Construction of a Core Collection of Germplasms from Chinese Fir Seed Orchards

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This article describes about construction of core collection of germplasm resources in Chinese fir seed orchards, and authors provide helpful information for management of genetic resources in this species. However, authors need to revise because some problems are recognized in your article including minor. I will point out some comments below in your article.

 

P4 L137-139

"Under the strong sampling intensity, the core collection constructed by all methods was significantly different from the whole col- lection (MLS, 10%; CC-X,10%,20%; CC-I, 10%, 20%)"

It would be better to be more specific as to which parameters were significantly different. If the “ * ”  in Table 1 indicates a significant difference, it does not seem to be consistent with the statement. In addtion, the meaning of  “ * ”  should be indicated in the caption of Table 1.

 

P4 L146 "SAAN"→SANA?

 

P5 L154-156

 "We comprehensively considered the homology of the core collections and the preservation of alleles, A-NE (E-NE) and CV were given different weights, and the core collections were constructed under 30% sampling intensity (Table 2). "

The notation of the parameters in the discussion（P8 L252-255） and Table 2 do not match. It is difficult to understand the actual parameters given and the statistics obtained from them, so please organize and present them more clearly.

 

P6 L169−172

"We found that the core collection A-NE&CV73 was evenly distributed in the principal coordinates of the entire Chinese fir seed orchard resources (Figure 2B), and the core collection E-NE&CV55 was irregularly distributed in the entire collection (Figure 2A)."

There does not impress to be a difference in distribution as described by author.

 

P7 Table3

The values of Ne in Whole collection differ from Table 1.

 

P8 L252-255

"We found that giving them different weights (A-NE, 0.5; CV, 0.5 and E-NE, 0.7; CV,0.3) can effectively improve the preservation rate of alleles and control the correlation between accessions in the core collection to be lower than that of the first-degree relationship."

Given the names A-NE&CV73 and E-NE&CV55, wouldn't the parameters be reversed?

 

P9 268-280

Although author indicate the origin of the parental clones in explaining the percentage of the seed orchards, since it is also important to cover geographical factors as mentioned in P8L226, would it not be better to add about the geographical coverage of the core collection using the origin of the parental clones?

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

An in-depth study with important results for seed orchard managers.

1.“germplasm resources” maybe “germplasms”

2.Line20-21, what mean “three generations”?

3.In abstract, which are the two core collections? How many germplasms in these two core collection? I think you should supply the data in the abstract to enhance the readability.

4.Core collection construction is an important and necessary work for tree breeding program. But the raw materials are mainly the germplasms which selected from different locations. The authors select the germplasms in three seed orchards. I think it is also very important accessions of Chinese fir. I suggest that would you explain the important role of the accessions in the section of introduction or materials.

5.The materials, the germplasms in these seed orchards are clones, families, or elite trees? The seed orchards are clone or family orchards? The information of the materials should be more detail.

6.line81, 607 germplasm resources, but in line132, 607 individual genotypes. Should be unified.

7.In table 1, what means the data with “*”.

 

8.t-test of genetic diversity index between core collection and whole germplasms would used to evaluate the validity of the core collection.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx