Maturity, Ripening and Quality of ‘Donghong’ Kiwifruit Evaluated by the Kiwi-Meter™

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 1)

- The authors should have provided a response to the previous comments as this makes it easier to review the resubmitted version. The resubmitted version did not provide answers to most of the comments listed in the first round. Thus, I will again provide those comments.

-  The authors presented a study about utilizing a commercial device, Kiwi-Meter, to measure different quality attributes of kiwi fruit cultivar “Donghong”. The study can be seen more as a pure applicable work than a research work. The study needs to be enhanced and the following comments might help to do so.      

 

 

 

ABSTRACT 

I would suggest to add some numbers to describe the results obtained in the study 

 

INTRODUCTION 

- The authors need to add the importance of measuring color, chlorophyll, and firmness for perishable produce quality. This means why each maturity attribute is important for the quality.

- The authors should add a figure containing photos of the devices listed in lines 44-50 

- The authors need to add more effort to justify their work. The device used in the study was listed to be used before and performed poorly with the cultivar “Hort16A”. This means the device is cultivar-dependent. What is the difference between using the device with the “Donghong” cultivar and other cultivars in terms of the novelty of the work? Please justify.     

  

Materials and Methods 

- 2.3. Change Fruit measurement to Measuring fruit maturity . 

- The authors should add a figure or 2 to clarify how the different measurements were taken. 

- The authors need to specify which experimental design was used in the study. 

Why wasn’t Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) used? 

 

Results and Discussion 

- Why was the SSC/Dry matter used? 

- Figures are not consistent in terms of the font type, size. This need to be fixed in the whole manuscript. 

 

Discussion 

- The authors made a good job to list previous studies working with chlorophyll, firmness, and color for the Donghong Kiwi fruits.  

Conclusions   

 

- This part needs to be rewritten as it is not suitable at its current status to describe the whole work.  

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report (Previous Reviewer 2)

The authors evaluated a newly developed Kiwi-Meter method for monitoring maturity, ripening and fruit quality of kiwifruit, and compared with the conventional methods. Although the results were negative, it would be important to make such data available to the public. Scientific methods employed in this manuscript was rather sound but there are many awkward English sentences that need to be rephrased. The manuscript should be proof-read by native English speakers before the next submission. Below are my comments and suggestions:

 

L14: three trials were conducted to evaluate the feasibility of…

L18-L21: I don’t understand this sentence at all. The manuscript needs to be proof-read by native English speakers.

 L28-L29: “mature” means “ripe”. It doesn’t make sense: ” when fruit are mature but firm and unripe”.

L39: eating quality -> fruit quality

L42: SSC and DM have …by Vis/NIR [6,7]. More rencently,…

L44: DA Meter or the Kiwi-Meter version? What do you mean by “version”. DA meter is known as Kiwi-Meter? Are they the same thing or just different name? Clarify this.

L44: What does DA stand for?

 L49: …seem to have been refined through time.. -> need to be adjusted (or changed) through time ??

L50: ->  : 254, 640 and  800 nm, and 560, 640 and 750 nm were used for DAg Data and DAr Data, respectively [10].

L54: Therefore the IAD index could be used to determine the harvest timing (or fruit maturity).

L65: -> In this study, three trials were conducted to evaluate Kiwi-Meter IAD data for monitoring fruit maturation, ripening during storage and postharvest fruit quality.

L67-L69: this sentence should go to 2.1. in the M&Ms section.

L71-L77: Delete this section, and add the objective of each trial to the respective M&Ms section of each trial (2.2.1 to 2.2.3).

L83: remove “arriving”

L89: On arrival at the laboratory,

L89: IAD index DAr value was measured for 20 individual fruit using Kiwi-Meter, then firmness, fresh color, SSC and DM were measured using …what tool? How are they measured for each attribute?

L91: After destructive measurement, skin and outer pericarp tissues approximately 1 mm in depth were sampled from five fruit.

L92: The sampled tissues were pooled,… for chlorophyll content assessment.

L97: transported to the laboratory and … Replace WBG with “laboratory” throughout the manuscript.

L98-L100: Change the sentence as suggested above in L89.

L98: what do you mean by “maturity area”? Some mature part of the fruit? How do you define “maturity area”? Soft or discolored part of the fruit? Clarify it.

L106: -> Postharvest fruit quality (or simply “fruit quality”)

L108-L110. Rephrase it as suggested above.

L110:  -> At harvest, firmness, SSC and DM of the fruit were XX, XX, XX, respectively.

L112: what aspect/attribute of the fruit was measured by Kiwi-Meter?

L113-L114: you need to describe how SSC, DM, and firmness (destructive methods) were measured in details in M&Ms section.

L120: Okay you explained how firmness, SSC, Dm were measured here. In this case, you should have mention “…firmness, SSC, and DM were measured as described below” in 2.2.1 - 2.2.3.

L139: A preliminary experiment showed that DAr value was associated with flesh color more than DAg value (data not shown).

L147-150: In brief, approximately 1.0 g of sample powder was suspended in 10 mL of 95% ethanol and 200 mg of calcium carbonate solution for 30,,??? Did you put the powder sample into the solution, right?

L156: (sem) -> (SE): Throughout the manuscript, replace “sem” with “SE”.

Fig. 3: What are orc1, orc2 and orc3?

L240: Postharvest fruit quality …

Fig. 5E: what’s the relationship between Classes on the x-axis and the black line (IAD index) in the figure? Wasn’t each Class defined based on IAD value?

L257: this classification based IAD index should be in M&Ms.

L305-L308: Grammatically awkward. Please ask native English speakers to rephrase it.

L321: rephrase this sentence.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 1)

The authors provided enough answers to most previous comments. However, the following should be addressed:

1- Looking at different figures,  it is clear that the fonts' sizes are not consistent. This must be corrected.  

2- The authors should add a photo of the device and how it is used. The device is the core of the work and more attention should be added to presenting the device. 

Author Response

1- Looking at different figures,  it is clear that the fonts' sizes are not consistent. This must be corrected.  

Answer:  Figures 1 and 3 have been reduced in size such that they are now similar to the other figures. The journal editors will finalize depending on the page layout etc,

2- The authors should add a photo of the device and how it is used. The device is the core of the work and more attention should be added to presenting the device. 

Answer: Photo added.

Reviewer 2 Report (Previous Reviewer 2)

The authors improved the manuscript and it looks good. Some sentences still need to be edited. Grammatically correct sentences don't necessarily mean that it's easy to understand. In fact, I misunderstood some of them. Those need to be edited so that the readers can understand what the authors meant.  

Author Response

The authors improved the manuscript and it looks good.

Answer：Thank you. 

Some sentences still need to be edited. Grammatically correct sentences don't necessarily mean that it's easy to understand. In fact, I misunderstood some of them. Those need to be edited so that the readers can understand what the authors meant.  

Answer:  We have looked at the places where the reviewer does not understand the English and made word changes. Hopefully this will help.

 

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

horticulturae-1849552-peer-review-v1 

The authors presented a study about utilizing a commercial device, Kiwi-Meter, to measure different quality attributes of kiwi fruit cultivar “Donghong”. The study can be seen more as a pure applicable work than research work. The study needs to be enhanced and the following comments might help to do so.      

 

Title: add “the” before the Kiwi-Meter

 

ABSTRACT 

I would suggest to add some numbers to describe the results obtained in the study 

 

INTRODUCTION 

The authors need to add the importance of measuring color, chlorophyll, and firmness for perishable produce quality.    

The authors should add a figure containing photos of the devices listed in lines 44-50 

The authors need to add more effort to justify their work. The device used in the study was listed to be used before and performed poorly with the cultivar “Hort16A”. This means the device is cultivar-dependent. What is the difference between using the device with the “Donghong” cultivar and other cultivars in terms of the novelty of the work? Please justify.     

  

Materials and Methods 

The authors need to add a reference(s) for measuring the firmness and color the way listed in the study. 

The authors should add a figure or 2 to clarify how the different measurements were taken. 

The authors need to specify which experimental design was used in the study. 

Why wasn’t Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) used? 

 

Results and Discussion 

Why was the SSC/DM used and what does it means? 

Figure 1. No need to use different colors for the axis, make this in the legend.   

Figures are not consistent in terms of the font type, size. This need to be fixed in the whole manuscript. 

 

Discussion 

The authors made a good job to list previous studies working with chlorophyll, firmness, and color for the Donghong Kiwi fruits. However, there is a need to link the results in the manuscript to the previous studies. 

  

Conclusions   

This part needs to be rewritten as it is not suitable at its current status to describe the whole work.  

 

 

Reviewer 2 Report

This manuscript needs to be proofread and edited by native English speakers before peer-review.