Study of Fungal Communities in Dry Red Wine Fermentation in Linfen Appellation, Shanxi

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The aims of the study should be more clearly formulated both in the abstract and at the end of the introduction.

Regarding the microbial communities of the studied wine samples, the authors focused only on fungi, disregarding bacteria. Why?

It is important to clearly distinguish between genus and species of molds and yeasts throughout the whole manuscript.

Which fungal species are responsible for the fermentation of wine?

Which fungi are pathogenic or worse producers of mycotoxins? This is an important food safety issue that must be discussed.

Please make a clear distinction between technological/fermentative and pathogenic mycobiota!

The experimental design must be clarified and explained in detail in the Materials and Methods section. How many independent samples per sampling time? One with three replicates? Three without replicates? Composite samples?

Please avoid the bullet points within the body text in the Conclusions section.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your review comments, I have carefully revised each review comments, the details are in the following documents.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The study entitled (Study of fungal communities in dry red wine fermentation in Linfen appellation, Shanxi) used high-throughput sequencing technology to determine the fungal microbial diversity of three dry red wines, Cabernet Sauvignon, Matheran, and Cabernet Franc, before, during, and after natural fermentation. The work is good, results are interesting.

I have some major comment

·         The abstract is not so clear as the conclusion obtained in this study. The conclusion section is stronger than abstract. Some important data should be highlighted in the abstract section to clarify the impact of this work.

·         The manuscript should be carefully revised for the formatting as almost all mentioned scientific names in the text and reference section are not italic format

·         Several typing mistakes should be corrected for example see line 29 (un-derstand) line 43 (fo-cused), L60, l72, …etc

·         L87 please provide the reference in the format of the journal

·         L98-99, clarify what these primers for??  With reference

·         L121-128, must be deleted

·         Clarify the title of Table 1

·         Fig.1 is not clear, please distinguish each variety with specific symbol to be clear for the respective reader

·         L175 move the reference to the end of this paragraph

·         Fig.4 should be clarified more and enlarged with high resolution

·         Add X and Y axes titles to fig 5 and 6(revise the formatting of scientific names of microorganisms

·         Data in Tables 3 and 4; please use 3 effective figures

·         Table 4 is better to be presented as figure

·         L443; change chapter to paper

Author Response

I am very grateful for your review comments, and I have revised each review comment carefully, please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors satisfactorily revised their manuscript answering the most of my questions. However, regarding the question on "Which fungi are pathogenic or worse producers of mycotoxins? This is an important food safety issue that must be discussed.", the authors fail to directly reply to my question!

Their answer Food safety is indeed a crucial matter. When making wine, not only is a certain amount of sulfur dioxide produced "naturally" during the yeast fermentation process, but also a reasonable amount of sulfur dioxide or its derivatives are added artificially, which can have an antibacterial effect and ensure food safety. Sulfur dioxide or its derivatives are also added artificially and reasonably, which can inhibit the effect of miscellaneous bacteria and harmful bacteria, ensuring food safety.

does not focus on mycotoxin-producer fungi at all and they talk about bacteria? I do not follow...

Author Response

Thanks for your comment, here is my answer to this question.

In actual production, the toxins produced by pathogenic bacteria are controlled below the national standard and will not cause harm to the human body. After fermentation, sulfur dioxide not only inhibits harmful bacteria but also inhibits the growth and reproduction of all microorganisms.