Molecular Systems Biology Peer Review Process File Systems Analysis of Eleven Rodent Disease Models Reveals an Inflammatome Signature and Key Drivers Transaction Report

(Note: With the exception of the correction of typographical or spelling errors that could be a source of ambiguity, letters and reports are not edited. The original formatting of letters and referee reports may not be reflected in this compilation.) Thank you again for submitting your work to Molecular Systems Biology. We have now heard back from the three referees whom we asked to evaluate your manuscript. As you will see from the reports below, the referees raise substantial concerns on your work, which, I am afraid to say, preclude its publication. The most substantial concerns were raised by the second reviewer who clearly indicated that they were not convinced that this work currently presented a decisive advance in our understanding of gene expression patterns associated with inflammation, and the overlap and novelty of this inflammatome expression signature compared to previous works remained to be rigorously demonstrated. The other two reviewers had more specific, but important concerns, regarding the manner in which consensus networks were constructed and key aspects of the expression profiling methodologies. These two reviewers both rated the validity of the conclusions reached in this work and its suitability for publication as "medium," indicating that they felt that these concerns were important enough to cast some doubt on the conclusions reached in these work. Given these concerns, we feel we have no choice but to return this manuscript with the message that we cannot offer to publish it. Nevertheless, the reviewers expressed interest in the subject matter, and they make constructive