Reduction of Cancer Stem Cells and Invasiveness of Human Melanoma and Breast Cancer by Cucurbitacin B from Lagenaria siceraria
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear authors, the revision of the paper “reduction of cancer steam cells and invasiveness of Human melanoma and breast cancer by cucurbitacin B” reveals that the research project is well planned and organized. In my opinion prior to the publication minor revisions are needed.
My requests are as follows:
Avoiding repeating the discussion in both the results and the discussion paragraph might improve the results presentation. Please, reorganize the text avoiding repetitions.
The figures' captions should only contain the explanation of the figures, not the commentary that is found in the text. Please, erase all commentary in figures' captions.
Even if it is optional, the introduction of a concluding section can be quite supportive in helping the reader to recap the learnings from the research paper.
Author Response
Dear authors, the revision of the paper “reduction of cancer steam cells and invasiveness of Human melanoma and breast cancer by cucurbitacin B” reveals that the research project is well planned and organized. In my opinion prior to the publication minor revisions are needed.
My requests are as follows:
Avoiding repeating the discussion in both the results and the discussion paragraph might improve the results presentation. Please, reorganize the text avoiding repetitions.
I read through the Results and Discussions sections and either revised or deleted the repetitive description. I found that 4.1 paragraph seemed to have the most repetition and have made major revision on it (page 18) as well as minor revision in the paragraphs of the Discussions section.
The figures' captions should only contain the explanation of the figures, not the commentary that is found in the text. Please, erase all commentary in figures' captions.
I have revised the figure captions accordingly, particularly those of Figure 2, 4, 5, 6, 7.
Even if it is optional, the introduction of a concluding section can be quite supportive in helping the reader to recap the learnings from the research paper.
I have added more summary to the concluding paragraph in the introduction (page 2).
Reviewer 2 Report
ddc-2308634, Reduction of Cancer Stem Cells and Invasiveness of Human Melanoma and Breast Cancer by Cucurbitacin B
The manuscript presents a good research that could be of interest for the journal’s readers. It seems to be conducted correctly and the results are presented accordingly. There are some small issues that could be improved.
The title could be improved. “Reduction of Cancer Stem Cells” sounds unclear. The authors should point out exactly the effect. Also, the title mention “Cucurbitacin B”, but the main research is made on Lagenaria siceraria extracts.
Present clearly all the NMR signals, as it is done in the supplementary material section. The authors should argue better to convince that the compound is really Cucurbitacin B. Add more information in the main article, based on the spectra presented in SM.
Author Response
The manuscript presents a good research that could be of interest for the journal’s readers. It seems to be conducted correctly and the results are presented accordingly. There are some small issues that could be improved.
The title could be improved. “Reduction of Cancer Stem Cells” sounds unclear. The authors should point out exactly the effect.
I have revised this part of the title to ‘Reduction of the Number of Cancer Stem Cells’. Hope it is clearer now. Please don’t hesitate to let me know your suggestion.
Also, the title mention “Cucurbitacin B”, but the main research is made on Lagenaria siceraria extracts.
It is true that we use the Lagenaria siceraria extracts for the initial screening and characterizations. But once we confirmed the biological active compound, we repeated the early experiments and the later experiments (figures 5-9) using the AK20-F9 fraction from the final run of HPLC that contains near pure cucurbitacin B.
Present clearly all the NMR signals, as it is done in the supplementary material section. The authors should argue better to convince that the compound is really Cucurbitacin B. Add more information in the main article, based on the spectra presented in SM.
We have added more description of the chemical characterization in the main article (page 8).
Reviewer 3 Report
In this manuscript the authors report the potential interest of cucurbitacin B as agent for preventing cancer metastesis. This compound, identified as the most promising compound in MTT antiproliferative assays and obtained from a process of extraction from Lagenaria siceraria - fractionation - MPLC and HPLC separations, revealed to reduce the number of cancer stem cells and cancer invasiveness. The manuscript is well written and organized, the experimental part and SI are complete, with the significant data and graphics included. The complementary studies performed support the conclusions, and demonstrate the potential of this compound as lead molecule against cancer. I do not have less positive aspects to mention and therefore I recommend publication of this manuscript in the present form.
Author Response
I want to thank the reviewer for their time in reviewing our manuscript and providing the positive comments.
