Glycosylation: A “Last Word” in the Protein-Mediated Biomineralization Process
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscript by J.S. Evans provides a brief review of the role of glycosylation in mineralized tissue formation. The review is concise, clear, and well-written throughout. Although the review is quite limited in scope, in my opinion, this provides an easy entryway for non-specilists who may not want to take the time to read a lengthy review. I have a few very minor suggestions:
l. 44 - here, and in a few other spots, the line seems to cut-off midway through the sentence. This happens again in l. 193 and l. 216. I'm guessing this is due to inserting figures, but this leaves the spacing uneven.
l. 75 & 76 - Extra blank lines here.
l. 84 - It may be helpful to provide examples of non-calcium based biominerals, for readers unfamiliar with this.
Table 2. The examples seem somewhat limited here. I would suggest the author search more broadly for other applicable examples. Even if these are not described in detail in the text, a thorough table would be beneficial. There are a few crustacean examples I am familiar - for example, see the work of Shafer et al. 1995 (J. Exp. Zool.) and Coblentz et al. 1998 (Comp. Biochem. & Physiol B) on mineralization in crabs, and Kamiya et al. 2002 (Marine Biol.) in barnacles.
l. 146 - Italicize species names
l. 204 & 205 - Italicize the "H" and "S" for the species names.
Fig. 2. Would it be possible to include a predicted structure for AP24 with oligosaccharide chains?
Fig. 3 - I would find it helpful to include a visual key or label for the colors. The figure is quite complex, and going back and forth between the legend and the figure makes this more difficult to follow.
l. 248-263 - "we" is used several times here, but this is a single author paper.
l. 253-257 - within the sentence, some of the phrases separated by semi-colons start with a capital letter and some do not. I would just make this consistent.
l. 266 - change "lags" to "lag"
Author Response
Please see attachment
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
In this manuscript, Dr. Evans describes the current state of knowledge about protein glycosylation patterns and functions in the biomineralization mechanism and retention in the final mineral product. This is a timely and pertinent review as skeletal organic matrix protein suites across a variety of taxa outside the oft-studied Homo sapiens have now been sequenced and even the field of fossil proteomics is emerging from its own infancy. This review will be of significant interest to many researchers and groups, some of whom may have the funding Dr. Evans calls for to conduct some of his proposed experimental tracks. It was a pleasure to read this manuscript and I am excited to see this area develop in coming years. My specific comments below are minor and some may be considered nitpicky. I recommend this manuscript for publication after minor revisions.
- Line 12 as well as other locations following. Use of the ‘we’. Since there is only one author on the manuscript, and because in all usages it is not referring to the larger research community, all uses of ‘we’ should be changed to ‘I’.
- Line 29. ‘Uniquely different’ is redundant.
- Line 56. The ‘hybrid’ type of glycosylation. The author should clarify if they mean that a single glycan is attached in different places by both O and N linkages or if they mean that multiple glycans are linked, some at O locations and others at N locations.
- Line 146, as well as other locations following. Species names are not italicized.
- Line 150. Does the author mean mono-bisialylated and mono-bisulfated? The punctuation is confusing.
- Line 160. Does the author mean baculovirus-infected? There is a space before and after the ‘-‘ that are not present in other instances when dashes are used.
- Line 160. This sentence contains three ‘in’s and is therefore clunky.
- Line 169 as well as other locations. ‘In vitro’ is not italicized here whereas it is in other locations.
- Line 203. The sentence is clunky, perhaps because ‘nacre’ has a dash attached to it and I’m not sure why.
- Line 208. How does Figure 2 aid the story? And why was structure prediction for AP7 and AP24 but not SpSM50 and SpSM30B/C?
- Line 254. Some of the words after the numbers in this sentence are capitalized while others are not.
- Section 5.1. I love the boldness of this section!
- Section 5.3. Can the author suggest any potential pathways forward, perhaps from molecular biology or materials science, to give this section some more ‘punch’?
Author Response
Please see attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
