Effects of Drought Hardening and Saline Water Irrigation on the Growth, Yield, and Quality of Tomato

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

General comments

The work contains several deficiencies and errors. My primary point concerns the design of the experiment. The lack of control combination – drought stress without watering with saline water (W2S0, W3S0, W4S0).  So, the effect of drought itself on plants is unknown.

In addition, it would be pretty important/interesting to examine what changes at the metabolic and biochemical level caused by hardening (drought) could contribute to better plants’ coping with salinity.

 Please rewrite to use correctly the terminology like e.g. stress resistance, and stress tolerance, it is not the same.

·       Line 60 – Use salt-resistant instead of salt-tolerant

·       Line 90 – Use cross-resistance instead of cross-adaptation

·        Lines 443, 455, 469 – use salinity resistance instead of salinity tolerance

·        Line 69 –  Rewrite the sentence “…… adjust the metabolism and to adopt to growth in the new environment”.

·       Lines 91-92 – Rewrite this sentence without  using  the word “adaptability”

 2.2. Experimental design

·       How many plants were in each pot?

·        Symbols for all combinations are not given. These symbols are used in the rest of the manuscript. So, the information in the legends of Fig. 1 and Fig. 2  –  ”… the meaning of CK-W4S6 treatments is explained in the section 2.2”   is misleading.

The authors say in lines 123 – 124   “From flowering to harvest tomatoes were well-irrigated … with water of three different salinity: ……….”

But lines 142-145 say “The growing period …… was divided into three stages; seedling stage (from transplanting to 50 % of plants flowering), developmental stage (from 50 % of 143 plants flowering. So, what does it mean from flowering? It is not clear when plants were watered with saline water. At the beginning of the developmental stage?

 The choice of salt concentrations used shall be justified.

Results

The abbreviation of estimated parameters are used in the text. These abbreviations should also be included in the captions

Discussion

Some parts of the discussion (lines 455-468) refer to issues not directly related to the aim of the research. The authors did not examine the mechanisms of plant responses to drought and salinity at the metabolic and biochemical levels. Antioxidant activity, hormone levels or osmotic substances were not determined. Similarly, the parameters of the root system were not determined. Therefore, this part of the discussion is somewhat speculative.

The effect of drought hardening on plant response to soil salinity was examined based on gas exchange parameters, growth and yield of fruits. So, these issues should be described in the discussion. Therefore, this part of the discussion should be rewritten

 Other comments and suggestions

I suggest checking your work with a native speaker.

 

Language should be checked by a native speaker.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper entitled “Effects of drought hardening and saline water irrigation on the growth, yield and quality of tomato” by Gao et al. studied the effects on the production of tomatoes, including its physiology, yield, water use efficiency (WUE) and fruit quality.

1- Introduction: need more clarification on the effect of drought and salinity stressors interactions on the physiological and biochemical characteristics of tomatoes.

2. Materials and methods need references; each section has no reference.

3. The discussion is poor and needs more paragraphs.

 

 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

The English quality with minor errors

Author Response

 

 

 

 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf