Review Reports - Strategy for Selection of Drought-Tolerant Arabica Coffee Genotypes in Brazil

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper adresses an interesting topic. Authors have made a great effort to characterize a lot of genotypes and measure a lot of parameters, but results are present in a compressed way, so tables are huge and difficult to decipher. Table 2 has no indication of significance in the data, so it is difficult to evaluate wheter the observed data is significative or not. Can results be represented in a more graphical way such as a radial graphic? or in bars?

Another point that I miss is that similar studies have been performed in other crops such as broccoli

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.jafc.1c03421

How the results presented here compare with those results? Please comment this in the discussion.

Author Response

Lavras July 18, 2022

Dear Reviewer,

Please find in annex a new version of the manuscript entitled “Strategy for selection of drought-tolerant Arabica coffee genotypes in Brazil” with major revisions requested. All the reviewers' comments have been considered and they are highlighted in blue color. In the introduction, we cover regarding the previous work conducted in Brazil additional literature was added. In the results Table 1 was modified and the Table 2 and 3 was converted to figures. The discussion was enhanced, and additional literature was added to compare other breeding programs. The conclusion was rewritten.

We thank the reviewers who kindly improved our manuscript, making a great contribution to our work.

Sincerely,

Juliana Costa de Rezende

Corresponding author

Scientific Researcher

EPAMIG

Reviewer 2 Report

I commend the authors: Vânia Aparecida Silva, Juliana Costa de Rezende Abrahão , AndréMorais Reis , Meline de Oliveira Santos , Antônio Alves Pereira , Cesar Elias Botelho , Gladyston Rodrigues Carvalho , Evaristo Moura de Castro , João Paulo Rodrigues Alves Delfino Barbosa , Antônio Carlos Baião de Oliveira of the manuscript titled “Strategy for selection of drought-tolerant Arabica coffee genotypes in Brazil” for their work on performing an early selection of genotypes in response to drought through morphological, anatomical and physiological analyses.

There are several things need to be addressed or corrected:

1- In the introduction, I feel that the subject is not well covered regarding the previous work conducted in Brazil and similar programs in other countries. So additional literature should be added.

2- In the results

- Table 1 and 2 are quite large and should be converted to figures.

3- In the discussion

- The discussion need to be enhanced and additional literature should be added to compare other breeding programs on coffee “there are book about coffee”

4- The materials and methods is well written.

5- The conclusion, add the prospect of the work. Add the limitation of the study as well.

I give you major revision.