Advances in Mechanisms and Omics Pertaining to Fruit Cracking in Horticultural Plants

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors present a nice review of the potential causes and mechanisms of fruit cracking. It is interesting to note that the 1935 citation of Keretesz and Nebel is quite pertinent today.  As the authors state, the phenomenon of fruit cracking is complex and difficult to attribute to a definitive mechanism.  The authors also review some of the contributions of omics to this problem. 

Page 1, line 23.  Change "mechanism" to "mechanisms." 

Page 3, line 74" the mechanisms of fruit cracking in horticultural plants". Wouldn't this information also apply to agricultural production?  

Page 4, line132.  Can the type of proteins e.g. structural, etc be given, as line 133 states "enzymes" which are also proteins.

Table 2.  Reference 62 is about tomato, please check that it also pertains to apple.

Page 7, line 232.  "Proteomics . . .expresses all protein interaction..."  This may be confusing.  Perhaps reword to describes.

Page 7, line 243 and 245.  Metabonomics and metabolomics are often used interchangeably.  However, metabolomics is the identification and quantification of the entire metabolic profile in a biological system.  Whereas, metabonomics is the quantitative measurement of a metabolic response of a biological system to a stimulant, etc.  

Figure 2.  Suggested reword:  Decomposition of pectin.  Cell wall disassembly.

General comment:  Please define abbreviations when first used. 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for your careful and constructive comments. We have revised them one by one according to your constructive opinions. Please see the attachment for specific reponse.

We spared no effort to improve the manuscript and made revisions in the manuscript. We appreciate for your warm work earnestly, and hope the revisions will meet with approval.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper reviews the mechanisms underlying fruit cracking from cutin and cell wall by investigating gene families related to these categories.

 Line 36. Suggest changing the word ‘special’ for ‘particular’

Line 59. Add ‘due to’ between the words or and rain  -or due to the rain near harvest

Line 87. Reword ‘genetically affected on the offspring’ do you mean this is conferred on the offspring by the parents?

Line 89 Reword as unclear what’s meant by ‘early seedless type’ is this a stage or type of variety?

Line 99 add the between ‘to’ and ‘fruit’ and make surface plural – to the fruit surfaces

Line 114 remove ‘for’ between reaching and 57.00%

Line 145 replace ‘whole’ with full – full sibling population

Line 169 remove the word ‘kind of ’ – is an enzyme with….

Line 181 should this sentence be here?

Line 190  are expansins the protein or the gene family-  need to re-word this sentence.

Line 191 should read ‘expansins are a large gene family, which are the main factors regulating cell wall stress relaxation’

Line 206 full stop after cells and remove the words ‘on an overall level’

Line 210 add ‘the’ before Transcriptome to read ‘The transcriptome can be used…’

Line 218 add the word ‘involved’ before ‘in fruit’

Line 278 words missing? The name of the population and the word ‘and’  should read (RIL) population ‘name’ and determined the QTL  

Line 287 cover should be plural – covers

 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for your careful and constructive comments. We have revised them one by one according to your constructive opinions. Please see the attachment for specific reponse.

We spared no effort to improve the manuscript and made revisions in the manuscript. We appreciate for your warm work earnestly, and hope the revisions will meet with approval.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

See attached file.

Comments for author File: Comments.docx

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for your careful and constructive comments. We have revised them one by one according to your constructive opinions. Please see the attachment for specific reponse.

We spared no effort to improve the manuscript and made revisions in the manuscript. We appreciate for your warm work earnestly, and hope the revisions will meet with approval.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

Good job on the review. It just needs minor corrections. 

Line 21-22: Not sure finding QTL will reduce fruit cracking. It will aid the understanding of the mechanism but will not reduce cracking directly.

Line 35: average years instead of general years.

Line 37: Citation.

Line 56: remove the period at the end of the line and add a comma.

Line 58: add comma before etc.

Line 59: Or when rain happens near harvest.

Line 61: Add comma after genetic.

Table 1: add comma after deep side cracking.

Table 1: Capitalize the first letter of each cell

Table 1: Remove excessive non-necessary prepositions (such as “the”, “an”)

Line 70: Add comma after information. Please check the whole manuscript for this: if you are listing 3 or more examples, the last example of the list should be preceded by  “, and”. This is called “oxford comma” – please follow this grammatic rule.

Line 99: water on the fruit surface. Remove “attached”. Add a space before [47].

Line 104: occurs because aril swelling. Please do not use “do to the fact that”.

Line 105: Add a space before [31, 48]. Please check the whole manuscript for the same mistake.

Line 109-110: …carbohydrates, reducing the plants osmotic potential and allowing them…

Line 114: 57%

Line 115: Remove ”the”.

Line 128: Initiate a new sentence after [56-58].

Line 144-145: If these sentences belong to the same study, please make just one sentence.

Line 181: Remove this sentence.

Line 185-186: This sentence is weird – it does not have a meaning.

Line 190: Remove word “which”.

Table 2: The column “gene function” is difficult to understand. It looks misalign and the lack of capital letters makes things much more confused.

Table 2: The species column needs capital letter as well.

Line 206: What is “overall level”? Please change.

Line 228: Add space before “In addition”. Check the whole manuscript for this type of mistake.

Line 300: peels, Satoshi…

Line 307: Capital letter for the apple cultivars. Please check the whole manuscript for this.

Line 311: Calcium spray increases.

Line 313: There is something weird with this sentence. It looks that something is missing between the CaCl2+ and ABA pieces of the formula.

Line 317: Metabolomics.

Line 320-322: Start the sentence with “Other studies..”

Line 330: …had higher ABA…

Line 331: What is “anti-cracking”?

Conclusions: The conclusions do not reflect well the manuscript. It needs to be re-worked. The future perspectives is alright.  

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for your careful and constructive comments. We have revised them one by one according to your constructive opinions. Please see the attachment for specific reponse.

We spared no effort to improve the manuscript and made revisions in the manuscript. We appreciate for your warm work earnestly, and hope the revisions will meet with approval.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

The manuscript has been substantially improved. More comments have been attached separately.

Comments for author File: Comments.docx

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your constructive comments. Based on your suggestions, we have made corresponding modifications. Revised portions are marked in red in the paper. Please see attached for specific responses.

We spared no effort to improve the manuscript and appreciate for your careful suggestions, and hope the revisions will meet with approval.

Yours sincerely,

Yuying Wang

Author Response File: Author Response.docx