Boosting Immunity and Management against Wheat Fusarium Diseases by a Sustainable, Circular Nanostructured Delivery Platform

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

see attachment

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

We are grateful for your comments and suggestions. Here, our responses you requested.

1) The final NPF is not a nanomaterial. Indeed, in L149 we say that the average diameter dimension is 20 µ We introduced nanotechnology and nanomaterials in the introduction section, because we used cellulose nanocrystals as carriers. Indeed, nanotechnology is extremely useful to vehicle active principles and for this reason we believe it may be highly applicable for novel agrochemicals formulation.

2) I think you mean the Figure related to Fg cultured on tebuconazole-incorporated agar. The first time I prepared the plates I carefully checked them under the stereomicroscope, because I was sure there was bacterial contamination. Instead, I noticed that Fg cultured on tebuconazole-incorporated PDA always forms this bacterial patina-like mycelium, probably because of stressful conditions. Indeed, while Fg mycelium is typically cotton-like, while growing on tebuconazole incorporated medium, the hypha are not cotton-like and they are very translucent as a bacterial patina. In any case, I replaced that picture with one where the typical colours of Fg mycelium (yellow, orange) are more visible.

3) For the experiments performed with Fg inoculation, the plants have been grown until maturity. Indeed, we also evaluated the effect on the final yield. For the Fc experiments, we inoculated the plants at a young stage just for optimal space management (small plants). Our first intention was to grow also these plants until maturity, but we noticed that because of Fc infection, they were extremely fragile and the tillering was very bad, many of them died quite earlier, thus we decide to evaluate the final yield only on Fg inoculated plants.

4) Thank you to have noticed that, we corrected all the Latin names.

Reviewer 2 Report

This is a very good manuscript on the use of novel nanopesticides towards reducing infection of wheat by two species of Fusarium phytopathogenic fungi. The manuscript is very well written. The experimental design is robust and the results are supporting the conclusions. Some minor suggestions:

1) Figure 3f, 3g: the gray line for mock controls is not very visible. Please change color.

2) Line 219: please use the entire term for dpi (days-post-infection) and not just the acronym dpi the first time it appears in the manuscript.

3) In the Discussion, it would be interesting if the authors have an opinion on the economics of nanoparticle pesticides: will they be attractive to the pesticide industry as a new category of pesticides? 

Overall an excellent manuscript by an experienced research team in this field.

Author Response

Thank you a lot for your comments and suggestions. Here, the responses you requested:

1) Thank you for your suggestion, we changed colour into light blue

2) Thank you, we corrected it.

3) Thank you for your suggestion, we added our opinion in lines 1056-1061 in the conclusion section, since we believe that the discussion section is actually quite long.