Dating the origin and spread of specialization on human hosts in Aedes aegypti mosquitoes

Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, United States
Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, United States
Laboratory of Fundamental and Applied Entomology, Université Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Burkina Faso
Department of Livestock Sciences and Techniques, Sine Saloum University El Hadji Ibrahima NIASS, Senegal
Department of Parasitology, Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research, University of Ghana, Ghana
Department of Entomology. Center for Vector Biology & Zoonotic Diseases. The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, United States
Yale University, United States
Verily Life Sciences, United States

Mar 10, 2023

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.83524

Open access
Copyright information

Version of Record

Accepted for publication after peer review and revision.

Download
Cite
Share
CommentOpen annotations (there are currently 0 annotations on this page).

Version of Record published: March 24, 2023 (This version)
Accepted: March 10, 2023
Accepted Manuscript published: March 10, 2023 (Go to version)
Received: September 16, 2022
Preprint posted: September 13, 2022 (Go to version)

Decision letter
Author response

Decision letter

George H Perry

Senior and Reviewing Editor; Pennsylvania State University, United States
Nicolas Lou

Reviewer; University of California, Berkeley, United States

Our editorial process produces two outputs: (i) public reviews designed to be posted alongside the preprint for the benefit of readers; (ii) feedback on the manuscript for the authors, including requests for revisions, shown below. We also include an acceptance summary that explains what the editors found interesting or important about the work.

Decision letter after peer review:

Thank you for submitting your article "Dating the origin and spread of specialization on human hosts in Aedes aegypti mosquitoes" for consideration by eLife. Your article has been reviewed by 1 peer reviewer, and the evaluation has been overseen by a Reviewing Editor and George Perry as the Senior Editor. The following individual involved in the review of your submission has agreed to reveal their identity: Nicolas Lou (Reviewer #1).

The Reviewing Editor has drafted this to help you prepare a revised submission.

Before getting to the details, I first wanted to apologize for the exceedingly long amount of time that it took to reach this decision, and offer some explanation. We had three reviewers accept the invitation to review, and received one review promptly, but not the other two. Since there were two outstanding reviews I continually assumed that at least one would be submitted, if late… and with allowance for the intervening holidays and busy end-of-year period (and of course just the generally challenging times being faced by many), this stretched until now. To be brief from here, I am choosing to proceed with the positive decision on your paper at this point with one formally-submitted review, rather than add further time to the process to solicit wholly new reviews. This is partly due to my own comfort in evaluating your methods, results, and conclusions, as an unofficial second reviewer in this case. I fully support the comments of the submitted review and will add that I really like the paper – the methodological approach and the biological results are each outstanding on their own; together this is an outstanding paper in my view, with only relatively small changes needed prior to acceptance and publication.

Essential revisions:

Expand discussion regarding the specific assumptions made in your analyses, sources of uncertainty regarding the inputs, and how this impacts the certainty of your results. The inclusion of a formal uncertainty analysis could be warranted, with the expansion of this discussion to a mini-section of the paper.

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.83524.sa1

Author response

Essential revisions:

Expand discussion regarding the specific assumptions made in your analyses, sources of uncertainty regarding the inputs, and how this impacts the certainty of your results. The inclusion of a formal uncertainty analysis could be warranted, with the expansion of this discussion to a mini-section of the paper.

We have included more details about the phasing process, linkage structure, and our level of certainty about phasing and resulting inferences. We have also expanded our discussion of our assumption that the recent migration signal should correspond to the peak of the Atlantic Slave Trade, and discussed how deviations from this assumption would affect our conclusions.

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.83524.sa2