Identification of qPSR7-2 as a Novel Cold Tolerance-Related QTL in Rice Seedlings on the Basis of a GWAS
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The present manuscript is scientifically sound and of interest to the scientific community. Literature review is comprehensive and of relevance to the field and the experimental design is appropriate. However, the manuscript has several weaknesses, which are listed in the attached file, together with the suggestions for the manuscript improvements.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Dear reviewer, please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
This manuscript described identification of qPSR7 as a cold tolerance-related QTL in rice using genome-wide association study approach. The authors showed the Os07g0541800 gene in qPSR7 is the likely gene conferring cold tolerance via gene overexpression and knockout studies. They further examined the distribution of qPSR7 and cold tolerance in 984 rice germplasm resources. They found the distribution of qPSR7 in rice germplasm increases as the latitude increases. The finding of the new cold tolerance-related QTL in rice should be useful for breeding cold tolerant varieties.
Minor comments:
1) What does qPSR7 stand for? It is better given what qPSR7 stands for.
2) On FigureS1, country’s names should be labeled on the map.
Author Response
Point 1: What does qPSR7 stand for? It is better given what qPSR7 stands for.
Response 1: "qPSR7" represents a QTL on chromosome 7 associated with the PSR (plant survival rate）after cold treatment. And we found that the same name "qPSR7" has already been used in the article “https://doi.org/10.1104/pp.18.00209”, so we renamed it “qPSR7-2”.
Point 2: On FigureS1, country’s names should be labeled on the map.
Response 2: Thank you for your advice, we will label the country and province on the map.
