Reduced Vegetative Growth Increases Grain Yield in Spring Wheat Genotypes in the Dryland Farming Region of North-West China
, Yi Jin 3, Neil C. Turner 4 and Feng-Min Li 1,*Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear Authors,
You have done extensive work agronomical importance in my opinion and I think this obtain results and conclusions could interest many researchers and readers. There are fine observations that merit to be published in Agronomy. Although the work is interesting, I think that You should take a count small modification of this article. I recommend publishing it in "Agronomy" after correcting listed below suggestions:
- Generall remark is about the language, the text is written in poor and specific English, the Authors use multiple-fold sentences (especially in Resluts and Discussion sections), without care for stylistic correctness, which makes the text in many sections difficult to understand.
- I would also expect the role of other environmental factors, such as temperature, to be more exposed.
Title:
Line 4: North-west China to North-West China
Introduction:
Line 37: Triticum aestivum L. to Triticum aestivum L.
Materials and Methods
Line 116: As I understood the description "DATA" is the symbol of the x axis?
Lines 118, 398: Yuzhong (YZ) and Dingxi (DX) - if the Authors used the abbreviations (which were already explained) They should to use it here too.
Results
Line 215: The duration of the entire growth period was also negatively correlated to grain yield (Fig. 3): as grain yield increased, the growth period of spring wheat gradually shortened from 120 days to 105 days at both sites – this sentence seems to be illogical, should be rewritten, because the increased yield of grain is the consequence of shortened growth period.
Line 397: Table S2. …… GNPS – non compatibile with the description in the table GN (spike-1)
Discussion
Line 344: wrong way of citation: Araus, Slafer, Royo and Dolores Serret [11]
Line 352: I really do not know what does this sentence mean: This line of reasoning suggests that early anthesis may not be a strategy to escape drought, but the result of selection pressure to provide food during the ‘hungry period’ after the long cold winter.
Line 378: wrong way of citation: Foulkes, Slafer, Davies, Berry, Sylvester-Bradley, Martre, Calderini, Griffiths and Reynolds [56]
Conclusions
The conclusions are poor written, this part of article does not underline the obtained results and is weakly correlated with abstract.
I suggest to rewrite it.
I hope my comments will be helpful.
Best regards,
Author Response
Dear editor and Reviewer,
We highly appreciate you and the reviewers for reviewing our manuscript and providing us the opportunity to submit a revised version of our manuscript titled “Reduced Vegetative Growth Increases Grain Yield in Spring Wheat Genotypes in the Dryland Farming Region of North-West China” to Agronomy. We also appreciate the valuable and insightful feedback from you and the reviewers on our manuscript. Please find our itemized responses below and the revisions in the re-submitted files.
We have marked the changes using track-changes. We have carefully considered the reviewers’ comments and responded to all of the suggested revisions in more details below. The reviewer’s comments are in black color and our responses are in red color; line and page numbers refer to the revised manuscript.
Comments from Reviewer # 1
You have done extensive work agronomical importance in my opinion and I think this obtain results and conclusions could interest many researchers and readers. There are fine observations that merit to be published in Agronomy. Although the work is interesting, I think that You should take a count small modification of this article. I recommend publishing it in "Agronomy" after correcting listed below suggestions:
Response: Thank you for your positive comments. We appreciate your recommendation that the observations and paper are worthy of publication in Agronomy.
Comment 1: General remark is about the language, the text is written in poor and specific English, the Authors use multiple-fold sentences (especially in Results and Discussion sections), without care for stylistic correctness, which makes the text in many sections difficult to understand.
Response: Thank you for this comment. We have improved the English language and Prof N C Turner, a co-author from the University of Western Australia whose first language is English has also gone carefully through the paper to make it easier to understand.
Comment 2: I would also expect the role of other environmental factors, such as temperature, to be more exposed.
Response: The two sites were chosen as they differed in hydrothermal conditions, but the temperature at the two sites was similar throughout the growing season (Fig. 1), with a mean temperature difference over the whole growth period of only 0.5 ℃. As the focus of the study was to understand the co-evolution in yield-related traits with the breeding and selection for increased grain yield in a dryland environment, we consider that the role of rainfall and water use on growth and yield was the appropriate environmental factor to consider.
Comment 3: Line 4: North-west China to North-West China
Response: Accepted and changed throughout.
Comment 4: Line 37: Triticum aestivum L. to Triticum aestivum L.
Response: Thanks and changed.
Comment 5: Materials and Methods: Line 116: As I understood the description "DATA" is the symbol of the x axis?
Response: Sorry for the confusion. We have now corrected ‘(A) Date’ to ‘Dates (month/date)’, and added: The date in the x-axis is the first day of the 10-day periods. We trust the figure and legend of Fig. 1 is much clearer now.
Comment 6: Lines 118, 398: Yuzhong (YZ) and Dingxi (DX) - if the Authors used the abbreviations (which were already explained) They should to use it here too.
Response: Accepted. We now use the abbreviations YZ and DX throughout the text, and table and figure legends.
Comment 7: Line 215: This resulted in the The duration of the entire growth period was also negatively correlated to grain yield (Fig. 3): as grain yield increased, the growth period of spring wheat gradually shortened from 120 days to 105 days at both sites – this sentence seems to be illogical, should be rewritten, because the increased yield of grain is the consequence of shortened growth period.
Response: Thanks for this comment. We have revised the paragraph to now read: ‘As the grain yield of spring wheat genotypes increased, the pre-anthesis period (from sowing to flowering) decreased significantly at both sites (Fig. S1a).However, the post-anthesis period (from anthesis to maturity) remained almost unchanged at approximately 32–36 days (Fig. S1b), leading to the growth period of spring wheat genotypes gradually shortening from 120 to 105 days at both sites (Fig. S1c) and an overall negative correlation between the duration of the entire growth period and grain yield (Fig. 3).’ See lines 225-230.
Comment 8: Line 397: Table S2. …… GNPS – non compatibile with the descripion in the table GN (spike-1)
Response: Thanks for your suggestion. We have changed ‘grain number per spike (GNPS)’ to ‘grain number (GN) per spike’ See line 448, Table S2.
Comment 9: Line 344: wrong way of citation: Araus, Slafer, Royo and Dolores Serret [11].
Response: Sorry for that. We changed the citation to Araus, et al. [11] at line 371.
Comment 10: Line 352: I really do not know what does this sentence mean: This line of reasoning suggests that early anthesis may not be a strategy to escape drought, but the result of selection pressure to provide food during the ‘hungry period’ after the long cold winter.
Response: Sorry for the confusion. We have now changed the sentence to: ‘This suggests that selection for early anthesis in North-West China may not have been an active strategy to escape terminal drought as in Mediterranean-type climates, but an inadvertent outcome of simply breeding and selection for increased grain yield to reduce the ‘hunger gap’ between sowing and harvest under heavy population pressure in the long farming history of North-West China. It raises the question whether increasing the length of the post-anthesis period when more favorable hydrothermal conditions prevail will result in further increases in yield.’ See lines 380-388.
Comment 11: Line 378: wrong way of citation: Foulkes, Slafer, Davies, Berry, Sylvester-Bradley, Martre, Calderini, Griffiths and Reynolds [56]
Response: Sorry for that. We changed the citation to Foulkes, et al. [56]. See line 418.
Comment 12: Conclusions: The conclusions are poor written, this part of article does not underline the obtained results and is weakly correlated with abstract. I suggest to rewrite it.
Response: Accepted. We have rewritten the Conclusions as follows and please see lines 422-433.
Breeding and selection of spring wheat genotypes grown in North-West China over the past 120 years has mainly shortened the pre-anthesis period, reduced the growth of vegetative organs and the uptake of soil water before anthesis, conserving soil water and enabling the accumulation of more biomass in reproductive organs and the development of a greater number of spikes, grains per spike and better-filled grains after anthesis. These traits have been the main drivers of grain yield increase. However, the post-anthesis period of growth has not changed in the genotypes produced over the past century so that the recent cultivars have not been able to take advantage of the favorable growth period after maturity. We conclude that selection for a longer period of post-anthesis growth and larger kernel weight/kernel size should result in increased yield benefits for spring wheat in the semiarid region of North-West China.
We trust that you find our responses and corrections satisfactory and that the paper is now acceptable for publication in Agronomy.
Sincerely,
Feng-Min Li
Key Laboratory of Dryland Agroecology
College of Life Science, Lanzhou University
Lanzhou, 730000, China
Phone No: +86 18189678046
E-mail Address: [email protected]
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
This paper is about the grain yield increase of spring wheat in the Dryland farming region of North-west China. The wheat is an important crop to produce starting material for different food industrial purposes, but it is a challenging to grow it among very dry conditions.
The paper is clean, there are a lot of aspects, which had been examined and checked during the research period. Although, I have to mention that the research was made in 2019 only. I am not sure, that this short period should be enough to make conclusions for the future. Could you provide more detailed information about the soil characteristics (e.g. type, pH, lime content, humus content etc.)?
Sixteen genotypes listed in the Supplementary Table S1 were tested in the trial. Is it possible to have some information about their origin? Are those genotypes from a local breeding programme? Or is this trial just part of their evaluation process? I suggest to mention that information in the title or in the sub-title, that this results are ‘first results’ or ‘preliminary results’.
Author Response
Dear editor and Reviewer,
We highly appreciate you and the reviewers for reviewing our manuscript and providing us the opportunity to submit a revised version of our manuscript titled “Reduced Vegetative Growth Increases Grain Yield in Spring Wheat Genotypes in the Dryland Farming Region of North-West China” to Agronomy. We also appreciate the valuable and insightful feedback from you and the reviewers on our manuscript. Please find our itemized responses below and the revisions in the re-submitted files.
We have marked the changes using track-changes. We have carefully considered the reviewers’ comments and responded to all of the suggested revisions in more details below. The reviewer’s comments are in black color and our responses are in red color; line and page numbers refer to the revised manuscript.
Comments from Reviewer # 2
This paper is about the grain yield increase of spring wheat in the Dryland farming region of North-west China. The wheat is an important crop to produce starting material for different food industrial purposes, but it is a challenging to grow it among very dry conditions.
The paper is clean, there are a lot of aspects, which had been examined and checked during the research period.
Response: We thank the reviewer for the positive comments on the importance of this paper.
Comment 1: Although, I have to mention that the research was made in 2019 only. I am not sure, that this short period should be enough to make conclusions for the future.
Response: Although we understand that further studies at a greater number of sites and a greater range of seasons would inevitably strengthen the conclusions, we consider that the use of two sites differing in hydrothermal environments typical of the semiarid and rainfed farming areas of the Loess Plateau are sufficient to draw the conclusions from the data that we present in this paper. We believe that further sites and seasons will only confirm the present results.
Comment 2: Could you provide more detailed information about the soil characteristics (e.g. type, pH, lime content, humus content etc.)?
Response: The soil characteristics (type, PH, organic carbon content, total soil nitrogen, total soil phosphorus, bulk density and field capacity) of two sites were added as follows:‘The soil of two sites is a loess-like loam classified as an Orthic Entisol with a pH of 8.1 and 7.8,a soil organic carbon content of 9.1 g kg-1 and 8.96 g kg-1, a total soil nitrogen of 0.78 g kg-1and 0.84 g kg-1, a total soil phosphorus of 0.69 g kg-1 and 0.72 g kg-1, an average bulk density of the surface soil of 1.32 g cm-3 and 1.39 g cm-3, and a field capacity of 27 % and 28 % in YZ and DX, respectively. The field capacity decreased with soil depth from 28 % in the surface 20 cm, to 25% at 20-40 cm, to 27 % at 40-60 cm soil depth. The soil water content of the upper 2 m of the soil profile at sowing was 227 mm in YZ and 196 mm in DX (Fig.1B).’ See lines 119-125.
Comment 3: Sixteen genotypes listed in the Supplementary Table S1 were tested in the trial. Is it possible to have some information about their origin? Are those genotypes from a local breeding programme? Or is this trial just part of their evaluation process? I suggest to mention that information in the title or in the sub-title, that this results are ‘first results’ or ‘preliminary results’.
Response: The origins of the sixteen genotypes are very complex. They have been obtained from diverse sources and represent landraces, breeding lines and cultivars. Fourteen of the genotypes are native and have been the leading genotypes grown on the Loess Plateau over the past 120 years, while the other two are exotic, but identified by the international institute ICARDA as suitable for the semiarid Loess Plateau. There is no clear genetic relationship between them.
This field experiment is independent to any breeding program. We selected the contrasting genotypes to address our core question in this manuscript – ‘to examine how the yield components and non-yield-related traits have developed with breeding progress’ (lines 94-96). As argued above, ‘we consider that the use of two sites differing in hydrothermal environments typical of the semiarid and rainfed farming areas of the Loess Plateau are sufficient to draw the conclusions from the data that we present in this paper’ and are not ‘first results’ or ‘preliminary results’.
We trust that you find our responses and corrections satisfactory and that the paper is now acceptable for publication in Agronomy.
Sincerely,
Feng-Min Li
Key Laboratory of Dryland Agroecology
College of Life Science, Lanzhou University
Lanzhou, 730000, China
Phone No: +86 18189678046
E-mail Address: [email protected]
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper improved a lot after the revision, the revised version contains some new information about the trial, which can make a complex picture to understand better the results. I accept all answers of the authors made during the revision process. They provided detailed answers after my review report. I suggest to accept the paper in the present form.
