The Effect of Ethanol Extracts and Essential Oils Obtained from Different Varieties of Mint on Wood Molding

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper has been written well; however, it may use some grammatical check for better English.

My comments are:

1) The importance and novelty of the paper is not clear. In the last paragraph of the Introduction, it should be emphasized clearly. We have seen some papers in the literature in the past as shown below:

Sivropoulou, A.,Kokkini, S., Lanaras, T. 1995. Antimicrobial activity of mint essential oil. J. Agric. Food Chem. 43: 2384-2388.

Clausen, CA, Yang, VW (2011). Leach and mold resistance of essential oil metabolites. Proceedings of The 107th Annual Meeting of AWPA, Vol. 107, May 15-17, 2011.

Clausen, CA, Woodward, BM, Yang VW (2010) Antifungal essential oil metabolites. IRG-WP 10-30531. 

2) In the study, how did the authors prepare control plates and wood specimens? Did they use water or ethanol for preparations?

3) How did the authors treat wood specimens with essential oils and extracts?

4) Higher resolutions of the figures  are needed.

5) How the results can be used for wood protection/preservation in practical way? What's the importance of the results?

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your thorough evaluation of the manuscript content. We have evaluated the paper again and we hope we were able to make all corrections which you pointed out. 

Yours sincerely

Authors

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Overall, the topic of the manuscript is interesting and innovative. First of all, of course, I would ask the authors to review the formatting of the text carefully. At the moment, there remains an undeleted comment (line 234), which slightly complicates the review of the manuscript.

My recommendation for the Abstract is to reduce the presented results of the research, giving only the most significant ones (at the moment, it seems that all the conclusions are also provided in the abstract) at the expense of a few sentences determining the relevance of the study and the main novelty in it.

In my opinion, the keywords are appropriate.

I have no recommendations for the Introduction part. This part is prepared at a very high level, outlining, with appropriate references, the need for the study and the main novelty of it.

My recommendation for the Materials and Methods part is to be justified the materials and methods used. For example, "The research material consisted of 4 mint varieties:…." (lines 132) – why exactly these 4 varieties? (please provide references). The same recommendation applies to the research methods used. That is, it would also be good to provide references for them. Otherwise, the materials and methods used are described comprehensively and clearly.

In the Results and Discussion - please correct the quality of Figure 2 (line 318). Now, this figure is blurry and unclear. The same recommendation applies to figures 3 to 6.

In the Conclusions – Here, my recommendation, in contrast to the abstract, is to expand the conclusions, mainly emphasizing this study's main novelty and contribution. I ask the respected authors to consider whether the conclusions should be presented as separate points or as an overall conclusion. Whichever option is chosen, in my opinion, the Conclusions part cannot start directly by listing the conclusions but should include at least one explanatory sentence.

The references cited are appropriate.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your thorough evaluation of the manuscript content. We have evaluated the paper again and we hope we were able to make all corrections which you pointed out. 

Yours sincerely

Authors

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx