Morphophysiological and Biochemical Responses of Zea mays L. under Cadmium and Drought Stresses Integrated with Fungal and Bacterial Inoculation

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Manuscript Title: Morphophysiological and biochemical responses of Zea mays L. under Cadmium and drought stresses integrated with fungal and bacterial inoculation.

The title and subject of the manuscript are very interesting from the methodological and practical point of view, suitable and adequate. The scientific content contributes to the space in which it develops.

The abstract of the paper is factual concrete, realistic, and understandable.

The introduction provides a good understanding of the subject and its importance, with a significant quantity of information. Theoretical and practical reasons for the experiments are very reasonable.

The materials and methods are written clearly and in detail, for the reader to understand.

The results were not described nicely and accurately. You need to redesign the figures to display them better, as the experiment has two factors and the results must be presented as follows: the effect of the first factor, then the effect of the second factor, then the effect of the interaction between them, and not only the significant results. Then describe the results according to the figures.

There are some major corrections that I have noticed that may improve the standard of the manuscript in the attached file.

I recommend that this manuscript be published after following the corrections suggested in the attached file.

I hope my comments improve the quality of your manuscript

Best regards

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The concept aimed to assess the mechanisim of Bacillus paralichen-iformis and Tricoderma asperellum inoculation on the morphology, growth, membrane integrity, and enzymatic defense of a drought-sensitive plant, Zea mays L., under integrated with water deficit and Cd toxicity stresses. There are some suggestions about this paper.

1. All figure legends must be uniform including words size and unit, such as figure 2 unit and figure 8 number on T4 group.

2. The title of figure 2 does not match the picture. The picture shown the fresh and dry weight of maize leaf and root under various treatments, but did not reflect root biomass.

3. The content of all tables is so simple, the author should explain stress, microorganism types or time lengths in the part of analysis variance. Meanwhile stress or microorganism description also present in results.

4. The manuscript discussed the plant growth-promoting bacteria (PGPB) for plant growth and tolerance represents. The author should test maize morphological traits under stress and microorganism treatment, since figure 1 only shown the influence of single factor stress or microorganism on maize phenotype that wasn’t subject to theme.

5. The authors should provide the data showing why drought (50% of field capacity), Cadmium (200 mg/kg) were selected.

6. The error bar is so big in 5A, 5B and 9D. Please give a reasonable explain about these data.

7. The manuscript presents phenomena or phenotypes caused by different treatment, the author provides some molecular experiments will be better.

Minor editing of English language required.

Author Response

please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The manuscript with the title “Morphophysiological and biochemical responses of Zea mays L. under Cadmium and drought stresses integrated with fungal and bacterial inoculation” investigated the response of maize to inoculants under drought and Cd stress.

Line 89 and line 99 – the name of the inoculants. Use full name only first time mentioned, afterwards only as B. paralicheniformis and T. asperellum – use italics.

Paragraph from line 107 – Maize is an important crop not only for food and feed, but for industrial products and as energy crop, etc. Particularly, as energy crop – Cd contaminated biomass can be harvested and used in various ways.

Line 121, Aim and Objectives are not clearly expressed. What are the potential applications of the results?


Table 1- give a suggestive acronym to treatments that can be used afterwards.

Chapter 2.3.
Factor S – the stress with 4 levels: s1, s2, s3, s4
Factor M – the inoculant type with 3 levels: m1, m2, m3
From the combination of the two factors resulted 12 experimental variants (3x4) Table 1.

The results insist more on the influence of each factor levels than on their interactions. Because there are many papers published on either single heavy metal stress and drought in maize, I suggest authors to insist on interactions (the combined stress effects + inoculants) because this is more novel and less explored (as authors themselves declare at the beginning). Only the most important and novel results shall be in the manuscript, the other can be moved to supplementary and only referred to.

Conclusions do not have a structure, because no clear objectives were defined. Give a few (2-3) objectives of the study at the end of the introduction and then re-write the conclusions to answer to them. Otherwise how can we know if the authors have managed to reach their objectives of the research?

Best regards.

Author Response

please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Please see my comments in the attached file

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

      Dear reviewer 

thank you for video, we correct Error bar according your excellent video, and all your comments were applied. but if you see that Error bar is big in some figure, because  The error calculated values based on the ratio of 2 independent mean values with 2 different SDs. Therefore, the SD of the ratio may often be relatively high. and if you see in the some figure the Error bar with different letter had overlap, because we use standard deviation, and not standard error. Thank you for your carful review. thank you for your time. 

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear authors,

I have seen the responses to comments.

Best regards.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 

in order to improve the results,  Explanation were given in some parts.  thank you for your careful review. thank you for your time.