The Roles of Different Types of Trichomes in Tomato Resistance to Cold, Drought, Whiteflies, and Botrytis
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Materials and Method
Line 80-81: Please specify light conditions for the greenhouse (i.e natural light or artificial light, photoperiod e.g 16/8 h light/dark)
Line 88-90: Please give more detail about the preparation of sample for SEM, e.g which solution was used for dehydration and for how long … or alternatively please cite a protocol that has been followed.
Line 118-122: Please give more detail about the determination of RWC or cite a protocol that was used.
Line 126: remove the word “then”
Results
Figure 1: The quality of the SEM images are low. Very difficult to distinguish between type II, II & IV trichomes based on Figure 1C. If there is no other better image for this Figure, I suggest that the authors provide more details in the Figure legend including Magnification, scale bar and consider using other colours than white to indicate types of trichomes.
Figure 2, 3,4,5: Need more details in legends including Magnification & scale bar. Figure 5 needs details of materials in A, B, C &D images.
Lines 251-253 should be moved to discussion section
Figure 6, 7 & 8: quality need to be improved as specially Figure 7 & 8 were fuzzy at 100 % view and being fuzzier when zoomed out more than 150 %
Figure 6 Legend: information was repeated unnecessarily: e.g “During drought treatment, the fresh weight, dry weight and saturated fresh weight of the tested tomato materials were measured at different times. Dry weight water, content, fresh water content, and relative water content (RWC) were measured”. The Figure 6B only presents the RWC why the dry weight, fresh weight, Dry weight water, content, fresh water content need to be mentioned in this legend? Those just were parts of the RWC measurement, and they are not presented in the result. Information about what were presented in this Figure also needed, i.e data are mean ± SE or SD
Figure 7 legend also needs an improvement, i.e more details are needed i.e data are mean ± SE or SD. If photos of leaf that show the area of B. cinereal affected are available for different tomato varieties tested it should be included in this Figure to make the Figure more comprehensive.
Figure 8 legend also needs more information as suggested above
Lines 259 -260: I think that the sentence “The results indicated that trichomes play an important role in the resistance of plants to drought” is too strong statement based on the experiment results as the test only shows the RWC up to 4 days period of drought stress (stop watering) not up to the point of wilting, meanwhile practically the drought stress is usually long period. In addition, RWC is just one of the parameters for estimation of drought tolerance in plants Therefore, I suggest that the sentence to be modified to reflect that the trichomes help the plants to slow down water loss during water deficit and may contribute to drought tolerance of the plants.
Table 1,2,3 & 4 legends need more details i.e data are mean ± SE or SD and different letters represent …
Discussion
Lines 367-369: the sentence needs to be re-written
Lines 378-379: What does it mean by “and the type I glandular trichome is more resistant to cold stress”? does that mean the type I trichome was less damaged/ affected by cold stress? If yes, then more data are need in result section to support this statement i.e SEM images that show structure of type I trichome was not damaged/affected by cold stress. Otherwise the sentence needs to be modified to reflect that tomato variety that has more Trichome type I is more tolerance to cold stress compare to varieties that have less of this trichome type.
References
The number of references was jumping from numbered [18] in Introduction section to [41] – [47] in Materials and Methods then jumped back to [19] in discussion section. It needs to be re-numbered to make the manuscript flow well.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
The findings of this study describe a correlation between trichome type and tolerance/resistance to various abiotic and biotic factors, but the experiments performed in the manuscript seem a bit disjointed and require more justification and description to form a cohesive story. The observations seem very logical in terms of how trichomes would confer beneficial phenotypes however there is no mention of whether there are any known genes present in the selected cultivars/accessions which may influence observations. For example, could resistance genes present in 3186M and absent in JR influence the response to B. cinerea or whitefly?
Since findings suggest that increased trichome density can provide multiple benefits, it would be good to discuss why this hasn’t already occurred with evolution, or why it has not been incorporated via selective breeding. Are there associated yield penalties with increased trichome density? Or is this simply unknown?
Little information on the materials used is provided (LA3186 hairy cultivar, the wo mutant LA3186 hairless cultivar and the ln mutant LA3-071 hairy cultivar). Are these near isogenic lines? What are wo and ln? Do they differ in genes other than those involved in trichome development? Are they mutants of Jiaren?
It is not clear why SOD, POD and chlorophyll content were measured and what they have to do with botrytis and whitefly infection.
It would be good to include overall conclusions at the end of the discussion.
Minor comments
Line 17: omit “at all times”
Line 26: change “The relation between the different” to “The relationship between the different”
Line 36: change “also build a natural barrier against” to “also act as a physical barrier against”
Line 41: omit “In fact,”
Line 46: should “sugar” be “sugars” ?
Line 60: what is meant by “internal balance”? This is a bit vague
Line 63, 65: what is meant by “resistance”?
Line 69: you have not explained what “wo mutant” is
Line 80: what was the day length plants were grown under?
Line 84: this section is confusing. Is the second paragraph describing what was done in the first paragraph? If so, there is a bit of repetition.
Line 85: could use another descriptor like healthy or uniformly developed seedlings rather than “well-growed”
Line 94: insert “leaf” before “blades”. By “materials”, do you mean different tomato cultivars?
Line 103: change “well-growed”
Line 105: by triplicate, do you mean biological replicates?
Line 110: change “Samples was boiled” to “Samples were boiled”
Line 117: how long was the “certain period” when plants were not given any water
Line 126: change first sentence to “Botrytis cinerea was inoculated into liquid media and shaken at 25°C for approximately 1 week [43], after which B. Cinerea inoculum”
Line 141: change “well-growed”
Line 147: I think a supplementary table would help to summarise the trichome types of each cultivar as this is a bit difficult to follow currently – ie each cultivar, type (I, II etc), glandular, nonglandular, long/short, density (hig/low, per unit area)
Line 148: define “TGRC”
Line 170: change “The height of this type of trichomes” to “The height of this type of trichome”
Line 232: the sentence “The chloroplast of 3186M is mostly round” looks out of place here, it might be better moving after the following sentence. A sentence at the beginning of this section would also be good outlining why you are interested in chloroplast morphology
Line 244: change “Tomato at the” to “Tomato plants at the”
Line 245: remove brackets from reference to Figure 6A and other instances where you say “shown in” before
Line 251: what is meant by “tomato film”?
Line 348: what do you mean by “internal growth balance”?
Line 349: what do you mean by “resistance of tomato trichomes”?
Line 359: it is not clear what “Compared to some varieties” is referring to
Line 368: “I and II” roman numerals throughout appear to be a different font
Line 369: “Foolad and Lin (2001)” is a different format to the [1] used throughout
Lines 370-76: this description would be useful in the introduction
Lines 434-436: “The pathogen infection process is divided into four processes: exposure, invasion, lurking, and pathogenesis.” Is there a reference for this? Or have you defined the processes? I am not sure about the use of Lurking as a descriptor.
Figures 1-5: Captions do not mention what panels A-D show.
Figure 5: What are the four materials? Trichome density is not mentioned and each scale is different. They should be the same magnification if you want to show comparisons.
Figures 6-8: Font size is tiny and barely legible.
Figure 6: captialise first letter of axis titles
Tables 1 and 2: It appears captions have been mixed up.
Tables: spaces either side of “±” symbols will make tables more legible
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
