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In the revised version all the referees' requests have been fulfilled so the paper can be accepted for publication.
[# PeerJ Staff Note - this decision was reviewed and approved by James Reimer, a PeerJ Section Editor covering this Section #]
Dear Dr Santana,
Please receive the referees' comments on your article.
They recommend publication after minor revision.
Please consider all the point sraised and provide a revised version of your article
The article is concise and clearly written in a sufficiently correct English.
The Reference format is not that requested by the Journal.
The figures are well done but there are no captions to the figures.
The research topic is within the scope of the journal.
The methods are described with sufficient detail and the investigation conducted in a rigorous manner.
no comment
Just a few specific comments:
- the technique used is the powder XRD, so I would add the word powder at line 79 and throughout the text.
- At line 92 please correct Briker with Bruker.
- Please rephrase the sentence at lines 152-155.
The paper by Santana and Aranda reports a preliminary characterization of the structure of Pteria colymbus oyster shell by using an appropriate set of experimental techniques. The results are sound and, in my opinion, this work can be published after only minor revisions as outlined below.
In the Materials & Methods section, the Authors say that six 1 cm2 samples were cut from the shells. For sake of reproducibility of the experiments, a sentence on how powder samples for XRD and FTIR measurements have been prepared should be added.
Figure 4 reports the XRD pattern of nacre powder. However, the spectrum presents few reflections and it resembles the spectrum of the nacre from mussels, while it differs from the XRD spectrum of powdered mussel shells, as reported by Ren et al. (see reference list). The Authors should add a comment about this (i.e.: does it depends from a different grinding procedure?). Figure 4 should also report the position and indexing of aragonite reflections present in the reference ICDD card (no. 76-606) for comparison.
The title of the X-axis of Figure 4 is better written as 2θ.
The title of the X-axis of Figure 5 is wrong. It should report wavenumbers in cm-1. Also, the Y-axis of this figure should read as just “Intensity” or “Intensity / a.u.”
As stated above, the findings of this study are valuable and should be published.
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