Revamping of Cotton Breeding Programs for Efficient Use of Genetic Resources under Changing Climate

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

 

With the fast development of molecular biology, sequencing and gene editing technologies, many progressive works and novel genetic and genomic resources related with cotton breeding were published recent years. Thus, this is a timely review of the new literature in this fast growing field. However, the structure of the review is confusing. The part subtitled “6. Transgenic Cotton” was a part about breeding technologies and should be merged with “8. New emerging technologies”. “3. Cotton genetic resources” and “5. Cotton genomic database” are all about resources, which are better to be together. I would suggest the authors to reorganize the paper.

 

Besides, many important works were missed in this review. More integrated data should be added to enrich the paper, including the recent researches on genomics, biotechnologies, circumstance changes and plant-environment interactions for the direction of climate related plant engineering.

Here are some examples,

 

-Yang, Z., Ge, X., Yang, Z. et al. (2019) Extensive intraspecific gene order and gene structural variations in upland cotton cultivars. Nat Commun 10, 2989.

 

-Bao, Y., Hu, G., Grover, C.E. et al. (2019) Unraveling cis and trans regulatory evolution during cotton domestication. Nat Commun 10, 5399

 

-C. Shen, et al. (2019) Population genomics reveals a fine-scale recombination landscape for genetic improvement of cotton

Plant J., 99 , pp. 494-505

 

-Y. Hu, et al. (2019) Gossypium barbadense and Gossypium hirsutum genomes provide insights into the origin and evolution of allotetraploid cotton Nat. Genet., 51, pp. 739-748

 

-C.M. Shan, et al. (2019) Control of cotton fibre elongation by a homeodomain transcription factor GhHOX3

Nat. Commun., 5, p. 5519

 

-Cheng C, Zhang Y, Chen X, Song J, Guo Z, Li K, Zhang K. (2018) Co-expression of AtNHX1 and TsVP improves the salt tolerance of transgenic cotton and increases seed cotton yield in a saline field. Mol Breed. 2018;38:19. 

 

2, The logic in Fig2 need to be improved. It’s really hard to understand.

   1) Fiber traits are one parts of cotton agronomic traits, but the authors made them two parts.

   2) Disease resistance genes to directly improve fiber quality but not agronomic traits? Knocking out negative fiber genes to directly improve agronomic traits but indirectly improve fiber quality?

3) What’s the differences between “genetic engineering” and “genome engineering”?

 

3, Lots text mistakes in the paper, Here are some examples but not all:

Table 1, "Indeotype" should be "ideotype";

Line 175-176, reported by who?

Line 178-180, punctuation use is terrible.

Line 210, 220 plant Latin names should be italic,

Line 224, "w" should to be capital.

Line 234, journal name should be bold.

Line 231 and 240, please uniform the same journal name

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript "Revamping of Cotton Breeding Programs for Efficient Use of Genetic Resources under Changing Climatic Change" is a review about the situation of cotton breeding programs and the tools to face future challenges of cotton breeding. In the text, it is summarized the current situation of cotton cultivation, its economic importance, the benefits and strategies of past breeding programs and the nowadays tools to improve it. 

The manuscript is very well structured. The sections make the text easy to read and the language is appropiated. 

The text deals with the main points about the current situation of cotton breeding. However, some example or specific case showing succesful breeding in cotton is missing. For example, in the section "Tolerance to environmental stresses" there should mention specific QTLs that promote heat or drought tolerance in cotton cultivars. Also, there should be described, briefly, the strategies to counter the insect resistance cited in line 151.

 

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors addressed all my concerns. I have no more questions.