New Isolated Autochthonous Strains of S. cerevisiae for Fermentation of Two Grape Varieties Grown in Poland

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors in this manuscript studied in the wine of the three vine varieties (blancs: Regent and Seyval blanc and red: Solaris) the effect the newly isolated native S. cerevisiae yeast strains on the content of metabolites post fermentation.

The topic is revealing and deals with an interesting issue in agriculture, however many research groups select and autochthonous S. cerevisiae strains with good technological properties and quality traits, as a strategic asset for winemakers to unequivocally link a wine with its environment of production.  This is the reason,   this manuscript isn´t original research.

I recommend the acceptance of this manuscript for publication after considering minor revision. The authors should add in-depth Discussion furthermore and please add suggested comments: The introduction is clear and correct, aims are well described. However, in my opinion, the authors should go deeper into the introduction with additional references, citing recent works related to autochthonous strains.  

The authors mention that “In many studies (References please) the content of individual organic acids in wines was determined”. Cite references please.

The authors could provide more information on the experimental design. The description of the experimental approach is unclear at times. It is not clear the number of replicates in Total acidity and Volatile acidity, only one, and three? It has to be explained better in the experimental design or at the statistical analysis paragraph. A reader only knows it having a look to the Tables.

The discussion is rather poor; what are the future approaches? In conclusion, the manuscript is interesting, but I am left hungry for more critical discussions.

The authors (Table 9) mentioned that generally, wines produced from grape in warmer regions contain more tartaric acid, and malic acid predominates in products from colder regions. The sentence is not fully correct. These compounds are more related at the varieties characteristic than climate of the region. Albariño (from north Spain and Portugal) have more tartaric than Verdejo Negro (Northwestern Spain) both from cold regions. 

I missed the others parameters the quality recommendation of OIV (OIV-OENO 370): Guidelines for the characterization of wine yeast of the genus saccharomyces isolated from vitivinicultural environnments as the most important volatile organic compounds in wines, Resistance to SO2, Glycerol production…

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for reading our manuscript carefully and for your critical review. We have addressed all your comments in the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Manuscript details

Journal: Applied Sciences

Manuscript ID: applsci-1641125

Type of manuscript: Article

Title: Characteristics of Polish wines from two grape varieties fermented

with the newly isolated autochthonous strains of S. cerevisiae

Authors: Michał Wójcicki, Olga Świder, Renata Choińska *, Marzena Bujak,

Barbara Sokołowska, Magdalena Szczepańska, Elżbieta Bartosiak, Marek

Łukasz Roszko, Edyta Juszczuk-Kubiak

Submitted to section: Food Science and Technology

The article is well written, completely understandable, it is clear how authors conducted experiments and what methods were applied. The aim of the work was to establish if Polish native microorganisms newly isolated have a good potential for further longer use in wine making and compare them to commercially used ones. There are couple of minor changes that should be done and they are all listed below:

L40- …380 wine producers are have been officially...

L53-L54- ...mainly by grapevines variety and strains of microorganism involved...

L54- However, the others factors,...

L56- ...and bottling,...

L62- ...the produced wines have been characterized..

L79-L80- closing bracket is missing

L106- were was evaluated.

L124- of 26S (not 28S)

L126-L127- The reference for primers is missing (O’Donnell, K. (1993))

L200- why is it expressed in grams of malic acid when it is usually expressed in grams of tartaric acid for wines so this should be recalculated in results section (this will enable comparison to results from other papers)

L336- GenBank database (Table 1)

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for reading our manuscript carefully and for your critical review. We have addressed all your comments in the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

There are strong inconsistencies in the text and errors that cannot be ignored (e.g.: S. cerevisiae is not a genus but a species). I leave some suggestions line by line, however, before I can start a real revision process the text should be strongly revised also concerning the English.

You can think to improve the title because as it is written it does not make the paper instantly understandable.

The introduction is unclear, scattered, and does not allow to center the topic of the paper.

A further suggestion is to summarize the materials and methods by referring to an adequate bibliography (which is missing in this section). You have used known and well-established methods.

The results section is written in a totally different style from the previous one.

There are too many tables, you can think to improve and shorten this part, for example by preparing graphs (PCA or bar-plots of basic physicochemical parameters, polyphenolic compounds, organic acids, by-products of fermentation; containing information for both red and white wines) to simplify the reader.

Line 24 or 27: Please indicate the ID of the newly isolated strains.

Line 51: try to replace the term means with indicate.

Line 54: please replace “strains of microorganism” with “microbial strains”, and a citation is needed.

Lines 57-59: “A wide range of commercial wine yeast strains mainly of Saccharomyces cerevisiae genera being the dominant microflora during fermentation, is worldwide used in the industry”. Saccharomyces cerevisiae is a fungal species the genus is “Saccharomyces”.

Lines 63-65: please rephrase, the concept you express is unclear.

Line 92: It is the first time you talk about LAB, please specify the acronym.

Lines 36-106: the introduction is confusing, it is not clear the story you are telling, a strong re-arrangement is necessary.

Lines 108-135: Missing citation, e.g. about the sampling method or about the PCR conditions. You described well-known procedures, please re-write.

Lines 137-166: the bibliography is missing.

Please re-write all material and methods, all the procedures you are describing are well established, thus it is not necessary to be so detailed, but It is mandatory to add the right bibliography.

Results and discussions are well written compared to the first part. In any case, a selection of the content or an alternative solution to show the data is strongly recommended.

Considering that you are using new yeast strains, there is a lack of information about their behavior (viability) during fermentations.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for reading our manuscript carefully and for your critical review. We have addressed all your comments in the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf