Exploration of Bacterial Community Structure Profiling and Functional Characteristics in the Vermicomposting of Wasted Sludge and Kitchen Waste
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe paper provides a new method for kitchen waste treatment. The paper is interesting and well organized. However, it still need to be improved before it can be published on Water. The details of my comments are listed as follows:
1 Keywords should be controlled within 5 words.
2 The author should point out that where they got the earthworm species, how to culture them under the lab condition.
3 The “Materials and Methods” part should be concise but clear. Some contents, such as “q PCR reaction system” does not need to appear in the main body of the test.
4 The author said that the environmental parameters are critical to the compost process. However, it seems like the author did not optimize the environmental parameters by themselves. They just set the parameters according to the references. The author need to prove that it is the best condition in your study for waste treatment.
5 Section 3.1.2, the author need to provide evidence to prove that the earthworms and microorganisms have the synergistic effects between each other.
6 Section 3.1.4, why the author confirmed that the organic carbon could be mineralized and converted to CO2? Did you test the CO2 concentration during the treatment process?
7 The bacterial diversity and function were well described by the author. However, fungi definitely play important roles during the whole waste treatment process. The author should explain why they did not consider fungi when they studied the diversity and the function of the microbe in the sludge.
8 In the discussion part, the author should comprehensively compered the improved method for kitchen waste treatment with the traditional methods we used right now.
9 The conclusion part is too long and the important results in this study were not summarized well.
Comments on the Quality of English LanguageThe paper was written in good Engish with not significant mistakes throughout the manuscript. However, it still need to be improved by an expert.
Author Response
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Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
The present manuscript reports on the bacterial communities in the vermicomposting of wasted sludge and kitchen waste. High-throughput sequencing of 16S rRNA are analyzed in parallel with physicochemical parameters of the compost. This study involved a lot of experimental and analytical work.
I list hereafter my main concerns with some propositions to alleviate them:
Line 17, Do not use "T3 treatment" directly, as readers cannot understand its meaning from the abstract. Please explain the characteristics of T3 treatment or the differences between different treatments in abstract.
The authors should provide more summary conclusions in the abstract, for example, what are the changes in bacterial communities between vermicomposting and no vermicomposting, or what are the changes in bacterial communities between different raw material ratios. There existing some issues to be resolved before the publication.
Line 127, the moisture content of compost is generally set at 60-65%, why is it 73±2% in this study?
Only bacterial communities were analyzed in this study. Please do not use "microbial communities" instead.
Fig. 5. In the RDA, the first and second axes together explained more than 99%, which is incredible. This means that the authors have measured all factors that have an impact on the bacterial community, which is impossible. Please explain how the authors conducted this analysis.
Fig. 9, Fig.10 and Fig. 11. Please make some deletions. This does not help readers read quickly and focus on the main points.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe manuscript “Exploration of Microbial Community Structure Profiling and Functional Characteristics in the Vermicomposting of Wasted Sludge and Kitchen Waste” presents a case study on vermicomposting a mixture of kitchen waste and excess sludge from municipal wastewater treatment. Also, metabolic pathways during carbon and nitrogen transformation processes were discussed.
Table 2: the measuring units should be given unitarily in the first raw, after the column names. Final zero digit should be removed (e.g. 75.0 is in fact 75).
Table 4: also, unitary measuring units should be given in the column name. µM and µL are not the same with uM and uL. It should be corrected.
The overall quality of the study is high, the manuscript is well written and the results are discussed in detail.
The Conclusion section should be correlated with the results, and the most important should be reitterated here.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe manuscript is well revised according to the advices
