Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Huang et al in the present manuscript report the assessment of the importance of various active site residues for Thermoanaerobacterium xylanolyticum TxGH116 by mutagenesis, kinetic characterization, crystallographic study, and ONIOM calculations. The manuscript is well written, and the conclusions are supported by the experimental and computational results. I recommend the publication ‘as it is’. However, the coordinates of the structures in ONIOM calculations should be provided as Supplemental Materials.

Author Response

We are grateful to the reviewer for the positive response and suggestions.  Since the reviewer said the paper was well written, we think the assessment of "Extensive editing of English language and style required" was a mistake, but we have gone through the manuscript and corrected a few editing errors and grammatical errors, as well as adding a few clarifying statements.  

We have followed the reviewer's instructions to add the cartesian coordiates for the ONIOM optimized structures to the supplementary materials.  

We thank the reviewer again. 

Reviewer 2 Report

I think this manuscript has a good quality and can be published in Catalyst. This scientific work has well-selected goals, the procedure and experiments are properly designed, the results are relevant, and the manuscript is well-written. 

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for the positive support for our paper.  We have gone through and made minor corrections to the English as marked, including a few editing and grammatical errors.