High Performance Integration Pipeline for Viral and Epitope Sequences

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper from Alfonsi et al. proposes new platforms containing structural characteristics of viral proteins from diverse viruses. Data is taken from numerous databases and verified. These platforms could help researchers link the functions and structure of the viral proteins from multiple viruses and provide epitopes or targets for antibodies or drugs discovery and development. It is thus an interesting paper, and the platforms are clearly explained. However, a few modifications would improve this paper:

1. English needs to be corrected or improved,
2. Fig 1-2 need to be larger, 
3.  Fig3-5 need to have larger characters.

Author Response

We thank the Reviewer for the positive evaluation of our work. We revised the manuscript accordingly with their advice, improved the English, and we enlarged the figures. In particular, we improved all 5 figures:

• Figure 1 is now more compact and has a larger font size;
• In Figure 2, we excluded the screen captures inside the columns “Content optimization”, “Search” and “Result inspection”. As it was not possible to make them larger, we instead replaced them with textual descriptions. This change was helpful in saving space and increasing the font size to improve the overall readability.
• We increased the font-size of the Figures 3, 4 and 5.

Reviewer 2 Report

Alfonsi et al. provide some very useful, comparisons and technical aspects addressing the technical aspects behind search engine tools. The manuscript is well written. The work suggests how to explore and analyze data from tools like ViruSurf, EpiSurf, VirusViz and VirusLab and the ways to maintain genomic data. 

The manuscript has some minor spelling and grammar mistakes here and there, it will be useful to correct those. 

Author Response

We thank the Reviewer for their positive evaluation. We revised the manuscript to improve the language and corrected the misspellings.