation mimicking a phosphorylated serine, does not affect 18S-E maturation. However, although our manuscript provides many lines of evidence identifying RSK as the kinase responsible for RIOK2 phosphorylation at S483, we cannot formally exclude that other AGC kinases involved in growth and proliferation, such as S6K or Akt, may also be involved redundantly or alternatively. Our data presented in Figure 3A showing that treatment of cells with the RSK inhibitors LJH decrease RIOK2 phosphorylation at S483 support a specific role of RSK.

      We developed this point in the discussion section (Page 18, from Line 25).

      With these provisos, the work is technically good and will be of considerable interest to the field. The post-transcriptional regulation of ribosome synthesis is increasingly recognized a significant topic.

    1. Reviewer #3:

      This manuscript reports results from an eye tracking study of humans walking in natural terrain. These eye movements together with images simultaneously obtained by a head-fixed camera are used to calculate optic flow fields as seen by the retina and as seen by the head-fixed camera. Next, the structure of these flow fields is described. It is noted that this structure is somewhat stable in the retinal image, due to compensatory gaze stabilisation reflexes, but varies wildly in the head-centric image. Then, the authors estimate the focus of expansion in the head-centric flow and argue that it cannot be used for locomotor control, because it also varies wildly during walking. In a second, more theoretical section of the manuscript, they calculate retinal flow for a movement over an artificial ground plane, given the locomotor and eye movements recorded previously. They describe the structure of the retinal flow and compute the distribution of curl and divergence across the retina as well as in a projection onto the ground plane. They argue that curl around the fovea and the location of the maximum of divergence can be used to estimate the direction of walking relative to the direction of gaze and in relation to the ground plane.

      I really like the experimental part of the study. However, I see fundamental issues in the theoretical part, in the general framing of the presentation, and in misrepresentations of previous literature.

      The simultaneous measurement of head-centric image and gaze with sufficient temporal resolution to calculate retinal flow during natural walking provides a beautiful demonstration of retinal flow fields, and confirms many known aspects of retinal flow. The calculation of head-centric flow from the head camera images provides a compelling, though not unexpected, demonstration that the FOE in head-centric flow is not useful for locomotor control. It is not unexpected since one of the most well-known issues in optic flow is that the FoE is destroyed when self-motion contains rotational components (Regan and Beverley, 1982, Warren and Hannon, 1990, Lappe et al. 1999). Although this is often presented as an issue of eye movements in retinal flow, it applies to all rotations and combinations of rotations that exist on top of any translational motion of the observer. Thus, the oscillatory bounce and sway motion of the head during walking is expected to render any use of the FOE in a head-centric image futile.

      Yet, the first part of the manuscript is very much framed as a critique of the idea of a stable FoE in head-centric flow, presuming that this is what previous researchers commonly believed. This argument contains a logical fallacy. Previous research argued that there is no FoE in retinal flow because of eye rotations (e.g. Warren and Hannon, 1990). This does not predict, inversely, that there is an FoE in head-centric flow. In fact, it does not provide any prediction on head-centric flow. The authors often suggest that a stable FoE in head-centric flow is tacitly implied, commonly believed, etc without providing reference. In fact, the only paper I know that specifically proposed a head-centric representation of heading is by van den Berg and Beintema (1997).

      Instead, the fundamental problem of heading perception is to estimate self-motion from retinal flow when the self-motion that generates retinal flow combines all kinds of translations and rotations. The present study shows, consistent with much of the prior literature, that the patterns of retinal flow are sufficiently stable and informative to obtain the direction of one's travel in a retinal frame of reference, and, via projection, with respect to the ground plane. This is due to the stabilising gaze reflexes that keep motion small near the fovea and produce (in case of a ground plane) a spiralling pattern of retinal flow. This is well known from theoretical and lab studies (e.g. Warren and Hannon, 1990, Lappe et al., 1998, Niemann et al., 1999, Lappe et al. 1999) and, to repeat, beautifully shown for the natural situation in the present data. The presentation should link back to this work rather than trying to shoot down purported mechanisms that are obviously invalid.

      The second part of the manuscript presents a theoretical analysis of the retinal flow for locomotion across a ground plane under gaze stabilisation. This has two components: (a) the structure of the retinal flow and the utility of gaze stabilisation, and (b) ways to recover information about self-motion from the retinal flow. Both aspects have a long history of research that is neglected in the present manuscript. The essential circular structure of the retinal flow during gaze stabilisation is long known (Warren and Hannon, 1990, van den Berg, 1996, Lappe et al., 1998, Lappe et al. 1999). Detailed analyses of the statistical structure of retinal flow during gaze stabilisation have shown the impact and utility of gaze stabilisation (Calow et al., 2004; Calow and Lappe, 2007; Roth and Black, 2007) and provided links to properties of neurons in the visual system (Calow and Lappe, 2008). These studies included simulated motions of the head during walking, as in the current manuscript, and extended to natural scenes other than a simple ground plane.

      Given the structure of the retinal flow during gaze stabilisation the central question is how to recover information about self-motion from it. The authors investigate a proposal originally made by Koenderink and van Doorn (1976; 1984) that relies on estimates of curl and divergence in the visual field. They propose that locomotor heading may be determined directly in retinotopic coordinates (l. 314). This is true, but it fails to mention that other models of heading perception during gaze stabilisation similarly determine heading in retinotopic coordinates (e.g. Lappe and Rauschecker, 1993; Perrone and Stone, 1994; Royden, 1997). In fact, as outlined above, the mathematical problem of self-motion estimation is typically presented in retinal (or camera) coordinates (e.g. Longuet-Higgins and Prazdny, 1980). The problem with the divergence model in comparison to the other models above is threefold. First, it really only works for a plane, not in other environments. Second, it requires a local estimate of divergence at each position in the visual field. The alternative models above combine information across the visual field and are therefore much more robust against noise in the flow. One would need to see whether the estimate of the divergence distribution is sufficient to work with the natural flow fields. Third, being a local measure it requires a dense flow field while heading estimation from retinal flow is known to work with sparse flow fields (Warren and Hannon, 1990). Thus, the theoretical part of the manuscript should either provide proof that the maximum of divergence is superior to these other models or broaden the view to include these models as possibilities to estimate self motion from retinal flow.

      The case is similar for the use of curl. It is true that the rotational or spiral pattern around the fovea in retinal flow provides information about the direction of self motion with respect to the direction of gaze, as has been noted many times before. This structure is used by many models of heading estimation. However, curl is, like divergence, a local property and thus not as robust as models that use the entire flow field. It may be interesting to note that neurons in optic flow responsive areas of the monkey brain can pick up this rotational pattern and respond to it in consistency with their preference for self-motion across a plane (Bremmer et al., 2010; Kaminiarz et al. 2014).

      I think what the authors may want to draw more attention to is the dynamics of the retinal flow and the associated self-motion in retinal (or plane projection) coordinates. The movies provide compelling illustrations of how the direction of heading (or the divergence maximum, if you want to focus on that) sways back and forth on the retina and on the plane with each step. This requires that the analysis of retinal flow (and the estimation of self-motion) has to be fast and dynamic, or maybe should include some form of temporal prediction or filtering. Work on the dynamics of retinal flow perception has indeed shown that heading estimation can work with very brief flow fields (Bremmer et al. 2017), that the brain focuses on instantaneous flow fields (Paolini et al. 2000) and that short presentations sometime provide better heading estimates than long presentations (Grigo and Lappe, 1999). The temporal dynamics of retinal flow is an underappreciated problem that could be more in the focus of the present study.

      Additional specific comments:

      Footnote on page 2: It is not only VOR but also OKN (Lappe et al., 1998, Niemann et al., 1999) that stabilises gaze in optic flow fields.

      Line 55: Natural translation and acceleration patterns of the head have been considered by (Cutting et al., 1992; Palmisano et al. 2000; Calow and Lappe, 2007, 2008; Bossard et al., 2016)

      Line 59: The statement is misleading that the key assumption behind work on the rotation problem is that the removal of the rotational component of flow will return a translational flow field with a stable FoE. Only one class of models, those using differential motion parallax (Rieger and Lawton, 1985, Royden, 1997) explicitly constructs a translational flow field and aims to locate the FoE in that field. Other models (Koenderink and van Doorn, 1976, 1984; Lappe and Rauschecker, 1993; Perrone and Stone, 1994) do not subtract the rotation but estimate heading in retinal coordinates from the combined retinal flow. This also applies to line 109.

      Last paragraph on page 5: Measures of eye movement during walking in natural terrain were also taken by Calow and Lappe (2008) and 't Hart and Einhäuser (2012).

      Lines 140 to 163: This paragraph is problematic and misleading as pointed out before.

      Line 193: The lack of stability is expected, as outlined above. The use of a straight line motion in psychophysical experiments reflects an experimental choice to investigate the rotation problem in retinal flow, not an implicit assumption that bodily motion is usually along a straight line.

      Line 200: That gaze stabilization may be an important component in understanding the use of optic flow patterns has also long been assumed (Lappe and Rauschecker, 1993; 1994; 1995; Perrone and Stone, 1994; Glennerster et al. 2001; Angelaki and Hess, 2005; Pauwels et al., 2007).

      Line 314: Locomotor heading may be determined directly in retinotopic coordinates. Yes, and this is precisely what the above mentioned models do.

      Line 334: What is meant by "robust" here? The videos seem to show simulated flow for a ground plane, not the real flow from any of the terrains. It is not clear whether the features can be extracted from the real terrain retinal flow.

      First paragraph on page 15: This is an important discussion about the dynamics of retinal flow in conjunction with the dynamics of the gait cycle. It should be expanded and better balanced with respect to previous work and other models. It is true that any simple inference of an FoE would not work. However, models that estimate heading (not FoE) in the retinal reference frame would be consistent with the discussion. Oscillations of the head during walking affect the location of the divergence maximum and curl as much as the direction of heading in retinal coordinates. In fact, the videos nicely show how these variables oscillate with each step. This applies to all retinal flow analyses, and is a problem for any model. It requires a dynamical analysis. The speed of neural computations is an issue, of course, but it applies to divergence and curl in the same way as to other models. There is some indication, however, that neural computations on optic flow are fast, deal with instantaneous flow fields, and respond consistently to natural (spiral) retinal flow, as described above.

      Line 393: This paragraph is misleading in suggesting that naturally occurring flow fields have not been used in psychophysical and electrophysiological experiments.

      Line 516: This has been done by Bremmer et al. (2010) and Kaminiarz et al. (2014). Their results are consistent with computing heading directly in a retinal reference frame as predicted by several models of retinal flow analysis (e.g. Lappe et al. 1999).

      References:

      Angelaki, D. E. and Hess, B. J. M. (2005). Self-motion-induced eye movements: effects an visual acuity and navigation. Nat. Rev. Neurosci., 6:966-976.

      Bossard, M., Goulon, C., and Mestre, D. R. (2016). Viewpoint oscillation improves the perception of distance travelled based on optic flow. J Vis, 16(15):4.

      Bremmer, F., Kubischik, M., Pekel, M., Hoffmann, K. P., and Lappe, M. (2010). Visual selectivity for heading in monkey area MST. Exp. Brain Res., 200(1):51-60.

      Calow, D., Krüger, N., Wörgötter, F., and Lappe, M. (2004). Statistics of optic flow for self-motion through natural scenes. In Ilg, U., Bülthoff, H. H., and Mallot, H. A., editors, Dynamic Perception, Workshop of the GI Section 'Computer Vision', pages 133-138, Berlin. Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Aka GmbH.

      Calow, D. and Lappe, M. (2007). Local statistics of retinal optic flow for self- motion through natural sceneries. Network, 18(4):343-374.

      Calow, D. and Lappe, M. (2008). Efficient encoding of natural optic flow. Network Comput. Neural Syst., 19(3):183-212.

      Cutting, J. E., Springer, K., Braren, P. A., and Johnson, S. H. (1992). Wayfinding on foot from information in retinal, not optical, flow. J. Exp. Psychol. Gen., 121(1):41-72.

      Grigo, A. and Lappe, M. (1999). Dynamical use of different sources of information in heading judgments from retinal flow. JOSA A, 16(9):2079-2091.

      't Hart, B. M. and Einhäuser, W. (2012). Mind the step: complementary effects of an implicit task on eye and head movements in real-life gaze allocation. Exp. Brain Res., 223(2):233-249.

      Kaminiarz, A., Schlack, A., Hoffmann, K.-P., Lappe, M., and Bremmer, F. (2014). Visual selectivity for heading in the macaque ventral intraparietal area. J. Neurophys. 112(10):2470-80

      Lappe, M., Pekel, M., and Hoffmann, K. P. (1998). Optokinetic eye movements elicited by radial optic flow in the macaque monkey. J. Neurophysiol., 79(3):1461-1480.

      Lappe, M. and Rauschecker, J. P. (1993). A neural network for the processing of optic flow from ego-motion in man and higher mammals. Neural Comp., 5(3):374-391.

      Lappe, M. and Rauschecker, J. P. (1994). Heading detection from optic flow. Nature, 369(6483):712-713.

      Lappe, M. and Rauschecker, J. P. (1995). Motion anisotropies and heading detection. Biol. Cybern., 72(3):261-277.

      Niemann, T., Lappe, M., Büscher, A., and Hoffmann, K. P. (1999). Ocular responses to radial optic flow and single accelerated targets in humans. Vision Res., 39(7):1359-1371.

      Pauwels, K., Lappe, M., and Hulle, M. M. (2007). Fixation as a mechanism for stabilization of short image sequences. Int. J. Comp. Vis., 72(1):67-78.

      Perrone, J. A. and Stone, L. S. (1994). A model of self-motion estimation within primate extrastriate visual cortex. Vision Res., 34(21):2917-2938.

      Regan, D. and Beverley, K. I. (1982). How do we avoid confounding the direction we are looking and the direction we are moving? Science, 215:194-196.

      Rieger, J. H. and Lawton, D. T. (1985). Processing differential image motion. J. Opt. Soc. Am. A, 2(2):354-360.

      Roth, S. and Black, M. J. (2007). On the spatial statistics of optical flow. Int. J. Comp. Vis., 74(1):33-50.

      Royden, C. S. (1997). Mathematical analysis of motion-opponent mechanisms used in the determination of heading and depth. J. Opt. Soc. Am. A, 14(9):2128-2143.

      van den Berg, A. V. (1996). Judgements of heading. Vision Res., 36(15):2337-2350.

      van den Berg, A. V. and Beintema, J. A. (1997). Motion templates with eye velocity gain fields for transformation of retinal to head centric flow. NeuroReport, 8(4):835-840.

  7. Oct 2020
    1. He highlights the Memex’s killer feature of associative linking and how trails of links have never been implemented in the way the Memex envisioned: It is associative indexing though, that is the essential feature of the memex, “the process of tying two items together is the important thing.” Bush describes a hypertext like mechanism at this point, but most interesting from my perspective is his emphasis on a trail as a fundamental unit — something we largely seem to have lost today. […] Documents and links we have aplenty. But where are our trails?
  8. covidandreopeningcolleges.weebly.com covidandreopeningcolleges.weebly.com
    1. Son, Changwon, et al. “Effects of COVID-19 on College Students’ Mental Health in the United States: Interview Survey Study.” Journal of Medical Internet Research, vol. 22, no. 9, Sept. 2020. EBSCOhost, doi:10.2196/21279.    This article demonstrates the effect online learning has had on college students. The author notes that COVID-19 has placed large amounts of stress and anxiety on students, leading many to fall behind in school and other areas in life. From a study performed on college students in Texas, 91% of the students reported they were negatively impacted by the pandemic, with 86% citing lack of social interactions due to online learning. The author suggests schools look into this issue and recommends they look to find alternatives that can help students through this hard time, which, if the situation allows, could point to bringing students back on campus. Online learning has proven to be very lonely and isolating, and many students need to be back in a social environment where they can interact with their peers. Prolonged isolation may prove to be detrimental to students' mental health as time goes on. Bradley EH, An M, Fox E. Reopening Colleges During the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Pandemic—One Size Does Not Fit All. JAMA Netw Open. 2020;3(7):e2017838. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.17838This article highlights the different ways schools can safely reopen during the COVID-19 pandemic. Obviously every school is different, and different strategies can be applied to different situations. For example, bigger schools may need to employ stricter restrictions and more social distancing measures than a smaller school. Some schools may decide they cannot safely reopen at full capacity, while others can and predict they will have minimal cases. The way in which a school reopened depends on its size, population, location, and local laws regarding the pandemic. As time goes on, schools can learn from each other and determine what is best for them and their students. This article will provide insight on the morality of opening schools, and show that while every school has the opportunity to bring students on campus, not all of them should. Coryton, Demitri. “What Does the Research Evidence Tell Us about the Effect of Closing and Reopening Schools during the Coronavirus Pandemic?” 14-19 Learning & Skills Bulletin, no. 331, Apr. 2020, pp. 18–27. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=142954038&site=ehost-live.        This article gives an international perspective to the issue of having schools closed during the pandemic. Using data collected from the United Kingdom at the start of their lockdown, the author highlighted some of the key effects shutting down all schools in the UK had on society. It looked into economic impacts, whether or not the lockdown was effective, as well as how successful the switch to online learning was compared to other European countries. This article will provide insights to the effects of having campuses closed, and the possible negative effects we may begin to see in our own societies if schools do not begin to reopen. Andersen, M., Bento, A., Basu, A., Marsicano, C., & Simon, K. (2020, September 23). College Openings, Mobility, and the Incidence of COVID-19 Cases. Retrieved October 28, 2020, from https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.22.20196048v1.full.pdf html    This article studied two separate colleges and the COVID-19 cases on campus and in the surrounding areas. The researchers carefully monitored cases starting two weeks before classes started up until two weeks after. There was a noticeable link between spikes in cases in areas where students were coming from COVID-19 “hotspots”, pointing to the idea that bringing students back to school from around the country is not exactly safe nor smart. The data found in this study can be used to predict the pattern of coronavirus spread in other campuses across the country. This article shows the effects of opening campus on the local community. Yamey, G., & Walensky, R. (2020, September 01). Covid-19: Re-opening universities is high risk. Retrieved from https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3365This article looks at schools that have reopened for the fall semester, and looks deeper into why they have increased spread of COVID-19. Looking at other countries’ successful reopening of schools, researchers saw that the most effective way to stop the spread on college campuses was to first stop community spread. This has also shown to have been true in the United States, with case counts being relatively low in areas that have stopped community COVID-19 spread. Researchers then went on to say that in order to have a safe reopening, schools should have a thorough and efficient testing strategy which allows cases to be caught before they can spread. This article sheds light on some of the issues facing the reopening of schools in the United States.

      These all look good - I don't think you need to change anything.

    1. But why should we think these histories are in any normative or descriptive sense alike?

      This rhetorical question is a good response to the claims of Bloom's argument. The author suggest that even though a good may be historically relevant, it may not describe the worth of the good entirely. Instead, the author suggests more reasoning than simply history defining something as expensive.

    1. The history of science teaches us how difficult this renun-ciation is. How we come to hypotheses, theories, systems, or whatever other modes of thought may exist through which we try to grasp the infinite, will be the topic of the second part of this short essay. In the first part I will consider how we proceed when we aim to understand the forces of nature. My current studies of the history of physics often provide the opportunity to think about these matters and give rise to this little essay. I strive to show in what way many great indi-viduals have furthered, and also harmed, science.As soon as we consider a phenomenon in itself and in relation to others, neither desiring nor disliking it, we will in quiet attentiveness be able to form a clear concept of it, its parts, and its relations. The more we expand our consider-ations and the more we relate phenomena to one another, the more we exercise the gift of observation that lies within us. If we know how to relate this knowledge to ourselves in our actions, we earn the right to be called intelligent.

      En ese párrafo el autor nos habla sobre el primer tema que abordará. Básicamente dice que intentará demostrar en el ensayo como a lo largo del tiempo muchos grandes individuos han fomentado correcta e incorrectamente la ciencia. Y de que el don de la observación cuanto más ampliamos nuestras consideraciones y cuanto más relacionamos los fenómenos entre sí es ejercitándolo. Teniéndolo y sabiéndolo relacionar con nosotros mismos en nuestras acciones podremos ganar el derecho a ser llamados inteligentes.

    1. Author Response

      Summary:

      The strengths of the study are the findings that a single oxytocin level measured from saliva or plasma is not meaningful in the way that the field might currently be measuring. The reviewers appreciated this finding, and the careful attention to detail, but felt that the results fell short.

      Reviewer #1:

      This article describes the investigation of a valuable research question, given the interest in using salivary oxytocin measures as a proxy of oxytocin system activity. A strength of the study is the use of two independent datasets and the comparison between intranasal and intravenous administration. The authors report poor reliability for measuring salivary oxytocin across visits, that intravenous delivery does not increase concentrations, and that salivary and blood plasma concentrations are not correlated.

      Line 77-78: While it's true that saliva collection provides logistical advantages, there are also measurement advantages (e.g., relatively clean matrix) that are summarised in the MacLean et al (2019) study, which has already been cited.

      Thanks for the suggestion. We added this advantage:

      Line 101Compared to blood sampling, saliva collection presents several logistical and measurement advantages (i.e. relatively clean matrix)(1).”

      Line 86: It is important to note that the 1IU intravenous dose in this study led to equivalent concentrations in blood compared to intranasal administration.

      The reviewer is right that 10 IU (over 10min) in our case increased the concentrations of plasmatic oxytocin beyond those observed for the spray or nebuliser (we reported the full time-course of variations in plasmatic oxytocin in another manuscript we published earlier this year)(2). This was an intentional aspect of our study design. We decided to use the highest intravenous dose (at the highest rate of 1IU/min) that we could get permission to administer safely in healthy volunteers as a proof of concept, so as to achieve a robust and prolonged increase in plasmatic oxytocin over the course of our full testing session. In this manner, we demonstrate that even when plasmatic levels of OT are maintained substantially increased throughout the observation interval, we cannot detect increases in salivary oxytocin. In this aspect, we believe that our manuscript goes one step beyond the important findings described in of Quintana et al. 2018(3), showing that this phenomenon is not linked to dosage (or to amount of increase in plasmatic levels of exogenous OT), as far as we can determine given the current safety standards for the administration of OT IV.

      Please see also response to Reviewer 2, point 1.

      Line 158: When using both ELISA and HPLC-MS, extracted and unextracted samples are correlated when measuring oxytocin concentrations in saliva, at least in dogs. (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneumeth.2017.08.033).

      Thanks for pointing out this study. Indeed, in this specific study the authors found correlations between extracted and unextracted saliva samples. Such associations in humans have nevertheless been rare. In humans, the body of evidence suggests that the measurements obtained when comparing extracted samples to unextracted samples, or when comparing samples obtained using different methods of quantification (for instance, ELISA versus radioimmunoassay), do not correlate or show very low correlations (4, 5). Furthermore, most ELISA kits and HPLC-MS protocols to measure oxytocin have so far fallen short on sensitivity to detect the typical concentrations observed in humans at baseline (0-10pg/ml)(6). The current gold-standard method for quantifying oxytocin in biological fluids is the radioimmunoassay we used in this study(4). This method has shown superior sensitivity and specificity when compared to other quantification methods, when combined with extracted samples; therefore, it was our primary choice. We now highlight this advantage in the revised version of the manuscript more explicitly.

      Line 129For all analyses, we followed current gold-standard practices in the field and assayed oxytocin concentrations using radioimmunoassay in extracted samples, which has shown superior sensitivity and specificity when compared to other quantification methods(7).

      Statistical reporting: I ran the article through statcheck R package (a web version is also available) and found a number of inconsistencies with the reported statistics and their p values. For example, on Line 302 the authors reported: t(123) = 1.54, p = 0.41, but this should yield a p value of 0.13. The authors should do the same and fix these errors.

      Thanks very much for taking the time to check our statistical reporting thoroughly. We apologize if we were not sufficiently clear in the previous version of the manuscript, but the p-values we reported are corrected for multiple comparisons using Tukey correction. Currently, statcheck can only evaluate inconsistencies when the results are reported in the standard APA style and does not take into consideration corrections for multiple comparisons of any kind. We did check all of our statistical reporting and the p-values and correspondent statistics are correct (we only corrected an inadvertent error in reporting the degrees of freedom for these tests). In any case, we have now clarified in the manuscript when the reported p-values have been adjusted for multiple comparison to avoid any further confusion.

      Line 305: The confidence intervals for these correlations should be reported.

      We have now added the confidence intervals, estimated using bootstrapping, in our results section.

      Line 348: This is an important point, but it's important to note that the vast majority of these studies use plasma or saliva measures. Perhaps CSF measures are more reliable, but the question wasn't assessed in the present study, and I'm not sure if anyone has looked at this question.

      We are not aware of any study evaluating the stability of measurements of oxytocin in the CSF. Indeed, there are only a few studies sampling CSF to measure oxytocin in clinical patients and it is unlikely that CSF will become a widely used fluid to measure oxytocin in humans, given the invasiveness of the procedure to obtain CSF samples. Here, we wanted to refer specifically to saliva and plasma, which remain as the most popular options for measuring oxytocin in humans and which we investigated specifically in the current study. We have changed the text accordingly for clarity.

      Line 466 “Our data poses questions about the interpretation of previous evidence seeking to associate single measurements of baseline oxytocin in saliva and plasma with individual differences in a range of neuro-behavioural or clinical traits.”

      Line 423: I broadly agree with this conclusion, but it should be added that "single measurements of baseline levels of endogenous oxytocin in saliva and plasma are not stable under typical laboratory conditions" Perhaps these measures can be more stable using other means (i.e., better standardising collection conditions). But the fact remains, under typical conditions these measures do not demonstrate reliability.

      Thanks for the suggestion. We have revised the text accordingly throughout the manuscript (examples below). Our study is a pharmacological study, which means that it is conducted in a highly controlled setting and adheres to strict protocols (i.e. we tested participants at the same time of the day, we instructed participants to abstain from alcohol and heavy exercise for 24 h and from any beverage or food for 2 h before scanning). These exclusion criteria were stricter than those applied in a large number of studies sampling saliva and plasma for measuring oxytocin for the purposes estimating possible associations with various traits associating. Most of these studies do not control, for instance, for fluid or food ingestion. Therefore, we expected our reliability calculations to represent an optimistic estimate of the reliabilities of the salivary and plasmatic oxytocin concentration used in most studies.

      For now, it remains unclear to us what factors might be driving the within-subject variability in salivary and plasmatic concentrations we report in this study. Thanks to Reviewer 3, we are now confident that this is unlikely to represent measurement error (see response to Reviewer 3, point 3).

      Line 117 “Here, we aimed to characterize the reliability of both salivary and plasmatic single measures of basal oxytocin in two independent datasets, to gain insight about their stability in typical laboratory conditions and their validity as trait markers for the physiology of the oxytocin system in humans.

      Line 567 “In summary, single measurements of baseline levels of endogenous oxytocin in saliva and plasma as obtained in typical laboratory conditions are not stable and therefore their validity as trait markers of the physiology of the oxytocin system is questionable.”

      Reviewer #2:

      Summary:

      To test questions whether salivary and plasmatic oxytocin at baseline reflect the physiology of the oxytocin system, and whether salivary oxytocin index its plasma levels, the authors quantified baseline plasmatic and/or salivary oxytocin using radioimmunoassay from two independent datasets. Dataset A comprised 17 healthy men sampled on four occasions approximately at weekly intervals. In the dataset A, oxytocin was administered intravenously and intranasally in a triple dummy, within-subject, placebo-controlled design and compared baseline levels and the effects of routes of administration. With dataset A, whether salivary oxytocin can predict plasmatic oxytocin at baseline and after intranasal and intravenous administrations of oxytocin were also tested. Dataset B comprised baseline plasma oxytocin levels collected from 20 healthy men sampled on two separate occasions. In both datasets, single measurements of plasmatic and salivary oxytocin showed insufficient reliability across visits (Intra-class correlation coefficient: 0.23-0.80; mean CV: 31-63%). Salivary oxytocin was increased after intranasal administration of oxytocin (40 IU), but intravenous administration (10 IU) does not significantly change. Saliva and plasma oxytocin did not correlate at baseline or after administration of exogenous oxytocin (p>0.18). The authors suggest that the use of single measurements of baseline oxytocin concentrations in saliva and plasma as valid biomarkers of the physiology of the oxytocin system is questionable in men. Furthermore, they suggest that saliva oxytocin is a weak surrogate for plasma oxytocin and that the increases in saliva oxytocin observed after intranasal oxytocin most likely reflect unabsorbed peptide and should not be used to predict treatment effects.

      General comments:

      The current study tested research questions relevant for the study field. The analyses in two independent datasets with different routes of oxytocin administrations is the strength of current study. However, the limited novelty of findings and several limitations are noticed in the current report as described below.

      Specific and major comments:

      1) Previous study with similar results has already revealed that saliva oxytocin is a weak surrogate for plasmatic oxytocin, and increases in salivary oxytocin after the intranasal administration of exogenous oxytocin most likely represent drip-down transport from the nasal to the oral cavity and not systemic absorption (Quintana 2018 in Ref 13). Therefore, the novelty of current findings is limited. The authors should more clearly state the novelty of current results and the replication of previous findings.

      We apologize for not describing the novelty and impact of our findings with sufficient clarity, and thanks for the opportunity to do so. Our study had two major goals. The first was to investigate whether single measurements of salivary and plasmatic concentrations of oxytocin can be reliably estimated within the same individual when collected at baseline conditions (i.e. without any experimental manipulation). As the reviewer highlighted, this is an important methodological question given the wide use of these measurements in a large and increasing number of studies to establish associations between the physiology of the oxytocin system and a number of brain and behavioural phenotypes in both clinical and non-clinical samples. However, to our knowledge, no previous study has appropriately conducted a thorough investigation of the reliability of these measurements (see also response to Reviewer 3, point 5). Thanks to our study, we now know that when single measurements are collected at baseline, salivary and plasmatic oxytocin cannot provide a sufficiently stable trait marker of the physiology of the oxytocin system in humans. As we highlight in the manuscript, this finding should deter the field from making strong claims based exclusively on associations of phenotypes with single measurements of peripheral oxytocin concentrations. Furthermore, our study also describes two very concrete implications of our findings which we believe are very important for the field. First, if baseline level of OT is to be used as a trait marker, future studies should, as much as possible, rely on repeated measures within the same participant but collected on different days to maximize reliability. Second, this less than perfect reliability should be taken into consideration when calculating the sizes of the samples needed to detect a certain effect, if it exists, with sufficient statistical power.

      The second goal of our study was, as pointed out by the reviewer, to revisit the findings of Quintana et al. 2018(3), but this time with two major design modifications which could strengthen the conclusions from that study. The first modification was the dose of intravenous oxytocin administered, which was considerably higher (see response to Reviewer 1, point 2). The administration of a higher dose that resulted in substantial and sustained increases in plasmatic oxytocin throughout the two hours observation period can only strengthen the previous conclusion that increases in plasmatic oxytocin cannot be detected in salivary measurements, and that this is not a matter of dose (as far as we can ascertain by administering the maximum intravenous dose we could safely administer in healthy volunteers). We believe that this is an important addition to the literature.

      The second modification regarded the choice of the method we used to quantify oxytocin. In this study, we used radioimmunoassay, which is superior to ELISA in sensitivity and hence more appropriate to measure the low concentrations of oxytocin in saliva and plasma typically detected in humans at baseline conditions (1-10 pg/ml; for most individuals 1-5 pg/ml)(6). For instance, in Quintana et al. 2018(3) the limitations in the sensitivity of the ELISA kit used led the authors to discard around 50% of the collected saliva samples. Hence, our study replicates and extends the previous findings from Quintana et al. 2018 in important ways, demonstrating that the lack of an association between increases plasmatic oxytocin and salivary measurements is not limited by the dose of intravenous oxytocin administered or limitations of the sensitivity of the method used to quantify oxytocin.

      We have now made the novelty and contribution of our work more explicit:

      *Line 77 “Currently, we lack robust evidence that single measures of endogenous oxytocin in saliva and plasma at rest are stable enough to provide a valid trait marker of the activity of the oxytocin system in healthy individuals. Indeed, previous studies have claimed within-individual stability of baseline plasmatic and salivary concentrations of oxytocin in both adults and children based on moderate-to-strong correlations between salivary and plasmatic oxytocin concentrations measured repeatedly within the same individual over time using ELISA in unextracted samples(14-16). However, these studies have a number of methodological limitations that raise questions about the validity of their main conclusion that baseline plasmatic and salivary concentrations are stable within individuals. First, measuring oxytocin in unextracted samples has been postulated as potentially erroneous, given the high risk of contamination with immunoreactive products other than oxytocin(4). It is conceivable that these non-oxytocin immunoreactive products might constitute highly stable plasma housekeeping proteins (17) that masked the true variability in oxytocin concentrations. Second, a simple correlation analysis cannot provide information about the absolute agreement of two sets of measurements – which would be a more appropriate approach to study within-subject reliability/stability. Third, it is not clear whether these findings generalize beyond the early parenting(14) or early romantic(15) periods participants were in when the studies were conducted, since these periods engage the activity of the oxytocin system in particular ways(18). Hence, establishing the validity of salivary and plasmatic oxytocin as trait markers of the activity of the oxytocin system in humans remains as an unmet need. Such evidence is urgently required, given reports that plasma and saliva levels of oxytocin are frequently altered during neuropsychiatric illness and that they co-vary with clinical aspects of disease(13).

      Line 509 “Our findings were not consistent with these expectations. We could replicate previous evidence that intravenous oxytocin does not increase salivary oxytocin(3) and extended it by showing that the lack of increase in salivary oxytocin is not limited to the specific low dose of intravenous OT that was previously used (1IU) and that it is not driven by the insufficient sensitivity of the OT measurement method (which had resulted in more than 50% of the saliva samples being discarded in the previous study(3).”*

      2) As authors discussed in the limitation section of discussion, the current study has several limitations such as analyses only in male participants and non-optimized timing of collection of saliva and blood due to the other experiments. These limitations are understandable, because the current study was the second analyses on the data of the other studies with the different aims. However, these limitations significantly limit the interpretations of the findings.

      Here, we would like to highlight two aspects. First, most studies in the field are indeed conducted in men to avoid potential confounding from fluctuations in oxytocin concentrations across the menstrual cycle in women. Therefore, our study is representative of the typical samples used in most human studies. Second, we did not optimize our study to collect repeated samples of saliva. Indeed, it would have been interesting to describe the full-time course of variations of oxytocin concentrations in saliva after intranasal and intravenous administration. However, this does not detract the importance of our findings in respect to our first aim (which was our main goal).

      We agree with the reviewer though that it is at least theoretically possible that we could have missed the window for increases in salivary oxytocin after intravenous oxytocin if it existed, given that we only sampled one post-administration time-point. However, we believe this was unlikely for one reason. Despite the sustained increase (throughout the two-hour observation interval) in plasmatic oxytocin following the intravenous administration of oxytocin, we observed no increase in salivary oxytocin post-dosing (at ~115 min). Unless the half-life of oxytocin is shorter in saliva than in the blood (which we do not know yet), we expected the levels of salivary oxytocin to mirror the changes in plasma – potentially with a slight delay given the time that it might take for oxytocin concentrations to build up in saliva through ultrafiltration from the blood, but this was not the case. Most likely the half-life of oxytocin in the saliva is not shorter than in the blood, since a previous study found increased concentrations of oxytocin in saliva up to 7h after administration of intranasal oxytocin (as the reviewer pointed out below, in our study we no longer could detect significant increases in plasmatic oxytocin after the intranasal administration of 40 IU with two different methods at around 115 mins post-administration). Therefore, while we acknowledge these limitations we also believe they do not detract from the importance of our main findings and the potential they hold to influence the field towards a more rigorous use of these measurements. Please see below for the implemented changes in the text.

      Line 554 “It is possible that we may have missed peak increases in saliva oxytocin after the intravenous administration of exogenous oxytocin if they occurred between treatment administration and post-administration sampling. This is unlikely given that the dose we administered intravenously resulted in sustained increases in plasmatic oxytocin over the course of two hours. Unless the half-life of oxytocin in saliva is much shorter than in the plasma, it would be surprising to not find any increases in salivary oxytocin after intravenous oxytocin given that concentrations of oxytocin in the plasma were still elevated at the specific time-point of our second saliva sample. Currently, we have no estimate for the half-life of oxytocin in saliva; however, given that previous studies have found evidence of increased salivary oxytocin after single intranasal administrations of 16IU and 24IU oxytocin up to seven hours post-administration(19), it is unlikely that the half-life of oxytocin is shorter in the saliva than in the plasma.

      3) As reported in page 6, the dataset A comprises administrations approximately 40 IU of intranasal oxytocin and 10 IU on intravenous. The rationale to set these doses should be described. Since the 40IU is different from 24 IU which is employed in most of the previous publications in the research field, potential influence associated with the doses should be tested and discussed.

      Thank you for the opportunity to clarify this aspect of our work. With respect of our primary aims (to investigate whether single measurements of salivary and plasmatic oxytocin at baseline can be reliably measured within individuals across different days), the choice of doses is of course not relevant.

      With respect to our secondary aim, namely, to investigate whether salivary oxytocin can be used to index concentrations of oxytocin in the plasma, particularly after the administration of synthetic oxytocin using the intranasal and intravenous routes, the administered doses are relevant.

      The data reported here were collected as part of a larger project – which determined the choice of both intranasal and IV doses (2). As explained in our response to Reviewer 1, point 2, the selection 10IU (over 10min) was the highest intravenous dose that we could get permission to administer safely in healthy volunteers as a proof of concept, so as to achieve a robust and prolonged increase in plasmatic oxytocin over the course of our full testing session. In this manner, we demonstrate that even when plasmatic levels of OT are maintained substantially increased throughout the observation interval, we cannot detect increases in salivary oxytocin.

      Regarding the intranasal OT dose, it is worth noting that the 24 IU is indeed popular in oxytocin studies, but not exclusive, and generally the selection of dose in oxytocin studies has not been informed by detailed dose-response characterizations. Our choice of 40IU was made for the purposes of matching our previous work on the pharmacodynamics of OT in healthy volunteers(20), and is a dose we (21-29) and others (e.g. (30)) have commonly used with patients.

      A potentially important implication if dose variations also imply variation in the total volume of liquid administered (as is usually the case with standard nasal sprays – but not with the nebuliser), then it is likely that the potential for drip-down might increase for higher volumes and decrease for lower volumes. As far as we know, no study has ever investigated the impact of administered volume on salivary oxytocin after the intranasal administration of synthetic oxytocin, but we agree this would be an important point to look at. We have now expanded our discussion to accommodate this point.

      Line 519 “We expect this phenomenon to be particularly pronounced for higher administered volumes. Further studies should examine the impact of different administered volumes on increases in salivary oxytocin.”

      4) It is difficult to understand that no significant elevations in plasma oxytocin levels were observed after intranasal spray or nebuliser of oxytocin. From figure 4A, the differences between levels at baseline and post administration are similar between nebuliser, spray, and placebo. Please discuss the potential interpretation on this result.

      The plasmatic concentrations of oxytocin we report in this study refer solely to the samples acquired at around 2h after the administration of intranasal oxytocin. We reported the full-time course of changes in plasmatic oxytocin in a paper published earlier this year(2) – which we now refer the reader to. We did find increases in plasmatic oxytocin after administration of oxytocin with the spray and nebuliser (around 3x the baseline concentrations) that did not differ between intranasal methods of administration. Plasmatic oxytocin reached a peak within 15 mins from the end of the intranasal administrations. Given the short half-life of oxytocin in the plasma, we believe it is not surprising that at 115 mins after the end of our last treatment administration the concentrations of oxytocin in the plasma are no longer different from the placebo condition.

      Line 166 “The full time course of changes in plasmatic oxytocin after the administration of intranasal and intravenous oxytocin in this study has been reported elsewhere(2).”

      5) In page 12, the reason why not to employ any correction for multiple comparisons in the statistical analyses should be clarified.

      We apologize that this was not sufficiently clear, but we did correct for multiple testing using the Tukey procedure in our analyses investigating the effects of treatment on salivary and plasmatic oxytocin (this was described in page 9 – Treatment effects). If the reviewer meant something else, we would be glad to follow any further advice on multiple testing correction he/she might have.

      Line 250 “Treatment effects: The effect of treatment on blood/saliva oxytocin concentration were assessed using a 4 x 2 repeated-measures two-way analysis of variance Treatment (four levels: Spray, Nebuliser, Intravenous and Placebo) x Time (two levels: Baseline and post-administration). Post-hoc comparisons to clarify a significant interaction were corrected for multiple comparisons following the Tukey procedure.

      Reviewer #3:

      In the current study, baseline samples of salivary and plasma oxytocin were assessed in 13, respectively, 16 participants, to assess intra-individual reliability across four time points (separated by approximately 8 days). The main results indicate that, while as a group, average salivary and plasma samples were not significantly different across time points, within-subject coefficient of variation (CV) and intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) showed poor absolute and relative reliability of plasma and salivary oxytocin measurements over time. Also no association was established between plasma and salivary levels, either at baseline or after administration of oxytocin (either intranasally, or intravenously). Further, salivary/ plasma oxytocin was only enhanced after intranasal, respectively intravenous administration.

      The study addresses an important topic and the paper is clearly written. While the overall multi-session design seems solid, sample collections were performed in the context of larger projects and therefore there appear to be several limitations that reduce the robustness of the presented results and consequently the formulated conclusions.

      General comments

      1) A main conclusion of the current work is that 'single measures of baseline oxytocin concentrations in saliva and plasma are not stable within the same individual'. It seems however that the study did not adhere to a sufficiently rigorous approach to put forward this conclusion. It lacks a control for several important factors, such as timing of the day at which saliva/ plasma samples were obtained, as well as sample volume. Particularly while it is indicated that all visits were identical in structure, important information is missing with regard to whether or not sampling took place consistently at a particular point of time each day, to minimize the influence of circadian rhythm. Without this information it is not possible to draw any firm conclusions on the nature of the intra-individual variability as demonstrated in the salivary and plasma sampling.

      Thanks for pointing this out. Indeed, we were not sufficiently explicit on how strict we were in controlling for some potential sources of variability that could have contributed to the lack of reliability we report here. Our data was acquired in the context of two human pharmacological studies, which by design were strict on a number of aspects to minimize unwarranted noise. All participants were tested in the same period of the day (morning) to avoid the potential contribution of circadian fluctuations of oxytocin. In dataset A, we tried, as much as possible, to match the exact time participants were tested between visits, using the start time of the first visit as a reference. With the exception of one participant, where one session was conduct 1h and 30 mins later than the other three, all the remaining participants from study A were tested within 1h of the exact start time of session 1. Further, we also instructed participants to abstain from alcohol and heavy exercise for 24 h and from any beverage or food for 2 h before scanning. Hence, we believe our sampling protocol was strict enough to discard any potential contribution of major known sources of variability in oxytocin levels.

      The reviewer also inquiries about the volume of the samples. For the plasma samples, we used a standardized protocol and collected the same blood volume in all participants, visits and time-points (1 EDTA tube of approximately 4 ml). The saliva samples were collected using Salivettes. Participants were instructed to place the swab from the Salivette kit in their mouth and chew it gently for 1 min to soak as much saliva as possible. After this, the swab was then returned back to the Salivette and centrifuged. In both cases, to avoid degradation of the peptide in the collected sample, we followed a strict protocol where all samples were put immediately in iced water until centrifugation, which happened within 20 mins of sample collection. Samples were then immediately stored at -80C until analysis. Hence, differences in degradation of the peptide related to the processing of the sample are also unlikely to justify the poor reliabilities we report here.

      For completeness, we have now added all of these further details to our Methods section.

      Line 169 “**All visits were conducted during the morning to avoid the potential confounding of circadian variations in oxytocin levels(31, 32). In addition, we also made sure that each participant was tested at approximately the same time across all four visits (all participants were tested in sessions with less than one hour difference in their onset time, except for one participant where the difference in the onset of one session compared to the other three sessions was 1.5h). “*

      Line 192 “Blood was collected in ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid vacutainers (Kabe EDTA tubes 078001), placed in iced water and centrifuged at 1300 × g for 10 minutes at 4°C within 20 minutes of collection and then immediately pipetted into Eppendorf vials. Samples were immediately stored -80C until analysis. Saliva samples were collected using a salivette (Sarstedt 51.1534.500). Participants were instructed to place the swab from the Salivette kit in their mouth and chew it gently for 1 min to soak as much saliva as possible. After this, the swab was then returned back to the Salivette, centrifuged and stored in the same manner as blood samples. For both saliva and plasma, we stored the samples in aliquots of 0.5 ml, following the RIAgnosis standard operating procedures. We followed this strict protocol, putting all samples in iced water until centrifugation with immediate storage at -80C until analysis to minimize the impact putative differences in degradation of the peptide related to differences in the processing of the samples might have on the reliability of the estimated concentrations of oxytocin.” *

      Correspondingly, a deeper discussion is needed on the reason why ICC's were considerably variable across pairs of assessment sessions, with some pairs yielding good reliability, whereas others yielded (very) poor reliability.

      Currently we have no insightful hypothesis on why this could have been the case. Indeed, we found higher ICCs for only 2 out of 6 pairs of visits for the plasma. However, it is plausible that this might have occurred by chance. In any case, we should note that the 95% confidence intervals for the ICCs of our different pairs of samples overlap; this suggests that there is no evidence that the ICCs we estimated for the specific two pairs where we found higher reliabilities are significantly higher than those observed in the remaining pairs.

      Line 431 “If there are specific reasons explaining the higher reliability indices observed for the specific pairs of sessions, these reasons remain to be elucidated. However, it is not implausible that we might have found higher reliabilities for these specific two pairs by chance, since the 95% confidence intervals for the ICCs for all pairs of samples overlapped.

      More detailed descriptions regarding sampling procedures (timing and sampling intervals) are necessary. Also, more information is needed on the volume of saliva collected at each session, to control for possible dilution effects.

      This information has been added to the revised version of the manuscript (please see response to your point number 1). As a further clarification, oxytocin concentrations were measured in plasma and saliva aliquots of 0.5 ml, following the standard operating procedures of RIAgnosis. This volume was used for all participants, sessions and time-points. Furthermore, for measuring cortisol, the salivettes were shown to allow for an almost 100% recovery, regardless of cortisol concentration, volume of the sample or method of quantification(33), suggesting that the sampling method is robust.

      2) It is indicated that the initial sample would allow to detect intra-class correlation coefficients (ICC) of at least 0.70 (moderate reliability) with 80% of power. Is this still the case after the drop-outs/ outlier removals? Since the main conclusions of the work rely on negative results (conclusions drawn from failures to reject the null hypothesis) it is important to establish the risk for false negatives within a design that is possibly underpowered.

      We understand the concern of the reviewer. However, according to the power calculations provided by Bujang and Baharum, 2017(34), the four repeated samples we collected in Dataset A would have allowed us to detect an ICC of 0.5 with 80% of statistical power even with only 13 subjects (which is the lowest sample size we used for the analysis on saliva in dataset A). The two samples we collected in Dataset B would allow us to detect an ICC of 0.6 with 80% of statistical power even with only 19 subjects. Hence, both datasets were powered to detect an ICC of 0.7 with acceptable power, if it existed, even after the exclusion of outliers.

      3) Did the authors also assess within-session reliability? For example, by assessing ICC between pre and post-measurements in the placebo session.

      Thanks for the suggestion. Indeed, we had not performed this analysis before but we agree it would be informative. We calculated the ICC and CV for the two samples acquired before any treatment administration and the intravenous infusion of saline during the placebo session. These samples where acquired with an approximate 15 min interval in between them. In this analysis, we found that the ICC was excellent 0.92 and the CV 20%. This additional analysis strengthens our findings by supporting the idea that our poor reliabilities across different days reflect true biological variability and cannot be attributed to measurement error. These new findings have now been included in the revised version of the manuscript.

      Abstract

      Line 44 "Results: Single measurements of plasmatic and salivary oxytocin showed poor reliability across visits in both datasets. The reliability was excellent when samples were collected within 15 minutes from each other in the placebo visit.”

      Line 240 “Within-visit reliability analysis: To investigate the reliability of salivary and plasmatic oxytocin concentration within the same visit, we calculated the ICC and CV as described above for two samples acquired before any treatment administration and the intravenous infusion of saline during the placebo session. These samples where acquired with an approximate 15 minutes interval in between them.

      Line 405 “Furthermore, in a further analysis assessing the within-session stability of plasmatic oxytocin using two measurements collected 15 minutes apart from each other in the placebo visit (one sample collected at baseline and the other after the intravenous administration of saline), we found excellent within-session reliability (ICC=0.92, CV=20%). Together, this suggests that the low reliability of endogenous oxytocin measurements across visits in the current study results from true intrinsic individual biological variability and not technical variability/error in the method used for oxytocin quantification.“*

      4) It is indicated that the intra-assay variability of the adopted radioimmunoassay constitutes <10%. Were analyses of the current study run on duplicate samples? Was intra-assay variability assessed directly within the current sample?

      We reported the intra-assay variability determined by RIAgnosis during the development of this assay(35). This was not specifically assessed for the current study.

      Introduction & Discussion

      5) The introduction and discussion is missing a thorough overview of previous studies assessing intra-individual variability in oxytocin levels.

      Thanks for the suggestion. We have now included in our introduction/discussion an overview of previous studies attempting to tackle this question, which unfortunately do not address this question with sufficient detail or using the appropriate methods and statistical analyses (see response to Reviewer 2, point 1). Hence, from the available evidence, it is not possible to draw robust conclusions about the validity of concentrations of oxytocin in saliva and plasma as valid trait markers of the activity of the oxytocin system. With this manuscript, we hope we can prompt further discussion and guide the field towards a more rigorous use of these measurements. A thorough discussion of this literature has now been added to the Introduction and Discussion.

      Line 434 “Our observation of poor reliability questions the use of single measurements of baseline oxytocin concentrations in saliva and plasma as valid trait markers of the physiology of the oxytocin system in humans. Instead, we suggest that, at best, these measurements can provide reliable state markers within short time-intervals (5 mins in our study). Our data does not support previous claims of high stability of plasmatic and salivary oxytocin within individuals over time. For instance, in one study, Feldman et al. (2013) assessed plasmatic oxytocin in recent mothers and fathers at two time-points spaced six months apart during the postpartum period. The authors found strong correlations between the two assessments for both mothers and fathers(14). In another study, Schneiderman et al. (2012) found strong correlations between plasmatic oxytocin concentrations measured at two different instances spaced six months apart in both single and individuals recently involved in a new romantic relationship(15). Two important differences between these studies and ours are i) the method used for oxytocin quantification, and ii) the particular states participants were in when the studies were conducted. Regarding the first difference, these previous studies used ELISA without extraction, reporting concentrations of plasmatic oxytocin well above the typical physiological range of 1-10 pg/ml detected in extracted samples (in their studies, the authors report concentrations above 200 pg/ml). The inclusion of extraction has been postulated as a critical step for obtaining valid measures of oxytocin in biological fluids(4). Unextracted samples were shown to contain immunoreactive products other than oxytocin(4), which contribute largely to the concentrations of oxytocin estimated by this method. It is possible that these non-oxytocin products might represent highly stable plasma housekeeping molecules(17) that masked the true biological variability in oxytocin concentrations between assessments in these previous studies that we could detect in extracted samples in our study. Regarding the second difference, these previous studies on within-individual stability were conducted during the early parenting(14) or early romantic(15) periods, which engage the activity of the oxytocin system in particular ways(18). Instead, we used a normative sample that did not specify these inclusion criteria. Hence, we cannot exclude that during these specific periods the reliability of salivary and plasmatic oxytocin concentrations might be higher. We note though that our sample more closely resembles the samples used the vast majority of studies in the field (which sometimes even exclude participants during early parenthood(36)). Hence, our estimates of reliability are a better starter point for all studies where specific circumstances potentially affecting the activity of the oxytocin system have not been specified a priori.

      6) The paper misses a discussion of previous studies addressing links between salivary/ plasma levels and central oxytocin (e.g. in cerebrospinal fluid). I understand the claim that salivary oxytocin cannot be used to form an estimate of systemic absorption, although technically, a lack of a link between salivary and plasma levels, does not necessarily imply a lack of a relationship to e.g. central levels. The lack of effect is limited to this specific relationship.

      In this study, we did not intend to investigate whether salivary and plasmatic oxytocin are valid proxies for the activity of the oxytocin system in the brain. Our data does not address that question and a thorough discussion of these studies falls, in our opinion, out of the scope of the manuscript. Instead, we focused on whether measurements of oxytocin in saliva and plasma (by far the most commonly used biological fluids to measure oxytocin) are sufficiently stable to provide valid indicators of the physiology of the oxytocin system in humans. Additionally, we also investigated whether salivary oxytocin can index plasmatic oxytocin at baseline and after the administration of synthetic oxytocin using different routes of administration.

      A previous meta-analysis of studies correlating peripheral and CSF measurements of oxytocin has shown that most likely peripheral and CSF measurements do not correlate at baseline; significant correlations could be found after intranasal administration of oxytocin or specific experimental manipulations, such as stress(37). We believe that currently we still do not have a clear answer about the extent to which these peripheral fluids can actually index oxytocin concentrations in the brain (even if associations with CSF are evident in specific instances). For instance, no study has ever shown that CSF oxytocin actually predicts the concentrations of oxytocin in the extracellular fluid of the brain. Given what we currently know about the synaptic release of oxytocin in the brain(38) (in contrast with former theories of exclusive bulk diffusion in the CSF(39)), we think we have good reasons to suspect this might not be the case.

      The only contribution our study can make in that respect is highlighting our current lack of understanding of how oxytocin reaches saliva if not from the blood. Currently there is no evidence of direct secretion of oxytocin to the saliva (not from acinar secretion or nerve terminals release). Hence, as it stands, the most likely mechanism for oxytocin to entry the saliva is from the blood (for instance, by ultrafiltration). If increases in plasmatic oxytocin after intravenous oxytocin cannot produce any significant increases in salivary oxytocin (shown in ours and in a previous study), how does oxytocin reach the saliva and why might it be able to predict concentrations in the CSF, if it does? In this respect, we hope our study highlights the need for further research shedding light on the mechanisms underlying these potential saliva – CSF relationships, if they exist. We would be glad to accommodate any other hypothesis the reviewer might have on this respect.

      Line 522 “The lack of increase in salivary oxytocin after the intravenous administration of exogenous oxytocin that was consistently found in our study and in a previous study(3) also raises the question of how oxytocin reaches the saliva if not from the blood. Currently there is no evidence of direct acinar secretion or direct nerve terminals release of oxytocin to the saliva; therefore, transport from the blood remains as the most plausible mechanism of appearance of oxytocin in the saliva. Clarifying these mechanisms of transport is paramount, given the current hypothesis that salivary oxytocin might be superior to plasma in indexing central levels of oxytocin in the CSF(40).

      Methods

      7) Related to the general comment, the variability in days between sessions is relatively high (average 8.80 days apart (SD 5.72; range 3-28). However, it appears that no explicit measures were taken to control the conducted analyses for this variability.

      Thanks for point this out. Indeed, we were not sufficiently thorough in exploring the impact of this potential variability in the time gap between visits on our estimated ICCs. Thanks to the reviewer we now acknowledged this limitation of our analysis and decided to explore this further. We decided to run the following sensitivity analysis. First, we went back to our dataset A and identified all pairs of consecutive measures that were collected with an exact time interval of 7 days between visits. We could retrieve 15 examples of these pairs from 15 different participants for both saliva and plasma. Then, we recalculated the ICC and CV on this subset of our initial sample. In line with our main analysis, we found poor reliabilities for both salivary and plasmatic oxytocin; in both cases the ICCs were not significantly different from 0 and the CVs were 49% and 40%, respectively. This further analysis has been added to the revised version of the manuscript. We hope the reviewer shares our vision that our main conclusion of poor reliabilities of single measurements of baseline oxytocin in saliva and plasma cannot be simply attributed to the variability in the number of days between visits.

      Line 229 “Since there was considerable variability in the time-interval between visits across participants, we conducted a sensitivity analysis where we repeated our reliability analysis focusing on 15 pairs of consecutive measures that were collected with an exact time interval of 7 days between visits in 15 participants. Here, we recalculated the ICC and CV on this subset of our initial sample, using the approach described above.

      Line 399 “These poor reliabilities are unlikely to be explained by variability in the time-interval between visits of the same individual, since we also found poor reliability indexes for both saliva and plasma when we restricted our analysis to a subset of our sample controlling for the exact number of days spacing visits.”*

      8) A rationale for the adopted dosing and timing (115 min post administration) of the sample extraction is missing. Additionally, it seems that intravenous administrations were always given second, whereas intranasal administrations were given third, with a small delay of approximately 5 min. Hence, it seems that the timing of 115 min post-administration is only accurate for the intranasal administration.

      We collected saliva samples before any treatment administration and after the end of our scanning session (collection of saliva samples in between was just not possible because the participants were inside the MRI machine and could not have moved their heads). For the plasma, we collected samples before any treatment administration, after each treatment administration and at other five time-points during the scanning session. Here, we only report the plasma data that was acquired concomitantly with the saliva samples (the full-time course of plasma changes in plasmatic oxytocin has been reported elsewhere(2)). In the manuscript, we report post-administration times from the end of the full treatment administration protocol. Hence, as the reviewer highlights our post-administration sample was collected at around 115 mins from the last intranasal administration and 120 mins from the end of the intravenous administration. We have now made this aspect explicit in the revised version of the manuscript.

      Line 162 “For the purposes of this report, we use the plasmatic and salivary oxytocin measurements that were obtained at baseline and at 115 minutes after the end of our last treatment administration (this means that our post-administration samples were collected 115 mins after the intranasal administrations and 120 mins after the intravenous administration of oxytocin).

      9) Since the ICC of baseline samples showed poor reliability, it seems suboptimal to pool across sessions for assessing the relationship between salivary and blood measurements. It should be possible to perform e.g. partial correlations on the actual scores, thereby correcting for the repeated measure (subject ID). Further, since the sample size is relatively small (13 subjects), it might be recommended to use non-parametric (e.g. Spearmann correlations) instead of Pearson. The additional reporting of the Bayes factor is appreciated; it is very informative.

      Thanks for the suggestion. In fact, for the correlation the reviewer mentions we indeed used a multilevel approach where we specified subject as a random effect (please see pages 9-10). This allowed us to deal with the dependence of measurements coming from the same subject in different visits. Furthermore, since we also had concerns about the sample size, we calculated Pearson correlations but used bootstrapping (1000 samples) to obtain the 95% confidence intervals and assess significance. Bootstrapping is a robust statistical technique which allows significance testing independently of any assumptions about the distribution of the data and is robust to outliers. Please see page 12 of the manuscript, section “Association between salivary and plasmatic oxytocin levels”.

      10) Now, the authors only compared relationships between salivary and plasma levels, either at baseline or post administration. I'm wondering whether it would be interesting to explore relationships between pre-to-post change scores in salivary versus plasma measures.

      Thanks for the suggestion. We have now conducted this further analysis and we could not find any significant correlation between changes from baseline to post-administration in any of our treatment conditions. As for our other correlation analyses, here we also conducted Bayesian inference, which supported the idea that the null hypothesis of no significant correlation between changes in saliva and plasma from baseline to post-administration is at least 4x more likely than the alternative hypothesis. This further analysis strengthens our confidence that changes in salivary oxytocin after administration of oxytocin using the intranasal and intravenous routes should not be used to predict systemic absorption to the plasma.

      Line 260 “*As a final sanity check, we also investigated correlations between the changes from baseline to post-administration in saliva and plasma in each of our treatment conditions separately.

      Line 485 “Furthermore, we could not find any significant correlation between changes in salivary or plasmatic oxytocin from baseline to 115 mins after the end of our last treatment administration in any of our four treatment conditions. The lack of significant associations between salivary and plasmatic oxytocin (and respective changes from baseline) was further supported through our Bayesian analyses which demonstrated that given our data the null hypotheses were at least three times more likely than the alternative hypothesis.”*

      11) Please provide more information on the outlier detection procedure (outlier labelling rule).

      This information has now been added to the revised version of the manuscript.

      Line 271 “Outliers were identified using the outlier labelling rule(41); this means that a data point was identified as an outlier if it was more than 1.5 x interquartile range above the third quartile or below the first quartile.”*

      12) Please indicate how deviations from a Gaussian distribution were assessed.

      We used the combined assessment of i) differences between mean and median; ii) skewness and kurtosis; iii) histogram; iv) Q-Q plots; and v) the Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Shapiro-Wilk normality tests. Deviations from a normal distribution is common in the concentration of several analytes in the saliva (42), including oxytocin (15); hence, following the current recommendations, we used log transformations of the raw concentrations but plot the raw concentrations to facilitate the interpretation of our plots.

      Results

      13) Please verify the degrees of freedom for the post-hoc tests performed to assess pre-post changes at each treatment level (e.g. baseline vs Post administration: Spray - t(122) = 7.06, p < 0.001) . Why is this 122? Shouldn't this be a simple paired-sample t-test with 13 subjects?

      We apologize for this oversight. Indeed, we did a mistake in copying the values of the degrees of freedom from SPSS. We have now corrected these values. All the other p-values and F or T values were reported correctly and hence are not changed in the revised version of the manuscript (please see also response to Reviewer 1, question 4 regarding inconsistencies in the reported p-values).