Screening Winter Wheat Genotypes for Resistance Traits against Rhizoctonia cerealis and Rhizoctonia solani Infection

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (New Reviewer)

This paper looks at the resistance of a collection of cultivars to Rhizoctonia cerealis and R. solani.  They used a petri plate assay and an inoculated field test. They looked at correlations among measured variables and classified the cultivars into resistance classes.  It has some important information that is worth publishing.   There are several major comments.

1.        Why did you choose AG-5?  This is not considered a major pathogen on wheat, and in fact appears to be not very virulent.  A bit more of a background on this would be good.  The literature on R. cerealis is well established.

2.       You need to give more information on how you sampled disease in the field, how you sampled, etc.

3.       You need a detailed legend for Fig. 1.  It took me several minutes to figure this out. You need a label for each X and Y axis. These may be different for each correlation.  What do the colors mean?

4.       Why did you combine both fungi to make the correlations?  This is fudging a bit. If you looked at each species separately, it does not look like there is much of a correlation between variables.

5.       A better question would be- is there a correlation between resistance with R. cerealis and R. solani?  Could you look at this.

6.       In the discussion, you need to address the fact that AG-5 was not very virulent, and this makes it difficult to really separate out the cultivars.

7.       You should also discuss the fact that the petri dish assay looks at seedling resistance and the field at adult plant resistance. It appears that the field trial is more accurate.  But what about doing greenhouse screenings, that would be interesting and may be a better method than the petri dish method.

I made a number of editorial corrections on the PDF using sticky notes, attached.  These need to be corrected

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Response to the Reviewer has been attached.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)

Major concerns: The results indicated that the results of different experiments are not consistent. How can the authors ensure the accuracy and reliability of the data?

The manuscript was not well written. The major results should be presented in Abstract. Some paragraphs in Materials and Methods (2.1), Results, and Discussion sections are too long and need to be broken up into smaller ones. There are a lot of repeated descriptions in Introduction and Discussion such as host range etc. More details about the survey method, evaluation scale, and experiment arrangements should be provided.

 Minor modifications

Line 210: “Table 2” changed into “Figure 2”.

Line 215: “66 were susceptible”, however, the number in Table2 is “61”.

The references 1, 2 and 4 in the first paragraph of introduction are not appropriate, and this is common in this manuscript.

Some figs were repetitive and could be omitted.

Author Response

Response to the Reviewer has been attached.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)

The Introduction and Discussion sections are still too long. The conclusion presented in Abstract need to be more understandable.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

thank you for the suggestion. We agree, that the references cited especially in the Discussion were too long. The whole section has been corrected. Low informative sentences have also been removed from the Introduction. Finally, we rejected a few sentences from Abstract.

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

In the title, you should mention the full genera name nor abbreviated.

In the title, change “towards” to “against”

Line 11: change to “force the research” instead of  “forces the search”

Lines 21-23: “Pathogens, by affecting the water and nutrient uptake and balance of plants, reducing their condition, which in turn translates into the size and quality of the obtained yield”. Rewrite this phrase, it’s not clear.

Lines 25-26: “(E.P. Hoeven) R.T. Moore (Ceratobasidium cereale D.I. Murray et Burpee teleomorph)”, what is this?

Lines 26-27: “causing sharp eyespot, a disease that is an increasing problem both in Poland and around the world”. You need a reference here

Lines 37-40: “The main emphasis, however, is on the search for the determinants of wheat resistance to pathogens, which would make it possible to obtain material from which it would be possible to grow cultivars characterized by lower susceptibility or even resistance to sharp eye spot [1, 2, 5].” Rewrite this sentence.

Introduction: Generally, I invite the authors to exhibit a full English correction in the introduction section, and to rewrite their sentences in a way that can be readable for the readers because most of the sentences are long and I get lost when I read them.

Line 108: what do you mean by 203?

Line 109: what do you mean by provocative conditions?

Line 110: it’s not a photo 1 but a figure 1, correct it

Line 122: delete “protection”

In the M&M sections, I found no paragraph talking about the origin of the cultivars, and by which traits are different from each other. Moreover, in the field experiment you talked about 203 cultivars and in the paper experiment 132 instead, so why? This needs to be explained in this section.

Line 148: “The obtained data obtained from…” change it to “the data obtained from …”

Line 148: which data are obtained? You have to mention which kind of data you obtained separately from each experiment because from the field I don’t know what was measured at the end of the experiment!

Line 149: which statistical analysis was performed? It’s not specified and which analysis was conducted in the MS excel?

The M&M section is missing many important information. For example, while describing the results of figure 2, the authors mentioned for the first time many concepts like shoots, roots, leaves, stem, damping off, correlation matrix, and this is not mentioned before in the M&M. I invite the authors to introduce these concepts and write a full explanatory M&M section, because at this stage it is not mature.

Figure 2: what do both colours (i.e., orange and blue) represent? What does y- and x- axis represent?

Line 185: what do you mean by average root infection? Another concept that was not introduced in the M&M section

Line 186: what does DI refer to?

Table 1: instead of root, you should put roots infection and stem infection, otherwise the readers wouldn’t be able to identify what are these numbers especially that you don’t mention anything in the caption

Figure 3: the heatmap cluster names are so small, and how did you make this heatmap, you did not speak about it in the M&M section and the same comments goes for figure 4, 5, 6 and 7.

Discussion needs extensive English check-up and missing many recent references, for example, I suggest citing the work of bonanomi et al. 2020 (Decomposition and organic amendments chemistry explain contrasting effects on plant growth promotion and suppression of Rhizoctonia solani damping off). In this paper, the authors talked about the possibility that damping off/plant resistance to R. solani could be gained also from the application of organic amendments. And this could serve as a justification for the different resistance traits among your cultivars.

Reviewer 2 Report

The article titled “Screening winter wheat genotypes for resistance traits towards 2 R. cerealis and R. solani infection” shows a lot of work in the field and in the lab, and the aim of the paper is important for the farmers to avoid big losses.

However, at scientific level it does not show new results or step furthers with the resistant varietes of winter wheat against R. cerealis and R. solani.

By other hand, I see several faults in the paper related to the design of the experiment. I can not see a good design with number of replicates per variante, control treatments; how they are distibuted on the field etc.. and how you pick up the plant sample in the field and also in the lab. This question is really important to get robust results.