Investigation of Pinewood Nematodes in Pinus tabuliformis Carr. under Low-Temperature Conditions in Fushun, China
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscripts is satisfactory, however the authors should address the below queries before it is further processed.
Major
- Provide the Nucleotide sequence alignment of the ITS of your amplified sequennce and compare with previous B. xylophilus sequence.
- Whats the approximate length of the third stage juvenile. Please use scale bars in Fig.2
- What are authors trying to say in Fig. B , C, D? What’s the point in showing them separately.
- Fig. 4. What are the estimates of nematode eggs? It should also be estimated I believe.
- Give proper citations for the ITS primers used. I would have preferred doing an a RPA assay.
Minor
- Line 24. Monochamus which species was tested.
- I believe pinewood is a single term. It should be pinewood and not Pine Wood.
- Fig.1. the captions should be healthy and not health. IN legends mention the statistics.
- Fig. 4. It would be scientific if the significance levels are provided.
Author Response
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Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper deals with interesting topic of B. xylophilus nematode adaptation into cooler conditions.
According to my opinion the manuscript should be improved.
Add basic aims of your work at the end of Introduction part. It must be clearly stated what was the main purpose of the paper and what main scientific result was expected.
Line 95: Sentence beginning with "Look for..." does not make sense, please adjust it.
Line 108: Baermann funnel
Paragraph 2.3: There is no information considering DNA sequencing in this paragraph, add at least one sentence with short description how was it done (PCR product sequencing, cloning in bacterial vector?).
Paragraph 2.5: Last sentence of the paragraph is rather banal, please omit it.
Table 1: what are the values presented in the table? Averages +/- SD or averages +/- SE? Please add the explanation into table description. On the other hand there is no need to explain deManns indexes (a, b etc) in the table description, they should be well known to nematologists.
Line 187: cancer of trees - please delete this, Pine Wilt Disease is better and much more widespread term.
The manuscript also contains a number of spacing faluts, it should be corrected prior the publication.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Authors have defended well. it can be accepted now.
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
