Review Reports - Bioremoval of Yttrium (III), Cerium (III), Europium (III), and Terbium (III) from Single and Quaternary Aqueous Solutions Using the Extremophile <i>Galdieria sulphuraria</i> (Galdieriaceae, Rhodophyta)

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript has been significantly improved. I reccomend it for publication in Plants.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

thank you very much for your previous revision; we agreed with your comments and accepted your suggestions. Thank you for having recommended the manuscript for the publication.

Best regards

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript would benefit of some extra work at the introduction and discussion sections as to underpin and discuss the studied algae potential with comparisons to available literature data. Some flaws regard removal data presentation, in terms of nanomols/mg, I think that expressing them as percentual values would allow a more immediate evaluation of the algae potential as compared to other biosorbents or non biological sorbent material.
I have also incleded some suggestions in comments to the pdf file

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

with reference to your last revision, we kindly thank you for your valuable suggestions, which improved the quality of our manuscript. We addressed all the variations reported in the manuscript and we included more references about the use of algae in recovering REEs. Regarding your suggestion on the removal data presentation, we would like to explain the reason why we chose to express our results in micromol/g dm. Expressing the results in percentages requires the necessity to measure the residual metal quantities in the supernatant of the test solutions. Based on our experience with the ICP method, supernatant samples, which are high metal concentrated compared to the biomass, require multiple dilutions, thus leading to a dramatic increase in the error percentage. We consider more reliable the direct measurement of the biomass, instead of the supernatant measurement and subsequent calculation of the metal intake by subtraction. Anyway, we are working on optimising the supernatant measurements by ICP to gain more confidence in the expression of the results in percentage.

On behalf of all the authors

Best regards

Manuela Iovinella