Antibacterial Fluorinated Diamond-like Carbon Coating Promotes Osteogenesis—Comparison with Titanium Alloy

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

1. Please consider reviewing the abstract and highlight the novelty, major findings, and conclusions.
   Just before the last paragraph of the abstract, the authors are encouraged to answer the following question: What is the research gap did you find from the previous researchers in your field? Mention it properly. It will improve the strength of the article.
2. Please avoid using we, us or our in the manuscript, please check for this issue everywhere in the manuscript.
3. Please consider revising the title of the manuscript, why there is a dot and then a dash in the title.
4. Please check the paper for English editing and typos. Moderate English editing is required.
5. Introduction is poorly written, I don’t see any critical literature review which reports on past studies, what they did and what were their main findings and how does the current study bring new knowledge and difference to the field.
6. In the introduction, the authors are encouraged to combine any small paragraphs of 3-4 lines or less into larger paragraphs.
7. Please add scale bar for figure 2.
8. Line 153 does that mean that average results are reported? If yes, then the authors should mention that as well.
9. Lines 172-178 why the font size is different in this paragraph?
10. The authors are encouraged to include more detailed discussion section and critically discuss the observations from this investigation with existing literature.
11. Weak conclusion and no indication of the main findings of this study.

Author Response

Author1

1. Please consider reviewing the abstract and highlight the novelty, major findings, and conclusions.
   Just before the last paragraph of the abstract, the authors are encouraged to answer the following question: What is the research gap did you find from the previous researchers in your field? Mention it properly. It will improve the strength of the article.

Thank you for your comments and suggestions. A variety of antibacterial implants are currently under development. Fluorinated diamond-like carbon (F-DLC) coating is promising now that its excellent antibacterial properties and safety have been confirmed. However, no reports have been published on the effects of the coating on osteogenesis when used in intraosseous implants. We expect that F-DLC can be a very useful antibacterial implant coating material if it promotes bone formation to any extent. We have revised the abstract to emphasize that aspect.

 

1. Please avoid using we, us or our in the manuscript, please check for this issue everywhere in the manuscript.

We have revised the manuscript globally to avoid the use of those words.

 

 

1. Please consider revising the title of the manuscript, why there is a dot and then a dash in the title.

Thank you for your suggestion. The title has been revised.

 

1. Please check the paper for English editing and typos. Moderate English editing is required.

We have revised the manuscript to be written in more appropriate English with the help of translators.

 

1. Introduction is poorly written, I don’t see any critical literature review which reports on past studies, what they did and what were their main findings and how does the current study bring new knowledge and difference to the field.

Thank you for your comments. For osteogenesis, materials with highly hydrophilic properties are known to be advantageous. We did an additional search of the literature and found a report (additional reference #26) showing positive effects of the highly hydrophobic F-DLC on osteogenesis. We have referenced that report in our Introduction.

 

1. In the introduction, the authors are encouraged to combine any small paragraphs of 3-4 lines or less into larger paragraphs.

 

Thank you for the comments. In the revised version, the paragraphs in the Introduction have been restructured.

 

1. Please add scale bar for figure 2.

A scale has been added to Figure 2 in the revised manuscript.

 

1. Line 153 does that mean that average results are reported? If yes, then the authors should mention that as well.

We added the method of statistical analysis for Experiment 2 (Page 5 Lines 368-371).

 

1. Lines 172-178 why the font size is different in this paragraph?

Our apologies; we misunderstood the template. The font size has been changed for consistency.

 

1. The authors are encouraged to include more detailed discussion section and critically discuss the observations from this investigation with existing literature.

Thank you for the suggestion. The manuscript has been revised to provide more detailed discussion by referencing additional publications (References [26] [32] [40]).

 

 

1. Weak conclusion and no indication of the main findings of this study.

Our study looked at the in vivo effects of F-DLC coating on intraosseous implants to investigate a potential application for antibacterial coating for fighting postoperative infections. We believe that our results show sufficient evidence of better osteogenesis-promoting capabilities with the F-DLC coating than with conventional titanium alloy coating. We have revised the Conclusion to reflect this perspective more clearly.

Reviewer 2 Report

The article "Antibacterial Fluorinated Diamond-like Carbon Coating promotes Osteogenesis. -Comparison with titanium alloy." is well written and of potential interest to the readers.

My comments and suggestions for improving it are as follows:

Figure 2, caption: "Implants. Each implant consisted of a solid titanium alloy column 5 mm in diameter and 20 mm long, with slits 0.5 mm wide and 2 mm deep in each column. The columns were implanted into the femurs of living dogs.". No need for this information. It has already been given in the main text.

Figure 3, caption: "Three columns were implanted in each femur." Same as above.

The results should be summarized in a table, for better tracking and understanding.

Most of the references are old. Only one 2020 reference. Newer references should be added. The references style should match the example in MDPI template.

Author Response

Authoor2

 

The article "Antibacterial Fluorinated Diamond-like Carbon Coating promotes Osteogenesis. -Comparison with titanium alloy." is well written and of potential interest to the readers.

My comments and suggestions for improving it are as follows:

Figure 2, caption: "Implants. Each implant consisted of a solid titanium alloy column 5 mm in diameter and 20 mm long, with slits 0.5 mm wide and 2 mm deep in each column. The columns were implanted into the femurs of living dogs.". No need for this information. It has already been given in the main text.

Thank you for the comments. The caption and content of Fig. 2 have been revised.

 

Figure 3, caption: "Three columns were implanted in each femur." Same as above.

The explanation of Fig. 3 has been revised.

 

The results should be summarized in a table, for better tracking and understanding.

The results have been summarized in table format (Table 1) for better understanding.

 

Most of the references are old. Only one 2020 reference. Newer references should be added. The references style should match the example in MDPI template.

Thank you for your comments. Not many articles published during or after 2020 were available for our reference. We reviewed and referred to as many articles as possible (references [17] [18] [26] [32] [40]).

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have answered all questions and paper can now be accepted

Author Response

Thank you for your detailed suggestions and comments. By improving it, the content has improved. However, since I submitted it after having the translator confirm the expression in English, it is difficult for us to make further corrections.