Phenotyping of Southern United States Soybean Cultivars for Potential Seed Weight and Seed Quality Compositions

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Overview and general recommendations

As biological materials, foods present natural variations in the amounts of nutrients contained. Identifying and ranking the different sources of variability is a great challenge to consolidate the knowledge of food composition. In the study described in this manuscript, a great amount of work was done to explore the factors of the variability of soybean seeds. Therefore, the subject and overall method are interesting. I have some concerns about the conclusions the authors have made. Based on a careful assessment of this manuscript, my recommendation is that this paper needs some minor modifications.

Abstract

In the abstract, the author didn’t provide the information of the most important results (yield and quality traits). Without this information, the abstract looks general and is unable to justify the title of the manuscript more accurately. The abstract is a very important part of the manuscript, and it is transferred to the scientific base of data instead of a full paper. For this reason, abstracts deserve to have more consideration.

Introduction

The introduction is written well. But in a statement (line 63-65), it seems authors have not gone through the recent soybean nutritional/quality profiling updates.

Materials and methods

What about the maturity groups of each cultivar? Cultivars along with their maturity groups should be presented in materials and methods section 2.1.

Results and discussion

1. A) It is better to present figure 2 values in Table 1 along with other seed nutritional compositions for better understanding.

1. B) Correlations between yield and quality composition traits “as you mentioned “***” in the correlation table for indicating correlation strength. So, it's better to present stearic in the text too for the reader’s ease.

Author Response

Reviewer 1:

As biological materials, foods present natural variations in the amounts of nutrients contained. Identifying and ranking the different sources of variability is a great challenge to consolidate the knowledge of food composition. In the study described in this manuscript, a great amount of work was done to explore the factors of the variability of soybean seeds. Therefore, the subject and overall method are interesting. I have some concerns about the conclusions the authors have made. Based on a careful assessment of this manuscript, my recommendation is that this paper needs some minor modifications.

Response: Thank you very much for your valuable time and comments on the paper.

In the abstract, the author didn’t provide the information of the most important results (yield and quality traits). Without this information, the abstract looks general and is unable to justify the title of the manuscript more accurately. The abstract is a very important part of the manuscript, and it is transferred to the scientific base of data instead of a full paper. For this reason, abstracts deserve to have more consideration.

Response: We have made changes to the abstracts. The most relevant piece of information has been emphasized in the abstract. We are considering the word limit for the abstract (maximum of 200 words).

The introduction is written well. But in a statement (line 63-65), it seems authors have not gone through the recent soybean nutritional/quality profiling updates.

Response: The following changes have now been made in lines 67-69:  Besides environment and management-induced changes in yield and quality, the genetic potential of soybean seed quality composition has not received similar attention as that of yield under non-stress and optimum nutrient conditions.

What about the maturity groups of each cultivar? Cultivars along with their maturity groups should be presented in materials and methods section 2.1.

Response: We would like to bring it to your reviewer and editor to notice that we already have each cultivar's maturity group and brand in Table 2. Also, the colors highlighted in the bar graphs represent the same information. Therefore, we didn’t replicate the information under materials and methods to avoid information redundancy.

Results and discussion: A) It is better to present figure 2 values in Table 1 along with other seed nutritional compositions for better understanding.

Response: Thank you for the suggestion. We moved the ‘sucrose data’ from Figure 2 to Table 2; where all the quality compositions are mentioned. We used protein and oil parameters for Z score and cultivar selection, so we decided to retain the protein and oil in Figure 2. We retained the protein and oil content in figure 2 to better visualize these parameters.  

1. B) Correlations between yield and quality composition traits “as you mentioned “***” in the correlation table for indicating correlation strength. So, it's better to present stearic in the text too for the reader’s ease.

Response: We have explicitly mentioned this in the footnote of Figure 4 (“*p<0.05, **p<0.01, ***p<0.001 indicate a significant correlation between pair of traits”). To avoid the descriptive nature and monotony of the presentation, we chose to retain it as it is.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The manuscript is very interesting and contains valuable information for agricultural practice.

However I have some comments to improve the manuscript.

The abstract should be supplemented with the results obtained from the research.

Materials and Methods:

Literature references are missing for sub-section. It would be better to cite the references that the procedure adapted.

Line 103-108: What is the accuracy of the instruments, recovery, LOD and LOQ ……. These parameters are needed to report the efficiency of any analytical system.

Conclusion: I believe there are other a lot nice conclusions could be made from this study…. And the future perspectives for following research highly crucial here.

The statistical calculations were done correctly.

References: Please, prepare a literature record according to the requirements of the Agronomy

Author Response

Reviewer 2

• The abstract should be supplemented with the results obtained from the research.

Response: We have made some changes to the abstracts. However, the word limit for the abstract is 200 words at maximum. Therefore, we were bound to highlight only the significant results from the paper.

• Materials and Methods:

1. A) Literature references are missing for sub-section. It would be better to cite the references that the procedure adapted.

Response: The methods for crop husbandry and data collection follow the standard procedure we used in our lab. We have now cited the references for calculating the z- score for the cultivar and the individual cultivar performance index in the revised version; see material and method section.

1. B) Line 103-108: What is the accuracy of the instruments, recovery, LOD, and LOQ ……. These parameters are needed to report the efficiency of any analytical system.

Response: Thank you for bringing this to our notice. For the DA 7250, the calibrations used in this study were developed and updated by the manufacturer soybean seed samples, having a determination coefficient of 0.97 for protein, 0.92 for oil, 0.85 for oleic acid, 0.84 for linoleic acid, 0.92 for linolenic acid, 0.88 for palmitic acid, and 0.76 for stearic acid. The instrument’s detection range and samples size used for the determination coefficient is provided in the table.

We have now added the following sentences in conclusion “Nonetheless, we used whole-seed calibrations provided by Perten Instruments we have not compared our predicted values with wet chemistry. Based on the earlier report, NIRS predicted values and the wet-chemistry values for protein and oil were highly correlated. However, future validation and calibration studies are recommended for sugars. Further development of accurate calibration for sugars using diverse germplasm lines would considerably reduce the time required for phenotyping for the soybean sugar compositions”.  

• Conclusion: I believe there are other nice conclusions that could be made from this study…. And the future perspectives for following research highly crucial here.

Response: We have made the necessary edits in the conclusion sections per the review comment. However, we did not emphasize sugars in conclusion as other reports emphasized the weaker predictability or accuracy of sugar calibration using NIRS. And, we do not have wet chemistry data to support the sugars.   

• References: Please, prepare a literature record according to the requirements of the Agronomy

Response: We checked the MDPI Agronomy style and formatted all references accordingly.