Identification of Heat Tolerance in Chinese Wildgrape Germplasm Resources

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors,
attached is a pdf with my modifications/suggestions.
As you can see, there are many things to edit and review.
Moreover, I believe that many of the conclusions are not justified by a solid data. 

In my opinion, it would be appropriate for the authors to enter other data, not only those related to photosynthetic efficiency, but also to the biological diversity of species.
I believe that the data presented may be interesting, but should be integrated with other studies, before we can say that there is "heat tolerance".

Best regards

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear reviewers and editors,

We would like to thank reviewers for their comments about the manuscript. We have found the reviewer’s comments very thoughtful and helpful for improving our manuscript. We are pleased to submit the revised version of MS# horticulturae-951490, ‘Identification of Heat Tolerance in Chinese Wild grape Germplasm Resources’. We have responsed to each of your concerns below.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

I like the notion of the study presented in this manuscript. However, it is a very simplistic bit of research. There are a couple of things I don't understand, which I will point out below. And, I will make some comments on the English language syntax of the manuscript.

I find it odd that the authors created as subsection that just holds the table and figure(section 3.2). I am sure that the typesetters will incorporate these within the results section where appropriate. That will remove the need to have subsections altogether.

There is no need to give a description about what boxplots are (lns 86-91). Boxplots are well recognized as a suitable manner in which to display highly variable data. I would point out why, for some vines, you only have a narrow line instead of a box & whiskers that show various quartiles. I know the answer, you have insufficient data points for the software to create a box (or the data is so close together that the Y-axis scale does not allow differentiation). I think that you need to point that out. If it is the former (insufficient data) is it worth including that particular data?

With regards to Table 1. The authors do not refer to Table 1 in the text of the manuscript, at all. Instead, they refer to tables S1 and S2. This is odd and needs to be addressed in a rewrite.

Furthermore (again with regards to table 1), I can see different numbers with regards to "Fv/Fm" and "Average Fv/Fm" for each year, but I cannot comprehend the differences in their meaning. Than, at the end of the table your state an "average value" - what is that the average of? All the "average values" are 0.9(something) - these cannot be the average of the various year's average presented in the columns before, these are by themselves much lower.

 

Specific language suggestions:

line 25: remove "one of the most" and "worldwide" and replace with "a globally"

line 27: replace "while air temperature" with "when air temperatures"

line 28: add the word "the" before maximum

line 36: replace "... fluorescence is a probe to investigate", with "... fluorescence investigates ..."

lines 36-38: the authors state that the fluorescent method is "widely used", however, they only cite one single paper (reference 16). If something is widely used, please evidence this by citing multiple recent papers, rather than 1 old one.

lines 41-42: the sentence here is incomplete. It finishes abruptly. Please revise.

Line 46: start the sentence with a capitalized word (Chlorophyl)

ln 62: replace "In all, 247 assessed grape accessions, which were collected ..." with "247 assessed grape accessions, were collected ..."

line 63: add the word "which" after (supplementary table S1)

line 64: replace the word "are" with "were"

line 72: remove the word "respectively". The word respectively is only used with two strings of facts/data are being linked in a text. You only have one string (the years).

line 72: please clarify your text where you state "the fifth to seven healthy leaves ...". Is it supposed to read: "the fifth to seventh healthy leaves ..." or something else?

line 73: replace the word "on" with "from"

lines 73-74: rewrite "were collected on different trees respectively and used in the experiment immediately.", as "were collected on different plants and used immediately in the experiment.". Vines are not trees.

When comparing information in lines 74 and 83, please explain the difference between "three biological replicates" AND "five technical replications". I would assume that these should be the same: either 3 or 5.

line 75: delete "According to Xu et al (2014)" and start the sentence with "Leaf disks ....", and then place the citation at the end of the sentence.

line 81: replace "The data were statistically analyzed by IBM SPSS Statistics ..." with "Statistical analysis was carried out using IBM SPSS Statistics ..."

The discussion needs to be improved. There is only a limited attempt to link the findings to previous publications, and it does not even link the findings to various heat stress notion introduced in the introduction. Linked to that, it struck me as odd that in the discussion the authors introduce the notion of high temperatures in rain shelters, while in the introduction only global warming was cited as the potential source of heat that imposes a heat stress. Please stay consistent in your 'story line'.

Author Response

Dear reviewers and editors,

We would like to thank reviewers for their comments about the manuscript. We have found the reviewer’s comments very thoughtful and helpful for improving our manuscript. We are pleased to submit the revised version of MS# horticulturae-951490, ‘Identification of Heat Tolerance in Chinese Wild grape Germplasm Resources’. We have responsed to each of your concerns below.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors, 

I really appreciate your efforts! 

Best regards

Author Response

Dear reviewers and editors,

Thanks very much for taking your time to review this manuscript. We are pleased to submit the minor revised version of MS# horticulturae-951490, ‘Identification of Heat Tolerance in Chinese Wild grape Germplasm Resources’.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors made significant improvements to their manuscript. Furthermore, I accept their reasoning for the inclusion of limited data sets.

The only thing that still stand between the current version of the manuscript and acceptance is the use of English language. There are some real English-language oddities. For instance, on line 26 both plural and singular expressions are being used. Furthermore, in some instances, the changes made to the text have created poorly constructed sentences.

Please carry out a very careful English language editing on the entire manuscript. 

Author Response

Dear reviewers and editors,

We would like to thank reviewers for their comments about the manuscript. We have found the reviewer’s comments very thoughtful and helpful for improving our manuscript. We are pleased to submit the minor revised version of MS# horticulturae-951490, ‘Identification of Heat Tolerance in Chinese Wild grape Germplasm Resources’.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx