Aromatic Plants and Their Associated Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi Outcompete Tuber melanosporum in Compatibility Assays with Truffle-Oaks
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This manuscript is an important contribution on truffle cultivation and I would like to make my compliments to the Authors for it. One of the dreams of truffle growers is to realize double-cropping truffles and another cultivated crop in the same plot of land in order to have an extra income. As I suggested in a my book chapter (please consider this aspect and cite it in the discussion) aromatic plants produce volatile aromatic compounds which could have fungicidal effects especially against ascomycetes (Leonardi, M., Iotti, M., Pacioni, G., R. Hall, I., Zambonelli, A. (2021). Truffles: Biodiversity, Ecological Significances, and Biotechnological Applications. In: Abdel-Azeem, A.M., Yadav, A.N., Yadav, N., Usmani, Z. (eds) Industrially Important Fungi for Sustainable Development. Fungal Biology. Springer, Cham). That can explain the diminution of Tuber mycelium and mycorrhizas also without the inoculation with AM fungi.
Although it is obvious that the oaks grew less in presence of other plants in the some pot for nutritional competition, as suggested also by the Authors at line 305, the aspects on mycelial competitions and AM colonization of oaks are completely new.
I suggest to the Authors to add a figure of roots of oaks colonized with T. melanosporum and with AM fungi at least as supplemental materials.
The manuscript is clearly written as well as the methodology with exceptions of lines 199-209 which need to be better explained as well as fig. S2.
Line 155 substitute mycorrhizal with mycorrhized
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Reviewer 2 Report
I have carefully read this paper. Although the design of the paper is very meaningful, I generally feel that the research content is relatively small. It is recommended to resubmit after enriching the content.
Author Response
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Reviewer 3 Report
The experimental design was well set up and the results were adequately examined so that the work could be published after minor revision.
In the bibliography the names of the specific taxa must be absolutely arranged first because they are not written in italics second because the epithets of the species are all written with the first capital letter, instead of small.
In the discussion there is no mention of the fact that the medicinal plants examined all contain active ingredients with a strong antifungal action, so the negative effects recorded could also be partly attributed to the presence of these substances in the root exudates. See Casiglia et al., 2015; Lavin et al., 2016; Devreux et al., 2016; Savkovi´c et al., 2016; Elsayed and Shabana, 2018; Palla et al., 2020.
At L.97 change ‘pinyon-juniper’ in “pine-juniper”, “pinyon” looks a mechanical word
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Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
It's much better than the last version.
Still, please check all the spellings.
Author Response
We greatly appreciate these comments. We carefully revised the spelling and the language coherence of the whole manuscript, and we changed the British spelling of some words with the American spelling (i.e., colonization, analyzed, sterilization, phosphorus, fertilization, center, normalize), and we also corrected the verb “found” with the phrasal verb “found out”. Also, to facilitate reproducibility of the methodology that we used, we added the annealing temperature that was set up in the PCR program (page 6, line 210) that we adapted specially for our samples.
