Priming with Small Molecule-Based Biostimulants to Improve Abiotic Stress Tolerance in Arabidopsis thaliana
, Nikola Štefelová 2, Sara Salcedo Sarmiento 2, Lukáš Spíchal 2 and Nuria De Diego 2,*Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The submitted paper titled „Effect of postharvest UV-C radiation on nutritional quality, oxidation and enzymatic browning of stored mature date” is about an actual research question. I think this manuscript contains a lot of useful data, which can be good to use in the practice too.
I have just some small suggestions to improve more the quality of the paper. Is it possible to add a very shortpomolocial description about the variety called ’Deglet-Nour’ ? For those readers, who are not very familiar with palm date, it would be nice to explain the ’Tamar’ stage of ripening to understand better the material. The chemical values are well-described to this stage, but how it does look like? I think this is one of the keys in this research.
The results are clean to understand, everything is well-prepated in the manuscript Please mark the SD5% values in the figures. There are a huge number of references supporting the material of the manuscript.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer, we were willing to fulfill all the recommendations and suggestions included in the review process. However, It was not impossible because the comments added in the report are not connected to our study.
Reviewer 2 Report
Journal Plants (ISSN 2223-7747) 20220502
Manuscript ID plants-1723603
Type Article
Title
Priming with small molecule-based biostimulants to improve abiotic stress tolerance in Arabidopsis thaliana
Authors
Alba E. Hernándiz , Carlos Eduardo Aucique-Perez , Sanja Ćavar Zeljković , Nikola Štefelová , Sara Salcedo Sarmiento , Lukáš Spíchal , Nuria De Diego *
Section Phytochemistry
Special Issue Chemical Activators of the Natural Defences of the Plant
Drought and salinity are chronic issues all over the world. Hence the theme is excellent.
Small molecules promote plant growth and improve stress tolerance.
Query: Can these be used in post-stress conditions or prestress-induced conditions?
“ putrescine (Put) and its precursor ornithine (Orn) and degradation product 1,3- diaminopropane 22 (DAP) at two different concentrations (0.1 and 1mM) as a seed priming on in vitro Arabidopsis seed-23 lings grown under optimal growth conditions, osmotic or salt stress. “
Query: The concentration range seems to be too narrow.
Query: Are polyamines the only known small molecule-based biostimulants to alleviate the adverse abiotic stress effects? Can we envisage the usage of a cocktail/combination of molecules?
Query: Lines 153-158:; These descriptions should be made in the Materials and Methods section.
Query: The data and information are good but the manner of presentation throughout the manuscript is a bit complex. Most of the sections are over-descriptive. The whole document can be reduced to 50% of its present size.
Query: References related to Arabidopsis are quite limited.
Query: The use of scientific names should be as per accepted norms. Full names can appear only once, at first mention.
Major Suggestion:
Either Introduction or Discussion section should use information in closely related areas:
biomolecules from diverse organisms,
similar issues in related crop plants and
related mechanisms of application of biomolecules should be improved.
Information from the following documents will prove helpful in enhancing the perspective of this study:
https://doi.org/10.3390/microorganisms9040774
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12088-021-00979-7
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biortech.2019.122346
Author Response
We want to thank the Reviewer for the valuable comments and suggestions. We tried to include all of them in the present version of the manuscript. We hope that the current version is suitable to be accepted in Plants.
Query: Can these be used in post-stress conditions or prestress-induced conditions?
In our work, we are focused on prestress-induced conditions because we believe that the preparation of the plants to deal with the stress is crucial for reducing crop losses. However, in previous studies, we tested at least Put being applied simultaneously (in the media) that the plants were subjected to stress and improved plant stress tolerance. Additionally, there are many papers in which the Put application improves plant tolerance (e.i. Kumar et al. 2014, Exogenous application of putrescine at pre-anthesis enhances the thermotolerance of wheat (Triticum aestivum L.; Hassan et al. 2020, Exogenous application of spermine and putrescine mitigate adversities of drought stress in wheat by protecting membranes and chloroplast ultra-structure, etc..). Regarding DAP and Orn, there is almost no information about the effect of their exogenous application. Only two publications reported the beneficial effect of the exogenous Orn application of plants under stress, one performed in sugar beet under drought stress (Hussein et al. 2019, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2019.e02631) and another one suing cell suspension of tobacco cell under salinity [Ghahremani et al. 2014, AJCS 8(1):91-96 (2014)].
“ putrescine (Put) and its precursor ornithine (Orn) and degradation product 1,3- diaminopropane 22 (DAP) at two different concentrations (0.1 and 1mM) as a seed priming on in vitro Arabidopsis seed-23 lings grown under optimal growth conditions, osmotic or salt stress. “
Query: The concentration range seems to be too narrow.
We decided to work in this concentration range because we tested a higher range in our previous work, focused on salinity and priming with small molecules (Ugena et al. 2018), and 0.1 and 1 mM were the best concentrations for both polyamines and amino acids.
Query: Are polyamines the only known small molecule-based biostimulants to alleviate the adverse abiotic stress effects? Can we envisage the usage of a cocktail/combination of molecules?
Of course, no, many small molecule-based biostimulants can alleviate the adverse stress effects. For example, we just published a chapter titled “Use of Plant Metabolites to Mitigate Stress Effects in Crops,” where we reviewed many studies on plant metabolites used to improve plant stress tolerance. They include carbohydrates, free amino acids, polyamine, and phytohormone, among others.
About the combination or cocktail. This is something we would like to test in our close future research. In advance, a recent work performed by Hassan et al. 2020 obtained the best results in alleviating the negative effect of drought stress in wheat by using Spm and Put together.
Query: Lines 153-158:; These descriptions should be made in the Materials and Methods section.
We changed this section to M&M as suggested by the Reviewer
Query: The data and information are good but the manner of presentation throughout the manuscript is a bit complex. Most of the sections are over-descriptive. The whole document can be reduced to 50% of its present size.
We would like to thank the Reviewer for the valuable comments. First of all, we want to say that we believe that our way of presenting the data simplify and improves the visualization of the data when there are massive data sets (e.i. Phenomics). The use of parallel coordinate plots is beneficial to compare all the analyzed parameters together with the different situations and treatments and identify the good or bad responses of the plants. For example, the Reviewer can find similar representations in other works performed by our group (see Bryksová et al. 2020; Ugena et al. 2018, Sorrentino et al. 2021 and 2022). More examples can be found in the following link:
https://www.google.com/search?q=parallel+coordinate+plot&client=firefox-b-d&sxsrf=ALiCzsY_z5IPmLzo9eKBHD167t4kgxdHUQ:1651574542109&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiH6pvPksP3AhXMs6QKHWCcDv8Q_AUoAXoECAIQAw&biw=1536&bih=712&dpr=1.25
The multivariate statistical analysis also permits a better extraction of the most relevant results.
We also reduced the actual version of the manuscript considerably, especially in the Result section, with 1534 words from 1973 of the previous version
Query: References related to Arabidopsis are quite limited.
We include 4 new references related to Arabidopsis. They correspond with the reference numbers 33-35
Query: The use of scientific names should be as per accepted norms. Full names can appear only once, at first mention.
The use of scientific names has been checked and corrected, and the appearance of full names and abbreviations corrected
Major Suggestion:
Either Introduction or Discussion section should use information in closely related areas:
biomolecules from diverse organisms,
similar issues in related crop plants and
related mechanisms of application of biomolecules should be improved.
Information from the following documents will prove helpful in enhancing the perspective of this study:
https://doi.org/10.3390/microorganisms9040774
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12088-021-00979-7
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biortech.2019.122346
The references indicated by the Reviewer has been included and explained in the text in the Introduction (Lines 73, 82 and 83) and Discussion section (Lines 327, 331 and 332)
