Effects of Dietary L-malic Acid Supplementation on Meat Quality, Antioxidant Capacity and Muscle Fiber Characteristics of Finishing Pigs

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for this relevant paper. Some comments:

line 44: MyHC pops up as an acronym here. please explain acronyms first, before using them as such in the text. What you could do here is: "myosine heavy chain (MyH)". From then on, you can use the acronym,

line 50-51: "L-malic acid is of antibacterial properties" should read "L-malic acid has antibacterial properties".

line 91: "LD muscle": again an acronym. Better to write " Latissimus dorsi (LD) muscle"

line 162: what is the reason that three separate statistical analyses are used on the same material? One appropriate method would have sufficed? Particularly since conclusions are drawn about significance based on a significant result of only one (probably the most appropriate method in this case) of the statistical methods (table 3).

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

L 27-28 In the last 5 yrs poultry and not pig is the most consumed meat in the world https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-meat-production-by-livestock-type?time=1961..2020

Therefore, please change to read: Pork is of the most consumed meat …..

and change accordingly the reference.

L103-104 please explain in detail how did you measure the subjective color and marbling in order to provide all the required information to someone to repeat the experiment.

L106-107 As far as I am aware, calibration should be applied against the black tile as well. Please check the instructions again.

L114 What is the:  free-dried muscle power…??

Tables 6, 7 and 8 and figure 1.  Tables should stand alone. Please provide explanations for all abbreviations in footnote.

L 255-256 and Conclusions section. You speculate that the antioxidant capacity has been improved but this statement is not justified by your results. No mean differences have been obtained apart from a tendency for a quadratic effect. Please revise accordingly.

L272-277 The increase in carcass length is very interesting and I must say unexpected. Therefore, I consider that you should further discuss it by taking into consideration that carcass length is affected more by spine-bone development rather than muscle development. I consider that your statement that muscle growth affected carcass length is not that rational. In addition, there is a vast number of published articles that haven’t found any effect of antioxidants supplementation on carcass traits. Please discuss it in the discussion section.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf