The Det.Belt Server: A Tool to Visualize and Estimate Amphipathic Solvent Belts around Membrane Proteins

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

In this manuscript, the authors report a web server Det.Belt to quantify and visualize the detergent molecules around the hydrophobic patches of the membrane proteins. Currently, there are very limited experimental characterizations of these detergent molecules around membrane proteins, and the server reported in the paper can be a nice complementary modelling/ theoretical calculation of these layers of solvents. Overall, the paper is well-written, the setup of the server and the results are very clearly presented and discussed. I recommend its publication in the journal with minor changes. One comment is that both the online server (https://www.detbelt.ibcp.fr/) and the github site (https://github.com/MMSB-MOBI/detbelt_coreScripts) are not currently accessible, as checked by the reviewer. It would be nice to have them available for both reviewing and publication.

Author Response

Thank you to reviewer #1 for reading our manuscript. We apologize for the github scripts that were indeed in private mode but are now publicly available. For the server however, it is currently running and have been accessed more than 50 times in June, 190 times in May and 150 times in April. If there is a problem accessing the server, we would like to know at [email protected] so that we could fix the problem. The server is accessible at the moment.

Reviewer 2 Report

In this paper, Zampieri et al. developed a web server for estimating and visualizing amphi-pathic solvent belts around membrane proteins. This is very good paper, and the tool is very interesting and useful. I only have two minor suggestions.

1. The formula in section 2.3 should be reformatted
2. Most of figures are not clear enough, they should be improved.

Author Response

Thank you to reviewer #2 for reading our manuscript. We have upgraded the formula in section 2.3. High resolution figures have been created.