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Two experts in E. coli genomics and in microbial pathogenesis/epidemiology have looked at your manuscript and made useful suggestions for improvement. Apart from that, the manuscript needs slight editing to improve readability..
The article is written in clear English with sufficient introduction and background. All relevant prior literature is appropriately referenced. The figures are relevant to the article and appropriately described and labeled.
The submission describes original primary research and clearly defines a research question that is adequately addressed. There is a high technical standard of the work performed.
The data in this study is robust and statistically sound. The data is available via public databases. All conclusions are appropriately stated and backed up with the data presented.
This is a nice, straightforward study
- Lines 69 and 80: Please, correct typing errors.
- Line 158: Do the authors mean "two subtypes"? Please, correct it.
- Please, correct titles of supplementary figures 3 (stx2a) and 4 (stx2c).
- Please, reverse the order of graphs in supplementary figures 3 and 4.
- Line 135: Can the authors clarify how they calculated the 1200 score of the three stx2a-matched queries with query sequence of 600 bp?
- Line 261: The authors stated that 21 stx2a alleles were previously identified in the NCBI nucleotide database. However, in Fig. 5, they show 22 previously identified alleles.
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