Nitric Oxide-Releasing NO–Curcumin Hybrid Inhibits Colon Cancer Cell Proliferation and Induces Cell Death In Vitro

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

In this manuscript, Salah and co-workers described the used of nitric oxide (NO) curcumin as a chemotherapy for colon cancers. They showed the synthesis of NO-curcumin and tested its in vitro cytotoxicity via live/dead stain and XTT assay. They also briefly investigated the impact of NO-curcumin treatment on cell phenotypes through transcriptomic analysis via qPCR. Overall, this manuscript showed self-consistent results and contribute to the understanding of curcumin-related therapies. I suggest a moderate revision for now. Please see the comments below to improve the readability and reproducibility of the manuscript.

 

1. Whole paper: The section number is completely messed up over the manuscript, please reformat.
2. Materials and methods: Please indicate the supplier and the grade of key reagents.
3. Cell culture: The recommended medium for HT29, HCT116, and CaCO2 cells is McCoy 5A, McCoy 5A and EMEM according to ATCC. The authors cultured all of them in DMEM. Is there any specific reason to use DMEM? Please justify.
4. Materials and methods: the details of primer used in PCR are missing, please add.
5. Materials and methods: the details of cycler condition and cDNA concentration are missing, please add.
6. The scheme 1 mentioned in section 3.1 is missing. Please attached scheme and associated NMR data.
7. The detailed condition of NMR is missing in the materials and methods section, please add.
8. Figure 1 A-D, scale bar is missing.
9. Figure 2 A-D, the error is not clear, please upload a high-resolution image
10. Figure 3 C, the fitted curve looks a little weird – please double-check the parameters/conditions.

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for his critical reading and comments. We think that by responding to his point we enhanced the quality of our paper. Below is our response to his points.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Nitric Oxide-Releasing NO-Curcumin Hybrid Inhibits Colon Cancer Cell Proliferation and Induces Cell Death In vitro

This paper report the Natural products and their relatives still represent a very high percentage of the drugs used for cancer treatment. Curcumin is one of the natural drugs that, recently, attracted much attention due to its putative cancer-preventive and anticancer properties. As well, Nitric Oxide (NO) holds a great potential for NO-based treatments for a wide variety of diseases. Here, they claimed that the first time, the anti-cancer activities of Nitro-Curcumin hybrid, hypothesizing that; by joining the effects of curcumin and NO in one compound, would be more potent than curcumin alone in treating colon cancer.

The manuscript is good which will be good addition in the literature however, there are few queries which need to be addressed as;

1. Grammatical mistakes should be thoroughly checked
2. Significance of Nitric Oxide (NO) should be highlighted more in context of scientific phenomenon/mechanism.
3. Resolution of Figure should be improved.
4. At least one more characterization should be added to correlated the results for promising conclusion.
5. “Introduction” can be enriched while adding more latest literature/reference.
6. In addition to the above mention references, few more recent/relevant references may be cited as;

 

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2758121/
2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6429287/

• https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11696-020-01465-y

1. https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6694/12/7/1881/htm

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for his critical reading and comments. We think that by responding to his point we enhanced the quality of our paper. Below is our response to his points.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Accepted in present form