Advanced Breeding Strategies and Future Perspectives of Salinity Tolerance in Rice

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The present review makes very limited effort to cover one of the latest techniques for advancing rice breeding - CRISPR-Cas. While a quick search in research databases reveals many tens of papers devoted to its particular use in rice genetic dissection / genome editing, authors only devote a single paragraph (of about 40 lines) to it. This could be due to the insufficient familiarizing of them with this particular tool-set as authors misleadingly state that CRISPR-Cas9 is driven by homology-dependent repair (HDR - Line 446), while the system often uses either HDR or non-homologous end-joining (NHEJ) repair - as dependent on the intended type of modification to be introduced. To further aggravate misrepresentations in the text they state (Lines 447-448) that "it is a non-genetically changed technique" which is utterly incorrect. To what extent CRISPR-Cas9 can be classified as a tool that can be used "with great accuracy for editing particular genomic regions to get the desired phenotype" (Lines 448-449) is a mater of yet another debate that such a review should not skimp on, but rather make effort to clarify for the potential reader. It would have been better to present the reader with more detail on the differences (and limitations) of different types of Cas nucleases so that the review could be of better use for researchers with practical breeding challenges to meet.
Authors also demonstrate very lousy attitude to putting together their text - in many places horrible misspellings of basic terms can be found - taking again CRISPR-Cas as an example, 3 variations of it can be found in just one paragraph -  CRISPR-Cas9, CRISPAR-Cas9, and CRISPA-Cas9.

My overall impression is that the review would greatly benefit from re-balancing Section 4 (Breeding approaches for developing salt tolerant rice) to give more detail on various applications of CRISPR-Cas systems for achieving targeted editing / gene regulation in rice. This can be achieved by shortening other parts of that section (with references mostly to the main review articles that cover them, which could also shorten the references list).

In many places English is almost incomprehensible. It often seems that authors randomly collected parts of sentences from referenced reports and pieced them together. This leads to many sentences missing key verbs/nouns that make them very difficult to understand. Therefore, manuscript needs major corrections from native/professional English speaker.

Author Response

Dear Sir,

Thank you for your valuable comments on this manuscript.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

In this review article, the authors comprehensively reviewed the recent advances in different breeding platforms, including MAS, mutagenesis, genome editing, etc., for enhancing salinity tolerance in rice. Salinity is one of the major abiotic stresses affecting crop productivity all over the world. Thus, studying recent advances in salinity tolerance in a major crop like rice is worth considering. Overall, the authors have prepared a nice and attractive review article. However, I have some concerns that should be addressed.

1. Please change the “&” with “and” throughout the text.
2. Line 22-23 and line 63, 77, define QTL and MAS on the first appearance in the abstract.
3. Line 34, the “L” should not be in italic in (Oryza sativa L.).
4. I suggest dividing the introduction into 2-3 paragraphs according to the content.
5. Line 106, 108, define abbreviations. I am stopping here; please carefully check the entire text and define the undefine abbreviations on the first appearance in the text.
6. Section 2, I suggest adding some direct examples of yield reduction caused by salinity.
7. Line 147, Platten et al. 2013, prepare the citations according to journal guidelines.
8. There are some spacing issues throughout the text.
9. I suggest adding two mechanistic diagrams: (1) the effect of salt stress on rice physiological, biochemical, and molecular mechanisms. 2) a summary for breeding tools, how the single or integration of multi-breeding tools can help rice breeders develop salt-resilient plants.
10. In the conclusion and perspective section, the authors should add something about “how these modern breeding strategies can help local farmers”, etc.
11. The English language and styling need improvement.

Author Response

Dear Sir,

Thank you for your valuable comments regarding this review manuscript.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

Thanks for addressing all the comments/suggestions. I am satisfied with the author's responses and the revision made in the current version. Thus, now I support the current version for publication. However, some minor issues should be solved before official acceptance.

Congratulations!

1. Please change the “&” with “and” throughout the text. There are some places where this issue needs to be addressed. Please carefully check the entire text, including tables.
2. Also, check tables for sparing errors within the text.

Author Response