Fermented Antler Recovers Stamina, Muscle Strength and Muscle Mass in Middle-Aged Mice
, Hyejin Jeon 1,†, Sung-Hwan Kim 1, Keon Heo 1,*, Jae-Jung Shim 1, Jung-Lyoul Lee 1, Deok-Chun Yang 2,* and Se Chan Kang 2,3,*Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Very good paper. There is few papers on the influence of different food ingredients on muscle mass. It should be published.
Author Response
Thank you for your comments. We have checked the manuscript about the English language and style following your comments.
Reviewer 2 Report
line 94: make it clear the number of animals. Was it 4*5 in each age group or it was 20 all together?
lines 95-99: prepare a table to explain the treatments, in that form it is hard to understand.
line 154: increased in what?
figure 4a: it is not visible clearly from the PDF, but the reference lenght should be teh same for each picture. Figures and tables should appear after the first mention.
discussion: it is very weak. It has no logical structure, includes repetitions from results and non related information. Should be re-written.
conclusions: too lenghty, contains repeated results. Should be re-written.
line 313: adults should be replaced by mice.
Author Response
Thank you for impressive comments.
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
I found this to be a well written and with a few exceptions to be thorough and well controlled.
There are a few minor and one major point that should be addressed by the authors prior to publication.
- A major concern with this work is the assumption of the authors that the positive affects from a diet supplemented with fermented antler are due to the antler. However, given the growing field of studies regarding the many impacts of bacterial make up in the gut biome, the authors should also address a possible role for lactobacillus. For example, would they see that same affect if the same strain bacillus were grown on another substrate?
Some minor points that should be addressed
- Please edit the materials and method section so that the experimental and control groups are more clearly defined. It appears in the materials and methods section that mice were broken down not only by age but also by their initial assessment of grip strength and lactate. Please explain exactly which mice were used in the subsequent studies and why other mice were not included.
- To this end, it appears that middle aged mice that were supplemented with creatine or FA had initially better scores on the grip test as compared to the middle aged mice that were not supplemented (according to figure 1). If the control cohort was already in less than peak physical shape at the beginning of the studies this could impact both their decreased improved in the grip test and their subsequent shorter swim times. Also an "n" of 5 for a swim test seems a bit low. Could the authors please include a power analysis to justify these numbers?
- Please explain why there are no week zero numbers for the swim test.
- I respectfully disagree with the authors' interpretation of muscle mass data represented in figure 3. According to this graph, all the middle-aged cohorts had significantly lower muscle mass as compared to the young mice and there appears to be no significant difference between the supplemented and control middle-aged mice in terms of muscle mass.
Author Response
Thank you for impressive comments.
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 3 Report
Thank you for thoughtfully addressing my comments and questions.
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.
