Design of a Smart System for Rapid Bacterial Test

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors describe the design of a system for a rapid test for microscopic detection of growing bacteria. The article describes an experiment to grow microbes in coliform media containing agar and monitor growth from a single cell in situ with a camera. The novelty is monitoring growth in real time.The article then provides detail to theoretically design a system to monitor cell and detect microscopically in 2-4 hours.

Concerns:

It seems that this work should fall under the topical area of a patent not publication

More information about the types of devices that use agar and microscopy is needed for the introduction

Several times suggestions indicate that methods are expensive, but it is unclear of the actual cost per assay and how the cost of this methods differs (see lines 44, 62, 232)

Are all water borne pathogens fast growing microorganisms (line 74), if not it would limit the applicability of the device?

If the authors built the device in Figure 1 more description should be provided

Line 80-81 should be edited: …very high (e.g., as…method); less than….

It seems that some bacteria coliforms might not be detected with the 0.45 µm filter (line 98), shouldn’t a 0.22 µm filter be used?

What is the coliform specific medium (line 99), is it selective to only coliforms?

Line 101 should say: 100-fold

Figure 1 should have a size bar (e.g., 10 µm) indicated

More research is needed to categorically market the invention as a field test

More elements are needed to support development of the device, such as application of the method to real samples, validation that all pathogens are detected or that non-pathogens are not detected, effectiveness of the filtration, inhibitions of coliform growth, software application, field-level deployment, costs, etc.

Author Response

Please see the attachment for point-to-point response to your comments

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper titled  “Design of a Smart System for rapid bacterial Test” is based on a good idea that could facilitate and improve the analysis of biological water pollution, halving the costs and the time that currently are long and laborious.

In general, all the work is very smooth and easy to read and interpret. The introduction is fairly complete and clear, it touches all the points that need to be highlighted to show how much a new tool based on techniques that currently seem to be “overshadowed” can improve this specific and important type of analysis.

I am not convinced about the disposition of the chapters. What I have understood is that the first 3 chapters concern the preliminary investigation that was made to proceed with the development of the design, and perhaps it would be good to explain it also with a sentence at the beginning of paragraph 4 where instead the sentence "The device is shown in Figure 5 and envisaged to be easily connected." is not necessary because later it is well explained and clarified.

The design of the model is very clear and it is easy to understand. Just two questions:

1) Has the model been designed only or authors already developed the prototype? If the latter is the case, did authors performed any concrete preliminary tests on it?

2) What are the dimensions of the prototype?The possibility of carring out analysis using it directly in situ it would make things even easier.

However, this is a nice idea and an innovation that with my great pleasure takes up techniques considered "old" but that still have great potential.

Line 119: The sentence “In the next section, we illustrate these images” is not necessary.

126 delete “below”.

Figure 4: I don't like the caption in the middle of the figure, it’s better to bring the figure together and make a single caption.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer please see the attachment for our response to your comments.

Thanks

Tahmina

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you, well done. I appreciate your responses to my concerns. Suggest a final read-through, I noticed two periods at the end of a sentence somewhere in the document.

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors,

you work and developments to the BactI device are really interesting, but I think your manuscript should contain the description and results of further tests with BactI or preliminary experimental tests with the new device Bact II, otherwise differences from your already published paper ("A SMARTPHONE-BASED EARLY ALERT SYSTEM FOR SCREENING OF COLIFORM CONTAMINATION IN DRINKING WATER" JMBFS 9(3), 2019) are really too limited.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript submitted by Patil et al. tries to describe a portable device for monitoring coliforms in water samples. Unfortunately, in its current form, the document lacks substance and mostly uses information that is already published in one of their previous papers, including figures that need official approvement from the publisher of JMBFS. 

In the discussion section, the authors state that: "The device has been rigorously tested and validated with contaminated water samples under laboratory conditions. The data obtained shows comparable results with standard microbiological test.". Unfortunately, this information (that is, in my opinion, the strong point) is not presented.

With existing portable devices (e.g., BioMEME) for quantification of target microbial groups or genetic markers, the submitted manuscript does not bring substantial novel information in its present form.