Alleviating Salt Stress in Tomatoes through Seed Priming with Polyethylene Glycol and Sodium Chloride Combination

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

In the manuscript, Habibi et al tested the effects of seed priming on salt stress tolerance in tomato. The authors tested the impact of PEG and NaCl to pretreat and exposed them to various salt stresses. Under severe salt stress, primed plants were more vigorous and had higher fruit yield as measured by morphology, photosynthesis, and electrolyte leakage. The study is well-crafted and would be helpful in tomato plants’ resilience under salt-stress conditions. In general, the manuscript is well-written. However, the scientific increment over previous studies has not been described. Numerous studies, including those from authors [Habibi et al. Plants 2023, 12(11), 2187; Parvin et al. Antioxidants (Basel). 2019 Sep; 8(9): 350.) are published. Without describing sufficient novelty, it cannot be considered for publication.

Title

I would like to suggest the title as: Alleviating salt stress in tomato through seed priming with polyethylene glycol and sodium chloride combinations.

Abstract

Avoid +; instead, use plus (and throughout the manuscript).

Lines 25-32 are largely unnecessary. Please provide only the critical information in the abstract from your experiment.

Introduction

Describe the novelty in this section. You need to pay attention to line 71-80. Please also mention the potential reason for choosing NaCl and PEG as priming agents.Explain it from a physiological viewpoint.

Line 41, write “stomatal conductance” instead of “stomatal conductance rate.

Methods:

Concentrations of PEG6000 should be given as concentrations like NaCl. Consider your experimental temperature.

Line 294: Please define the controlled environment in parameters like temperature, illumination, humidity, etc.

Line 297: what do you mean by “wild-type”? Please explain.

Line 301: delete “making it a comprehensive and meticulously designed study”.

Line 309: replace “Post-drying” by “followed by air drying”.

Table 1 is not easy to understand; please prepare as follows:

Heading:

Treatment --- NaCl conc --- PEG conc and OP

information

Treatment-1 --- 0mM ---- 0, 0 Mpa

They can also be divided into two- salt stress treatment and priming treatment.

It is unclear how irrigation is provided and when the solution was changed.

Results:

Many aspects of relevant parameters are elaborated on at the beginning of each section, but these are unnecessary. Please eliminate these and write the key findings obtained from your experiment.

Table 1: remove p value from the table and mention in the caption.

In methods, there is also Table 1; please take care of this.

Text is overloaded with citations all over the manuscript, please reduce the number of reference by 35-40.

Reduce the conclusion to one-fourth, mentioning the key findings.

Author Response

Response sheet

Reviewer 1

The authors would like to thank you and appreciate your precious comments on the manuscript. It really helped us to improve the quality of the manuscript.

Best Regards,

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript presented about effect of seed priming on the enhancement of tomato growth and yield during salt stress. The seed priming with a combination of PEG and NaCl enhanced tomato growth and yield in the greenhouse experiment. The seed priming induced plant growth, photosynthetic efficiency, and yield of tomato.   However, several suggestions should be clarified by the authors, as follows:

1.       There were no differences between the results presented in Figure 2 and Table 1. The Figure 2 (heatmap) should be removed from the manuscript.

2.       Section 2.3. Photosynthetic Attributes (line 154) did not match with the manuscript content.  Please change the Photosynthetic Attributes to Yield Attributes.

3.       Figure 6, please provide an additional explanation in the caption, what are the green and blue circles. 

Author Response

Response sheet

Reviewer 2

The authors are thankful and value your insightful feedback on the manuscript, which has greatly contributed to enhancing its quality.

Best Regards,

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear authors,

I had the pleasure of reviewing your manuscript, and I must say, it's an impressive piece of work. Your thorough research and insightful analysis shine through in every section, making it both informative and engaging to read.

Your writing style is clear and concise, which greatly enhances the readability of the manuscript. Additionally, the way you've structured the content ensures a logical flow of ideas, making it easy for readers to follow your arguments and conclusions.

I particularly appreciate the depth of your insights and the originality of your findings. It's evident that you've put a lot of effort into this manuscript, and it truly shows. With some minor revisions to address a few points, I believe it has the potential to make a significant contribution to the field.

Overall, I commend you on your excellent work and look forward to seeing it published after some revision.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

The authors thank you for your valuable review. Please kindly refer to the attached file for the responses.

Best Regards,

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

This manuscript describes effect of combining different priming treatments on salinity tolerance in Tomato.

This subject have been studied extensively in previous articles by several groups. Few points to improve: by adding to the discussion and introduction: 

Authors do not discuss in details links between physiological observations and underlying molecular causes. It does not have to be through gene expression or enzymatic assays, but at least, authors can describe models found by others on the same priming treatments.

Oxidative stress was not discussed in depth, and the link with salinity is already established by several groups on different model plants and crops. Authors cite some of the papers without getting in-depth, H2O2, WRKY expression, Calcium sign,  and other elements could be relevent to study. 

Minor suggestions are presented in the pdf file.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

none

Author Response

We appreciate your valuable comments and recommendations. It really helped us to improve the quality of the manuscript. Please kindly refer to the attached file for the responses. For further revisions please kindly refer to the revised version of the manuscript. 

Best Regards,

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 5 Report

Comment to authors

The authors conducted an experiment to increase the salt tolerance of tomatoes by applying different seed treatments. However, some additions should be made in the methodological and literature review chapters and the reference list should be checked and improved. 

-Introduction chapter should be supplemented with results on the use of PEG treatment.

-PEG solution has commonly used to induce the osmotic stress responses in plants. The literature review should address this and refer to some resources where it has been used successfully. What is the role of PEG soaking in seed treatments? This must be communicated. 

Methods section:

-The numbering of table 1 should be 2 since there is already table 1 in the result section.

-In this table the concentration of reagents in seed treatments is the same for all salt treatments. Why present their amount separately here when you have already described it in lines 311-312? I think you should delete the “amount” data from the table it contains only the salt treatments and reagents. So it will not be confusing to review.

-How often and how much water or saline solution was applied during plant development? This should be reported. 

Results and Discussion sections

-There are many places in the manuscript where only “seed priming” is used, but I don’t think means PEG+NaCl treatment in all cases. In bracket it should be clarified which treatment is meant: PEG, NaCl or PEG+NaCl. This will make the results clearer to the reader.

-2.3. chapter does not evaluate the photosynthetic attributes. Change the title to “Yield attributes”

-When evaluating the figures, it would be better to also refer to the treatments shown in the figures in brackets, as in lines 164-167 (Fig.3A control) or lines 171-173 at the end of the sentence (Fig.3C).

-Lines 314-315: The authors' names should also be written before the brackets e.g. Garcia et al (41) and Michel et al (42).

-In the reference list, the appearance of the sources is different from the others. Let the appearance of references 6, 9 and 47 be identical to the others.

-16 reference is not accurate, only pdf is marked. The name of the journal is missing, it should be corrected.

-Correct reference 42 to Polyethylene Glycol 6000 delete 1

Author Response

We the authors appreciate your valuable review and precious comments on our manuscript. The critical and importants points were pointed our in your comments which improved the quality of the manuscript. Please kindly refer to the attached file for the responses.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I thank the authors for the revision. In the revised manuscript (lines 84-95), however, the novelty of the study was not sufficiently reflected. The author should describe what has already been done (including their own work) and what has not. Citing appropriate references is also necessary.

Author Response

Reviewer 1

The authors would like to thank you and appreciate your precious comments on the manuscript. It really helped us to improve the quality of the manuscript.

Reviewer 4 Report

I agree that the authors made few corections, but some comments were not addressed at all and instead of adding the requiered information, they chose to delete the references in question and skip the reviewer's point of view. The only aim of the reviews is to improve the quality of the article before publishing. Molecular mechanisms need to be discussed in this stress approach to show how is priming effective on the alleviation of response to salt stress. 

Also table 2 needs to be improve, we have two molecules and only one concentration which is misleading to think that everything was applied at the same concentration, if this is the case then, another problem is appearing since salt and PEG would be changing and thus applying more  pressure on the seed in a way tht is not comparable among treatments..

Author Response

Reviewer 4

The authors wish to express their gratitude and value your valuable feedback on the manuscript, as it significantly contributed to enhancing its quality.

Round 3

Reviewer 4 Report

Authors have addressed most of the comments.