Effects of Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi on Growth and Nutrient Accumulation of Oat under Drought Conditions

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Manuscript ID: agronomy-2646794

This manuscript focused on the study “Effects of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi on growth and nutrient accumulation of oat under drought” to assess the impact of inoculation with Glomus intraradices, Glomus mosseae, and without inoculation on drought resistance, as well as the nitrogen, phosphorus, and trace element content, and any differentiations in root configurations between the above ground and underground components of oats.

- The three water treatments are 75% of field capacity (well water), 50% of field capacity (moderate drought), and 30% of field capacity (severe drought).

- The study was conducted to study there are a difference between inoculation between one of these two types and non-inoculation on the growth and nutritional traits of the oat plant? The study was done in pots on sterile soil, which is a mixture of sand and soil (1:1) so that the study can determine the best of the two types and the treatment with it. One of the sources of defect in the study is that it would have been better to include a treatment with non-sterile soil or an experiment in the field to study the behavior the two types of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi under field conditions and the extent to which they are affected by different soil microorganisms.

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Title :

Effects of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi on growth and nutrient accumulation of oat under drought

Changed to :

Effects of Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi on Growth and Nutrient Accumulation of Oat Under Drought

Line 35: "Arbuscular": Changed to : "arbuscular"

                 "Drought": Changed to : "drought"

                  "Nutrient": Changed to : "nutrient"

Line 40 : "sorghum[1]" add space after sorghum

Line 89: "material" Changed to : "materials"

Line 105: "FC(: add space.

Line 108 : "FC(MD" and  "FC(MD": add space after FC

Line 118: "1%HCL" : add space after %

Line 135: "[34]using" : add space

Line 151-152: "There is no significant difference in the inoculation rate of the three drought treatments under different AMF treatments." : Rewrite and rephrase it in a correct way that is consistent with the results presented.

Line 287: "[38]study" : add space

Author Response

Dear Editors and Reviewers:

      Thank you for your comments concerning our manuscript entitled “Effects of Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi on Growth and Nutrient Accumulation of Oat under Drought” (Manuscript ID: agronomy-2646794). Those comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper, as well as the important guiding significance to our research. We have studied comments carefully and have made correction which we hope meet with approval. Revised portions are using the “Track Changes” in the paper. The main corrections in the paper and the responds to the reviewer’s comments are as flowing:

    Thank you for taking the time to review our manuscript and for providing valuable feedback. Based on your proposal, we have modified the article title “Effects of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi on growth and nutrient accumulation of oat under drought” to “Effects of Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi on Growth and Nutrient Accumulation of Oat under Drought” (in Line 2-3), and keywords “Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi; Drought stress; Nutrient uptake” to “arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi; drought stress; nutrient uptake” (Line 35), and “sorghum[1] ” to “sorghum [1] ”, “material” to “materials”, “FC(” to “FC (” , “1%HCL” to “1% HCL”, “[34]using” to “[34] using” (in Line 39, Line 89, Line 105-108, Line 118, Line 138). In addition, we rewrited “There is no significant difference in the inoculation rate of the three drought treatments under different AMF treatments.” to “Compared with CK, the colonization rate of R. intraradices under MD and both AMF colonization rates under SD were significantly reduced. However, under MD and SD, the mycorrhizal colonization of all AMF speices was not significant” (Line 154-157).

Thank you again for your contribution to improving the quality of our work.

Sincerely, Qingping Zhou

Reviewer 2 Report

Overall, I found the manuscript to be quite interesting, well-written, well-presented, and easy to follow. It explores the impact of inoculation with two distinct AMF fungal species on oats' drought resistance and certainly holds potential interest for your readers.

However, I did come across a few minor issues that I believe need attention:

Lines 67-69 - Elements such as N, P, and Ca are initially presented in their abbreviated form, with their full names only appearing later in the introduction, in the paragraph where the objectives are explained. This should be corrected by first stating them in full with the respective abbreviations indicated, and subsequently, using the abbreviations consistently thereafter. Please verify this throughout the text.

L131 - The title of this section should be appropriate to what is proposed, meaning it should also reflect the analysis of macronutrients.

L138 - Please add 'Liu and Zhang' before [36].

L140 - The title of section 2.5 is incorrect; it should probably be 'Statistical analysis'.

L155 - Please remove 'NM, Non-mycorrhizal' as it is not in the graph and does not make sense to be in the legend. This error is repeated in Figure 4.

L161 - In Figure 2b, labeled as 'Glomus intraradices vesicle and intraradical hyphae,' it would be beneficial to add an arrow or a similar annotation to indicate the portions of the 'intraradical hyphae,' as the vesicle is clearly discernible, but the rest is not.

L175 - There is a lack of proper formatting in "PAMF".

There are some sentences throughout the text, such as L229-232 or L247-252, that, due to their length and the amount of information included, could benefit from a brief revision and be divided for easier comprehension.

Author Response

Dear Editors and Reviewers:

Thank you for your comments concerning our manuscript entitled “Effects of Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi on Growth and Nutrient Accumulation of Oat under Drought” (Manuscript ID: agronomy-2646794). Those comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper, as well as the important guiding significance to our research. We have studied comments carefully and have made correction which we hope meet with approval. Revised portions are using the “Track Changes” in the paper. The main corrections in the paper and the responds to the reviewer’s comments are as flowing:

    Thank you for your affirmation and comments of our research, those comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper. Based on your proposal, we have modified the following issues. We modified “N, P, Ca” to “N (nitrogen), P (phosphorus), and Ca (calcium)” (Line67-69), added the section of “2.5. Macronutrient concentrations in oats” (Line 135), adapted “2.5 Statical analysis” to “2.6. Statistical analysis” (Line 143), deleted the “NM, Non-mycorrhizal” in Figure 1-4(Line157, Line191). We marked vesicle, spore, arbuscular, intraradical hyphae and extraradical hyphae with arrows in figure2 and modified the footnotes (Line162-165). The “PAMF”. was to “P_AMF” (Line178). We simplified the content of L229-232 or L247-252 for easier comprehension (Line233-236, Line251-256). We appreciate your suggestions and have made corrections to the grammar and spelling errors throughout the paper as per your recommendations.

Thank you again for your contribution to improving the quality of our work.

Sincerely, Qingping Zhou

Reviewer 3 Report

Line 42: I suggest mentioning the specific present countries. 

Line 127: I suggest further elaborating on this method. How many plants per treatment (replicates) were removed and measured using the imaging analysis software? How old were the plant roots that were used for this image analysis?

Line 148: I suggest elaborating further in these results and being more descriptive. 

Line 202: I suggest reviewing the y axis units of the first graph in the sequence.

Table 1: I suggest leaving a space between the numbers and the letters in the results presented in the table for visual clarity.

Some improvements can be made regarding grammar to improve clarity.

Author Response

Dear Editors and Reviewers:

Thank you for your comments concerning our manuscript entitled “Effects of Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi on Growth and Nutrient Accumulation of Oat under Drought” (Manuscript ID: agronomy-2646794). Those comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper, as well as the important guiding significance to our research. We have studied comments carefully and have made correction which we hope meet with approval. Revised portions are using the “Track Changes” in the paper. The main corrections in the paper and the responds to the reviewer’s comments are as flowing:

    Thank you for your comments concerning our manuscript, based on your comments, we added the specific method of root configuration determination (Line 130-131). We further refined the results of "3.1Mycorrhizal colonization" to make it more descriptive (Line 151-157), in addition, we checked the Y-axis of the first picture in the sequence in Figure 1 and added the space between the numbers and letters in Table 1 (Line 151-157, Line 238). We did not mention the specific country in line 42 because it is a quote and inappropriate changes may not correspond to the original text.

Thank you again for your contribution to improving the quality of our work.

Sincerely, Qingping Zhou