Macroscopic and Microscopic Phenotyping Using Diverse Yellow Rust Races Increased the Resolution of Seedling and Adult Plant Resistance in Wheat Breeding Lines

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper presents the use of macroscopic and microscopic phenotyping to evaluate yellow rust (YR) resistance in winter wheat breeding lines using three different pathogen races at seedling and adult plant stages. The text is well written, and the figure legends provide good summaries of the figures themselves. Therefore, the manuscript is publishable after some revisions. My major concern is that the phenotyping process of extracting information from images should be detailed descript in the methodology.

1. Line 18: “Microscopic phenotyping of one line.” Please replace “one line” with wheat line code in Table 1 to make it clear to readers. Check throughout the abstract to correct them, such as “Two lines” in L20 and L21.
2. Line 27-28: “It highlights the importance of using diverse races at different plant growth stages for high resolution of resistance phenotypes in breeding lines.” This conclusion is very common. I suggested focusing more on using macroscopic and microscopic phenotyping to facilitate the identification of seedling and adult plant resistance to YR (answer your hypothesis in L106-115).
3. Pay attention to punctuation and spaces throughout the manuscript.
4. Line 38: add a comma before “however”.
5. Line 77: remove the comma after “material”.
6. Line 95 and 97: wheat variety Xingzi 9104 and cultivar Alcedo: should double quotation marks be added to a variety name. Make it consistent throughout the manuscript.
7. Line 137: “200µmol” add a space between digital and unit.
8. Line 144: “18°C day” to “18°C at day”.
9. Table 1: Description of what does the “-” indicates.
10. Table 2: As standard GRRC differential sets contain 20 wheat differential lines, why were only 18 lines provided in Table 2.
11. Line178: “Airulence” to “Avirulence”.
12. Line 216-219: This sentence describes macroscopic phenotyping. Move it to part 2.3. I suggested combining this sentence with Line 191-193 and Line 209-211 in a separate paragraph and clearly describing the procedure of assessment infection type (IT) on a 0-9 scale and how to get the colony size and HR from images.
13. Line 256: change “statistical analysis” to “analysis of variance”
14. Delete Figure 3 as it is a subset from Figure 2.

Author Response

Please see attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Congratulations to the authors, amazing research. Excellent and in-depth study, proper presentation and discussion of data.

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for the very positive comments on our manuscript, and for taking the time to read it to make sure that it has the quality required for publication in Agronomy.