Toxicity of an Emamectin Benzoate Microemulsion against Bursaphelenchus xylophilus and Its Effect on the Prevention of Pine Wilt Disease

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Zhang et al report the results of a study in which emulsion formulations of emamectin benzoate were compared and a single formulation was tested against a nematode pest in the laboratory and then injected into pine trees and provided protection against pine wilt disease caused by the nematode.
The main issues that I have with the manuscript is that the authors fail to provide the details of the ingredients and quantities used to prepare formulations, and also do not provide details of replication and procedures in many points in the manuscript. It would therefore be impossible for another researcher to repeat their study and validate their findings.
I have written numbered points and numerous suggestions for improvements on a scanned copy of the manuscript.
Numbered points (see scanned manuscript)
1. Do not use keywords that are already in the title.
2. Please mention the size of 5-year-old trees.
3. There are many details missing on the recipes used to prepare the 14 formulations. It is necessary to provide a detailed breakdown of the substances and quantities used, so that researchers can repeat your study precisely. This could be included as supplemental material.
4. Was a qualitative comparison or a quantitative study involving measurements of emulsion characteristics such as viscosity, delamination (= phase separation?) and turbidity (not mentioned in the section 2.2)? Or were all findings based on simple observation?
5. What was room temperature in Nanjing?
6. I did not understand these method codes? Please explain or provide references.
7. How was pH measured?
8. How long did the thermal decomposition tests last?
9. What was the age of nematodes? What does "mixed" mean? Mixed ages?
10. Section 2.5. Please indicate sample size, conditions under which the experiment was performed, and details of the experimental site.
11. How much sample was homogenized for residue analysis?
12. How many samples were analyzed? How many trees were samples? We need more information on replication here.
13. What standards or reference materials were used in section 2.6?
14. How were trees inoculated with nematodes? Was the emamectin benzoate emulsion applied at 3 ml/tree?
15. Please replace SC with 'solvent control' in the entire manuscript for clarity.
16. Please provide sample sizes for the persistence study in section 2.8
17. How did you check that the data were normally distributed and met the assumption of homoscedasticity prior to ANOVA?
18. Delamination? Do you mean phase separation? Please clarify.
19. What does this figure show? The title does not explain the figure. If these are the compositions of the formulations it would be better to list everything in supplemental material.
20. This text should be moved to the Discussion.
21. Delete text, as you have no evidence for this assertion.
22. Please indicate units of residue concentrations. Are these micrograms/gram of plant tissue?
23. Figure 5. Do letters indicate significant differences for PAIRWISE comparisons?
The word 'formula' should be changed to formulation throughout the manuscript.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Requires improvement.

Author Response

Dear Editor,

Thank you very much for your appraisal of our manuscript entitled “Toxicity of a Emamectin Benzoate Microemulsion Against Bursaphelenchus xylophilus and Its Effect on the Prevention of Pine Wilt Disease” by Zhang et al, and for giving us the chance to revise our manuscript. We also greatly appreciate the reviewers for their constructive comments that have proved very helpful for us in revising the manuscript. The manuscript has been revised according to the reviewers’ comments and the changes we have made in the revised manuscript are marked. Detailed responses to comments are attached.

Author Response File: Author Response.doc

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments # 01: The introduction section is not clear. It is very broad and not at all comprehensively focused to relevance of the manuscript. It lists a lot of other people's research work, but it does not impress on readers the importance of this work, what is not solved in this field and why is it important. Therefore, as a reader, it is difficult to draw the conclusion from them as to why this study has been carried out. The authors need to discuss the previous work instead of only mentioning that author `A' did this and author `B' did this. In conclusion, there is not any insight into the physical description of the problem studied beyond the determination of a number of parameters by means of computing software.

Comments # 02: Many of the results and conclusions of this paper are quite basic. I recommend expanding: Introduction, Conclusions and the Results sections. The aim should be to: 1) give a broader view of the literature on the topic and the current state-of-the-art; 2) clarify and discuss the novelty and the significance of the results obtained here, and compare them with those available in the literature, also including discussions on potential applications; 3) complete the manuscript with some additional, less basic results. I cannot support publication unless the authors undertake all the above actions in full.

Comments # 01: The introduction section is not clear. It is very broad and not at all comprehensively focused to relevance of the manuscript. It lists a lot of other people's research work, but it does not impress on readers the importance of this work, what is not solved in this field and why is it important. Therefore, as a reader, it is difficult to draw the conclusion from them as to why this study has been carried out. The authors need to discuss the previous work instead of only mentioning that author `A' did this and author `B' did this. In conclusion, there is not any insight into the physical description of the problem studied beyond the determination of a number of parameters by means of computing software.

Comments # 02: Many of the results and conclusions of this paper are quite basic. I recommend expanding: Introduction, Conclusions and the Results sections. The aim should be to: 1) give a broader view of the literature on the topic and the current state-of-the-art; 2) clarify and discuss the novelty and the significance of the results obtained here, and compare them with those available in the literature, also including discussions on potential applications; 3) complete the manuscript with some additional, less basic results. I cannot support publication unless the authors undertake all the above actions in full.

Author Response

ear Editor,

Thank you very much for your appraisal of our manuscript entitled “Toxicity of a Emamectin Benzoate Microemulsion Against Bursaphelenchus xylophilus and Its Effect on the Prevention of Pine Wilt Disease” by Zhang et al, and for giving us the chance to revise our manuscript. We also greatly appreciate the reviewers for their constructive comments that have proved very helpful for us in revising the manuscript. The manuscript has been revised according to the reviewers’ comments and the changes we have made in the revised manuscript are marked. Detailed responses to comments are attached.

Author Response File: Author Response.doc

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have modified their manuscript to address my concerns.

English editing is essential.

Reviewer 2 Report

Accepted in the current form

Accepted in the current form