PREreview of An array ofZymoseptoria triticieffectors suppress plant immune responses

Within this study, Thynne et al. screen two libraries of Zymoseptoria effectors for suppression of elicitor-induced ROS and cell death. Through this approach they identify promising effector candidates for future investigation. Interestingly, they highlight that some of these identified effectors share structural homology. However, we have highlighted some issues with the clarity of the manuscript, as well as lack of cohesion between the two experimental datasets. Notably, we would have liked to see a more cohesive nomenclature system used for the effector names.

Due to the variation within the data collection methods of both libraries, some aspects of the manuscript were harder to follow. We would appreciate seeing some attempt of integrating these libraries, which would make following some of the analyses clearer. Furthermore, the manuscript doesn’t explicitly specify whether signal peptides are included when expressing these effectors in-planta. We believe the apoplast or cytoplasmic localisation of the effectors is a significant characteristic to include within the manuscript.

We’ve grouped comments by figure and table below.

Table 1:

-              The font is too small.

-              Could explicitly state which DPI values are symptomless and necrotrophic.

-              A continuous colour scale would be better, rather than the binary dark/light green used.

Figure 1:

-              There is no explanation of the different dot-points (larger black and smaller grey). This should be within the figure legend.

-              The smaller grey points are not well visualised, they could be bigger or a different colour.

-              There is a lack of explanation surrounding replicates used (technical and biological) within the legend.

-              There is no explanation of what the structural groups correspond to.

Table 2:

-              There is a lack of clarity of possible overlap between the effectors in Table 1 and Table 2.

Figure 2:

-              This figure seems to be presenting very similar data to Figure 1, but in a different format. We would like to highlight how Figure 1 data is normalised, but Figure 2 is not.

Figure 3:

-              This figure needs a level of quantification; we would suggest either the level of suppression observed or frequency of presence/absence (including replication data).

Figure 4:

-              In section A, what does the asterisk or asterisks represent? This is not explained in the legend, and we cannot find it in-text.

-              We would like to see some sort of confidence scoring within the figure or legend for the structural predictions. While pTM values are within the supplementary material, this should be seen within the manuscript as well.

Overall, the idea of the study is straightforward and logical with interesting results for further study. However, we do feel that there was a lack of narrative cohesion, partly due to the datasets being so separate.

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.