Dear Jean-Philippe David, Tiphaine Bacot and co-authors,

Thank you very much for submitting the revised version of your manuscript to PCI Evolutionary Biology. I consider that the reviewers' considerations have all been adequately addressed and I am now almost ready to proceed with my recommendation. There are two additional minor issues which would need to be addressed beforehand. 

First, the manuscript would need to undergo a careful reading to correct spelling and grammar mistakes, style consistencies and other minor issues. I am sorry for not pointing these out before but it has only been upon careful re-reading of your manuscript that I detected them. Please find below a list of these and do try to be exhaustive since there are probably a few more which I did not detect myself. 

Second, I would advise to deposit the Supplementary Material in a public repository such as Zenodo which allows to include descriptions such as the ones now included in the text. Please add the permanent doi identifier in the Data Availability section. Additionally, although the Materials and Methods section is quite exhaustive, I would advise to also provide the code used to conduct the statistical tests and, if possible, to produce the plots. Given the type of manuscript, I do not consider this to be absolutely necessary but in the spirit of reproducible science, I would strongly advise you to upload the code to a public repository and to include the permanent doi identifier in the Data Availability section. 

I am sorry for not mentioning these two issues before and that the review process has taken so long. I will proceed with my recommendation once these issues have been addressed in a revised version. 

Best regards, 

Diego A. Hartasánchez

Minor issues

Line 25: extra “and”

Line 100: please try to be consistent throughout the text in the use of mathematical signs and units. There is sometimes a space after “>”, and sometimes there is none (e.g. line 631). There is sometimes a space between number and unit (e.g. line 667) and sometimes there is none (e.g. line 668).

Line 104: please be consistent with the use of “kdr” vs. “Kdr” mutations

Line 105 and 372: there appears to be a double space. Please check the entire manuscript. 

Line 119: “reverse genetics”?

Line 128: “insectaries”?

Line 145: I would suggest describing the 20% increase by saying from x% to y% to avoid the potential misunderstanding that the value increased in 20% of the previous value (i.e. from 5% to 6%)

Line 145: please be consistent with the use of “p-value” vs. “P value”

Line 196: please use “vs.” instead of “Vs” for “versus” throughout the text and be consistent with the use of italics

Line 180 and 206: “fold” instead of “folds”. Please be consistent with the use of “2 fold increase” vs. “2-fold increase” as in line 267

Line 229: “expresses”

Line 298: please avoid collapsing the text onto Figure 4. Also, please explain what “a”, “b”, and “c” mean in Figure 4 top right

Line 310: “genes”

Line 351: “led”

Line 379: “through”

Line 358: “was”

Line 514: “Eppendorf”

Line 574: “manufacturer” or “manufacturer’s”

Line 587: 3’. I checked with several pdf viewers and I see a question mark inside a box symbol instead of the ’. 

Line 609: “Oct.”

Line 659: “et al.,”. Please check for consistency across the text. 

Line 687: “Acknowledgements”

Line 696: “Author” or “Authors’”

References: As for the case of 3’, there are multiple instances of this question mark sign, in particular (but not only) for the “-” in between page numbers. Potentially this could be solved by replacing “--” by “-”. Please check all references. 

Dear Jean-Philippe David, Tiphaine Bacot and co-authors,

Thank you very much for submitting the revised version of your manuscript to PCI Evolutionary Biology. I have now received very favorable comments from two reviewers. They both consider that all of their comments on the first version have been addressed and are pleased with the current version.

There are just four minor comments pointed out by one of the reviewers. Once these are addressed I will gladly proceed with my recommendation. 

I am very sorry that we have taken so long to complete this round of review. The recommendation will be published as soon as possible once your revised version is submitted. 

Best regards, 

Diego A. Hartasánchez

Dear Tiphaine Bacot and co-authors,

First of all, thanks for submitting your work to PCI Evolutionary Biology, and please forgive the delay in getting back to you with the reviews for your manuscript. 

I enjoyed reading your manuscript and find that it’s a research of great importance. I have received two reviews by experts in the field, which are also optimistic about your work. The reviewer’s comments are mostly positive with respect to the importance of your work, and the quality of your manuscript, acknowledging the complications in performing this type of research in a challenging genome. They do, however, raise important points that would need to be addressed prior to my recommendation. 

Please, address all of the reviewers’ points. In particular, the findings of Cattel et al., 2020, should be encompassed adequately in the manuscript; apparent inconsistencies between figure 1 and table 1, and between figures 1 and 4, need to be clarified; and I do suggest reevaluating the substructure of the results section to see if you find a way to present the results in a way that helps clarify some of the unclear points of the manuscript. 

Finally, although I consider that all of the reviewers comments and questions should be addressable, please feel free to explain your point of view if you happen not to agree with them.

I’m looking forward to your revisions.

Best regards,

Diego A. Hartasánchez