How Can Weedy Rice Stand against Abiotic Stresses? A Review
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Thanks for addressing some of my earlier suggestions and concerns, and your willingness to do a more extensive references review. It does take a lot of time and effort to put this review together and make it better, I really appreciate you time, and I think future readers will appreciate it too.
I believe this review will contribute to the rice production communities globally, especially to those are in concerns of weedy rice. It definitely will help rice producers and researchers better equipped with knowledge regarding weedy rice's weediness, morphologically and physiologically, especially those related to climate changes, in a "one stop shop" manner.
I would suggest to do a minor editing on English once more to further improve readability. Please see the attached file for a few minor edits to start.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The collection of findings and information related to weedy rice may well be of interest to weedy rice research community. It nevertheless still needs some major overhaul in order to establish sufficient interest for publication.
- The argumentation and correlation between the weedy rice characteristics (described in Sections 2 and 3) and the weed’s ability in adapting abiotic stresses is less convincing. For instance, how the shattering, hull colour, red pericarp and early flowering traits could be advantageous for weedy rice in adapting certain particular abiotic stresses, and what those abiotic stresses are not clearly explained, making the argumentation hard to follow. Overall, those weedy rice traits are considered to be advantageous for survival through seed dispersal, dormancy, etc strategies. They could be adaptive and competitive in rice field or modern rice agricultural setting but the clearer links between the “phenotypic traits” and “abiotic stresses” would need to be established, without which would jeopardize the quality of arguments that “weedy rice possesses traits against abiotic stresses”.
- The only section answering the question posed in the title “How can weedy rice stand against abiotic stresses?” is the Section 4. Some of the content is however less convincing mainly due to lack of high quality literature. Some citations used are from low quality journals, which should be avoided. To improve the manuscript, more recent discoveries (especially those of drought, cold and submergence tolerant weedy rice, on top of what have been included in the present draft) from reliable researches shall be cited and discussed.
- The statements “weedy rice is a wild rice” (see the lines 47-50) and “most common weedy rice have a red pericarp” (line 51) are either wrong or doubtfully correct. The weed has been dubbed “red rice” in the US and some other countries but many of the weedy rice ecotypes in other parts of the world possess white pericarp. There are also unclear statements, confusing text and grammatical errors found in this manuscript which have obscured the accurate expression in scientific writing.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
