Aromatic Plants Metabolic Engineering: A Review
, Ekaterina N. Baranova 2,3, Ekaterina V. Tkacheva 4, Yulia B. Evdokimenkova 4, Aleksandr A. Ivanovskii 5,6, Ludmila N. Konovalova 3,7 and Alexander A. Gulevich 8
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Shelepova et al. tried to study aromatic plants metabolic engineering, which looks interesting topic.
I think this manuscript will be acceptable after major revision.
The manuscript should be checked by a native speaker.
In general, when you describe the abbreviation in the parenthesis for the first time, you have to use its abbreviation in the rest of the manuscript. check EOs should write in lines 64, 113, 162 and etc. follow the rules in the whole of the manuscript for all abbreviations.
In general, some references looks old, use recent references instead of them.
Despite supplementary materials figures, I believe you should design a figure for section 2.The specifics of biotechnology application in improving the quality of aromatic plants. Also, a graphical abstract will be useful.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer!
Thank you for your detailed review of our article. We have finalized and made changes in accordance with your comments.
1) Manuscript checked using MDPI Language Editing Service
2) Throughout the text of the article, “essential olis” has been replaced with Eos
3) At the moment, the paper analyzed articles from 2010 to 2022. Articles with an earlier publication date have been replaced by us with more “fresh” articles
4) We agree with your proposal and supplemented Chapter 2 with figures.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors of this manuscript reviewed the metabolic engineering of aromatic plants in the 2010 – 2022 period.
The review was well-designed and written, and it also summarized recent biotechnological approaches in the field.
However, there are a few points that need to be clarified.
1. Be sure that all scientific names are written in italic.
2. in vitro and in vivo should be italic.
3. In figure S3, explain what WT, GMP, and GRP stand for.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer!
Thank you for your detailed review of our article. We have made changes and corrections to the text of the article in accordance with your comments. We would like to note that according to the editorial requirements of the journal Agronomy, when writing in vitro and in vivo, italic is not used.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
The paper is well written and a very interesting read.
The current title of the paper does not correspond to the paper, it is necessary to add and show in more detail in the paper the impact of engineering on the atomic metabolic pathway in the plant.
Also, show the impact that metabolic engineering has already had on plants aromatic metabolic system.
plants Or harmonize the title on the topic that is currently processed and presented to the office.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer!
Thank you for your detailed review of our article. We have finalized and made changes in accordance with your comments.
In recent years, several reviews have already been published on the achievements of metabolic engineering in the regulation of secondary pathways of terpene biosynthesis - 1) Mani, V., Park, S., Kim, J. A., Lee, S. I., & Lee, K. (2021). Metabolic perturbation and synthetic biology strategies for plant terpenoid production—An updated overview. Plants, 10(10), 2179.
2) Nagegowda, D. A., & Gupta, P. (2020). Advances in biosynthesis, regulation, and metabolic engineering of plant specialized terpenoids. Plant Science, 294, 110457.
We give a link to these works and supplemented our work with a description of the results in this area.
Examples of the production of specialized terpenoids in host plants due to the success of metabolic engineering are mainly presented in the form of tabular data, and in the text of the article only a few results are discussed using the example of representatives of the genus Mentha and the genus Artemisia. We deliberately chose this path in order to increase the amount of references analyzed and presented in the article. Our review is devoted to a wider range of issues related to increasing the productivity of transgenic aromatic plants; in particular, to raising the yield of essential oils by increasing the volume and number of essential trichomes, improving the resistance of aromatic plants to various diseases.
We believe that all the articles reviewed in our review are devoted specifically to changes and improvement of aromatic plants, perhaps, due to particular engineering solutions, but these particular solutions, in our opinion, are an integral part of metabolic engineering. That is why we named our work that way.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 4 Report
The paper introduced the development of modern biotechnology methods, including genetic engineering and genome editing, to modify aromatic plants belonging to different species, which have predictable quality, resistance to unfavorable factors and pests, dense growth and high yield, and productivity of valuable essential oils. The successful examples, application methods and main approaches of aromatic plant improvement were also introduced. Nevertheless, a few issues are needed to be clarified.
1. In the introduction part of the article, the author mainly explains the important of essential oils, but does not introduce the modern biotechnology methods of plants in detail; 2. The format of paragraphs is not uniform in many places in the article;
3. The logic before and after the article is unclear. The title of the article is "aromatic plants metabolic engineering", but there are few parts around metabolic engineering of aromatic plants;
4. There are many grammatical errors in the text, please check them carefully.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer!
Dear reviewer!
Thank you for your detailed review of our article. We have finalized and made changes in accordance with your comments.
1) We supplemented the Introduction with a description of modern methods of biotechnology
2) We tried to uniformly format the paragraphs in our article
3) We changed the title of chapter 2.3 from "Metabolic engineering of aromatic plants" to "The biotransformation of aromatic plants".
Our review is devoted to a wider range of issues related to increasing the productivity of transgenic aromatic plants, in particular, such as increasing the yield of essential oils by enlargement the volume and number of essential trichomes, improving the resistance of aromatic plants to various diseases.
We believe that all the articles reviewed in our review are devoted specifically to changes and improvement of aromatic plants, perhaps, due to particular engineering solutions, but these particular solutions, in our opinion, are an integral part of metabolic engineering. That is why we named our work that way.
4) Manuscript corrected using MDPI Language Editing Service.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
the current version looks acceptable.
Reviewer 4 Report
Accept
