A Review on the Composition and Biosynthesis of Alkaloids and on the Taxonomy, Domestication, and Cultivation of Medicinal Fritillaria Species

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript “Review on the composition and biosynthesis of alkaloids, taxonomy, domestication and cultivation of medicinal species of Fritillaria” is clear, relevant to the field and presented in a well-structured manner. This work describes the composition and biosynthesis of alkaloids from Fritillaria species. Furthermore, the manuscript describes and compares the alkaloids in Fritillaria from different sources and their biosynthetic pathways. The taxonomy of Fritillaria species is included as classical taxonomy and based on molecular decoding with a phylogenetic analysis. Interestingly, the geographic environment, especially the altitude where the Fritillaria species are grown, have a major influence on phytochemical components. Finally, recommendations are made to study and expand Fritillaria species that may be important for medicinal treatments.

 

In order to improve the manuscript some details are commented:

 

 

Line 20 “Fritillaria species growing at 2700–4000 m are the sources of Chuan Beimu with low 20 biomass...” it is not clear what do you mean by Chuan Beimu, it could be possible to add “extract namely Chuan Beimu (Chinese Pharmacopoeia, 2020 Edition),”   or     “… source of traditional Chinese prescriptions…”

 Line 232,295 species must be in italic

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 1 Comments

We would like to thank the editors and reviewers for all the thoughtful comments and suggestions. In this resubmission, we revised the text, two regular figures (Figure 1 and 5), and references based on the comments/suggestions. Hopefully the reviewers and editors will find this manuscript is more refined. We placed our response after each comment of Reviewer 1 for easy reference. Each of our responses starts in a new paragraph after “Re:”

 

Point 1: Line 20 “Fritillaria species growing at 2700–4000 m are the sources of Chuan Beimu with low 20 biomass...” it is not clear what do you mean by Chuan Beimu, it could be possible to add “extract namely Chuan Beimu (Chinese Pharmacopoeia, 2020 Edition),”   or     “… source of traditional Chinese prescriptions…”

 

Re: Thanks for your insightful comment! We have revised this sentence in Abstract as follows:

Fritillaria species growing at 2700–4000 m are the sources of extract namely Chuan Beimu (the Pharmacopoeia of the People’s Republic of China, 2020 Edition) with low biomass, and mainly contain more 5α-cevanine isosteroidal alkaloids with cis-configuration.

 

Point 2: Line 232,295 species must be in italic

Re: Thanks for pointing this out! We thoroughly examined and revised the plant names, which must be italicized, throughout the text.

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript entitled "A review on composition and biosynthesis of alkaloids, taxonomy, domestication, and cultivation of medicinal Fritillaria species" gathered very useful information on the genus alkaloids and discussed in details especially in biosynthesis pathways and chemotaxonomy.

I can recommend the manuscript for further publication procedure after addressing following minor revision requests:

 

Fig 1: please draw the structures using software such as ChemDraw

L77: please check the whole text language and revise the misspellings, grammatical errors, e.g. "will also been compared"; L78: "will be categorize"

L227,...: please check the plants' names which must be italic

- in Fig 5, may you provide a better resolution for section (B), not clear 

 - there is no conclusion, I would highly recommend adding this section to efficiently summarize the findings, it is very useful for readers

- some related and up-dated reports such as "

• https://doi.org/10.1186/s42269-021-00577-z" has not been cited

• - please check and style the references according to the guidelines, e.g. being italic for vol. no., etc.

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 2:

We would like to thank you for all the thoughtful comments and suggestions. The point-by-point response is uploaded as the attachment. Please see the attachment.

All the best!

Sincerely yours,

Qiang Wang

NingboTech University

Author Response File: Author Response.docx