maxbiostat
commented
9 years ago - Page 1 Line 34: “environmental…”. Are you really using environmental data (e.g. air and bathing water quality)? Or do you mean livestock population and trade data, so more epidemiologically-related data or population data?
- Page 1 Line 42: “Our findings…”. This is a general sentence and might lead to the assumption that evolutionary and spatial dynamics of serotype A and O are globally different (which might be not the case). Just highlight the South America setting.
- Page 1 Line 50: “, the most important…”. Is FMD the most important animal disease or, better, is one of the most?
- Page 2 Line 17: References 4 and 14 are duplicates.
- Page 2 Line 17: Use Di Nardo et al. [12].
- Page 2 Line 18 and Line 20: “environmental…”. Check the meaning of ‘environmental data’ with what you are trying to analyse.
- Page 2 Line 28: “…in the continent.”. Which one? Do you mean at ‘continental’ level? Or you are only referring to South America?
- Page 3 Line 48: “..we employ an asymmetric…”. You have already detailed your analysis procedures in the Material and Methods section. This could be deleted.
- Page 5 Line 12: “We provide evidence of Venezuela..”. Which region you are referring to? The Andean region? Please, specify.
- Page 5 Line 26: “…trade and viral diffusion, we collected…”. I think it would be better to say “we obtained data…from…” because maybe you have not been in the field collecting data.
- Page 7 Line 22: I would rather use: “see Figure 3 in [6]” or “see FMD historical outbreak data in [6]”.
- Page 8 Line 7: “..for viral Ne in both…”. You previously discuss about viral diversity and now present the effective population size (Ne). Since the skyline family is based on the θ=Net, you should describe Ne only if you have extracted that estimate with the appropriate measure of generation time, which you are not having or even discussing (i.e. in your graph you should report in your y-axis legend the compound value as well - Net). I suggest using viral diversity throughout the paper.
- Page 9 Line 13: It seems you used BEAST 1.7.5 - or even and older 1.7.2 version - (from your web available .xml) to perform the analyses, although a more recent version is available (1.8.2). Is the latest version more robust and efficient in the results generated? Have you re-analysed your data using the latest version and producing similar results?
- You have a type O sequence from Peru (GenBank Accession No. HQ695844.1) you say collected in 2004, whilst in your previous paper on Ecuador is defined as 1994. I checked in GenBank and this is from 2004. Therefore, you need to amend your previous paper with the correct date.