Review Reports

Round  1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is a well-written review article that covers an important topic. It provides a great summary of recent developments in the field.

Criticism:

1. After printing, it was extremely difficult to read the figures. The authors should use larger fonts to describe the various elements shown in the illustrations.

2.Figure 2 could be improved by moving the GAS and ISRE motifs to the correct positions in the IFN-responsive genes. Such elements are most frequently found upstream of the transcription initiation site.

Author Response

Thank you for the very fast and positive review.

Point 1: We have updated the figures to increase the font size in both.

Point 2:We have update figure 2 showing the correct location of the GAS and ISRE elements. Thank you for catching this, it was a mistake in labeling on our part.

Reviewer 2 Report

This is a detailed and up-to-date review on innate antiviral interferons. It will be useful to the field. The figures are particularly nice and easy to understand. I have no major complaints about the content. However, there are a number of stylistic and spelling revisions to address prior to publication.

Major points:

Introduction: There is no mention of type II interferons. I realize that this review is focused on the more innate antiviral function of type I and type III IFNs, but IFNg should at least be mentioned and distinguished from the type I and type III IFNs.

Figure 1. I like the figure, it is simple and clear. However, the receptors should be labeled. I realize this is shown in Table 2 but it was not immediately clear looking at the figure.

Minor points:

Line 41. “homo sapiens” should be italicized and written as Homo sapiens

Line 51. The S in “IFNS” should be lower-case

Line 72. “janus” should be capitalized

Figure 1 legend. “Signals are transduced” would be a more clear way of expressing the events triggered by IFN/receptor binding than “signal transductions are initiated”

Lines 203-204. This sentence doesn’t make sense to me. Maybe it’s missing an “of” between “downstream” and “both”?

Line  207-208. This sentence also doesn’t make sense to me. Is “were” supposed to be “where”?

Line 251. “in-vitro” doesn’t need a hyphen and should be italicized (consistent with in vivo later in the same sentence)

Line 264. “It” should be lower-case

Line 485. Why are back-slashes used here?

Author Response

Thank you for the very rapid and positive review.

Major points: 

We have now added the information on type II interferon to the introduction. Additionally, we have added the receptor labels to figure 1. 

Minor points:

Thank you for taking the time to thoroughly read our manuscript and catching our small grammar errors. They have been corrected in the revised version as per your suggestion.