For the questions of “is the deletion burden observed really exceptional in a population sample of similar ancestry”, we agree with the reviewer’s comment. We did the analysis a couple of years ago, at that time, there is no CNV data from the 1000 genome for Mexicans, Colombians, Puerto Ricans and Peruvians, however, there is data for the admixed populations, thus we used this for this study. There might be some difficulty to do more analysis since our statistician and bioinformatics person left the department and we are in the process of hiring somebody for this role. At the same, we continue in recruiting more subjects with cervical cancers to further confirm our findings. Moreover, in the discussion, we have list this as one of the limitations in page 8 “2) there might be bias of the CNA identified in cervical cancer for the Mexican Americans since we used the 1000 Genome admixed populations, not Mexican Americans, thus, we current recruit more subjects with cervical cancer from the same population and plan to validate the findings in more samples;” 2)
Therefore, the authors pointed out that validation and confirmation of the results in a large sample size will be needed in the future.