Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript “soil microbial communities from industrial and natural ecosystems respond to contamination by polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons” evaluated the effects of PAH contamination on soil microbial community in terms of structure and function by using PLFA, enzyme activity and MAI. The research has a certain meaning, but several problems remained, which is a sign of an incompletely prepared work.

 

1) The results of the statistical analysis (two-way ANOVA) seems to be weakness due to a small sample size.

 

2) The full name of “PLFA” should be clarified.

 

3) Line 56-57: the “ecological memory” mentioned in the introduction was not well discussed.

 

4) Line 103-105: the meaning of q values should be described.

 

5)Line 130-135: Clear values should be provided in this part.

 

6) Discussion section: it is a pity that the general law extracted from the experimental data seems to be lack of enough novelty and reference value.

Author Response

We gratefully thank the reviewer for the useful suggestions provided; we improved the manuscript also in accordance with the other reviewers’ suggestions

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Line 15: I thnk industral soil is also a kind of natural soil, the soil corresponding to the naturals soil is anthrosol.

Lines: 18-19: the predominant of microbes can not get the conclusion that they involved PAH degradation. Maybe these microbes has been stimulated for carbon metabolism since they are resistent to PAH contaminants. If the authors want to clarify the PAH degraders, they need to lable the PAH using stable isotop carbon and determing the 13&C in microbes.

Line: 37, remove "overall", please do not start a paragraph with such kinds of words. I think this sentence should be mentioned in the first paragraph.

Line 50-51: why the authors the anthropogenic pressure will affect the effects of PAHs on microbial community structure and function? Please add the a the associate contents before you propose your hypothesis here.

Line 69：How the authors determine the sampling time point? Why the autors want to know the responses of microbial communities to PAH stress at different time point? The authors need to illustrate the basis of this work more clearly at introduction section.

Line 98: change ad to at

Table 2: the authors can calculated the ratio of fungi and bacteira and the ratio of G+ and G-, please refer to the paper: "Can biochar and root exudates alleviate the toxicity stress caused by polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon in soil microbial communities?" These values will be meaningful to describe the changes of microbail functions and stability in response to PAH contaminants.

 

Table 4: it's interesting that the degradation rate of PAH in Industrial soils is largely higher than that in N1 and N2, as the authors discussed, this results can be ascribed to the different soil properteis such as SOM. I think the authors should determine the soil properteis such as pH

,SOC, CEC, and the contents of available nutrients in different soil samples. I think the industry soil should be poorly fertilize and the microbial activity should be low, why the PAH degradation rate shows so high. Maybe some functional degraderes have been enriched in the intustrual soils due to the long-term contamination? More detailed discussion is need. This finding is interesting.

 

The conclusion should be improved accordingly when the authors have addressed my comments as above. Thanks.

 

 

Author Response

Thanks for the positive comment and helpful revisions. Below the responses to each specific comment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The questions were well answered, and original manuscript was well improved. The revised manuscript can be accepted.