Effects of Processing on Chemical Composition of Extracts from Sour Cherry Fruits, a Neglected Functional Food

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

In this study, 36 samples of different harvesting time and process were collected and was anlayzed by CIEL*a*b*, HPLC-DAD and DI-ESI-MS analysis. Further, antioxidant activity was evaluted. Lots of work has been done. However, there are some mistakes and suggestions to the authors.

1.      The tables and figures were poor and needed to further improved. The format of the table is very strange, some of them have no header. The vertical axis of figures is missing.

2.      The wavelength of figure 2 was needed to confirmed, which was inconsistent in figure and caption.

3.      Figure 4 and MS chromatographs of other peaks(need to provide) could be moved to the Supplementary materials.

4.      The peaks (labeled by *) needed to be further analyzed to obtain the  name of compound(which achieve large peak areas).

Author Response

Replies (in red) to the Reviewer’s Comments

 

We would like to thank the reviewers for their work, which allowed us to improve greatly the quality and the presentation of our manuscript.

 

Reviewer 1.       In this study, 36 samples of different harvesting time and process were collected and was anlayzed by CIEL*a*b*, HPLC-DAD and DI-ESI-MS analysis. Further, antioxidant activity was evaluted. Lots of work has been done. However, there are some mistakes and suggestions to the authors.

1. The tables and figures were poor and needed to further improved. The format of the table is very strange, some of them have no header. The vertical axis of figures is missing.
2. The wavelength of figure 2 was needed to confirmed, which was inconsistent in figure and caption.

The Tables and the Figures were improved and modified in agreement with the reviewer’s suggest.

 

3. Figure 4 and MS chromatographs of other peaks(need to provide) could be moved to the Supplementary materials.
4. The peaks (labeled by *) needed to be further analyzed to obtain the name of compound(which achieve large peak areas).

Part of the reported results was moved in Supplementary material. Some information about the peaks (labeled by *) were inserted in the manuscript (line 304-306) and a new reference was cited. (Wojdyło, A., Nowicka, P., Laskowski, P., & Oszmianski, J. Evaluation of sour cherry (Prunus cerasus L.) fruits for their polyphenol content, antioxidant properties, and nutritional components. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 2014, 62(51), 12332-12345).

 

 

Reviewer 2.       It is a methodologically sound manuscript, which presents data on the content of anthocyanins and flavonols in a local Italian variety of sour cherries. Novelty and originality of the manuscript are limited. However, its findings could find practical application in the processing of those local sour cherries into food products. There are some serious issues that should be addressed by the authors:

1. The title of the manuscript is misleading and does not represent well the essence of the study. In its current form, it resembles more title of a review paper. It should be revised to be more specific.

The title was modified accordingly.

2. Abstract should contain more qualitative data, i.e. the most important results expressed with numbers.

Some data were added in the abstract as suggested by the reviewer.

3. The denotation of the samples is very confusing for the reader. For example, it is very difficult to follow results in Table 1.

The denotation of samples was better explained in the text, with the aim to facilitate the comprehension of data reported in the Tables.

4. Line 142-143: Were purified methanol extracts dried or freeze-dried? Author should specify that.

It was specified

5. Figure 2, lower panel: Is it 280 nm or 520 nm?

It was corrected.

6. Authors should show which values are significantly different in Table 2 and Table 4 and standard deviations should be presented.

Standard deviations were reported as maxima values of relative standard deviation for all the reported data.

7. What is the purpose of figure 1 and what information does it show? It is very difficult for the reader to compare between different panels of the figure.

Figure 1 shows the reflectance of the samples (here considered as mean values for each considered cluster) in the range 400-700 nm, that is the color appearance of a sample, expressed in a physical mode as wavelength absorbed rather than reflected by a matrix. This concept was inserted in the discussion of Figure 1. The meaning of the reported reflectance curves was also deepened in the discussion, in lines 268-278.

8. From materials and methods and from table 4 it is not clear how results for DPPH scavenging activity were expressed. Is it per gram fresh weight? Authors should specify that.

It was specified.

9. Figure 5 should contain units of DPPH scavenging activity.

It was corrected.

10. In general, the quality/formatting (text size and formatting, presence/absence of titles, gridlines and so on) of all excel figures must be improved.

It was implemented.

11. English language and quality of presentation must be improved.

All the manuscript was deeply revised in terms of English language and quality of presentation.

 

Reviewer 3.       your manuscript ‘Sour Cherry: an underutilized high valuable functional food’ is not acceptable in its present form. The subject matter may be of possible interest to the food science community, but the manuscript is in such bad condition that I have spent considerable time with it to improve the imprecise writing and other blemishes. However, since reviewers are not in a position to rewrite a manuscript for authors, I recommend the manuscript is sent for accurate revision by a specialized proofreading service (providing a certificate).

As the content of the manuscript, the authors are encouraged to revise the literature of the topic (some have been cited inside the manuscript, as comments) and to rewrite part of the Introduction and Discussion, in a more ‘scientific’ style, without exaggerating.

As the journal is ‘Antioxidants’ it is needed to provide at least two different antioxidant assays (as also other renowned journals require), not only the DPPH assay, which has a limited scientific value (at biological level) and also the authors did not apply the original assay of Brand-Williams and co-workers.

Statistics is not reported in Tables and Figures. 

Some marked-up pages are attached to point out what is wrong or imprecise with it. 

Replies (in red) to the Comments on page 1-2

1. really it is a well-known fruit species, it is not so spread as the sweet cherry. Moreover, you cannot say: 'sour cherry is a fruit' rather is a fruit species (it is a tree, sour cherries are fruit)
2. it is not a berry, it is a drupe. Pls revise accordingly
3. not all sour cherries are intense reddish, some are dark, some are light. pls change following bibliographic references:

Webster and Looney, Cherries: Crop Physiology, Production and Uses (Cabi), 1995 , ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0851989365

Blando and Oomah 2019   here already cited

4. be more precise, what are you referring to?
5. change to 'this fruit' (you have not mantion yet the health valu of the fruit, pls, introduce this feature first)
6. pls cite which are
7. and cite which are

The introduction was deeply revised according to all the reviewer’s suggestions.

 

8. not true, pls see other paper which report cyanidin-3 rutinoside, as in sweet cherry,

Chaovanalikit, A., & Wrolstad, R. E. (2004). Anthocyanin and polyphenolic composition

of fresh and processed cherries. Journal of Food Science, 69(1), FCT73

https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2621.2004.tb17859.x

 

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfca.2011.03.004

 

or other Prunus species

- Blando, F., Albano, C., Liu, Y., Nicoletti, I., Corradini, D., Tommasi, N., et al. (2016).

Polyphenolic composition and antioxidant activity of the underutilized Prunus mahaleb

 

9. this is a too generall sentence: pls see the huge bibliography related to cyanidin derivatives bioactivitiy.
10. For your reference, see among the others:

https://doi.org/10.1111/1750-3841.13398

https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms19010169

and references therein

The introduction was revised according to the reviewer’s suggestionss.

 

11. the present paper was performed with the aim to deepen the knowledge of the poly-81 phenolic profile and, at the same time, enhance a native species of the Lazio region, eval-82 uating the effect of some simple technological procedures on the bioactive component.

pls re-formulate in a correct English.

The sentence was re-formulate as suggested by the reviewer.

 

Reply to the comments on page 3,4:

1. specify the cultivar
2. time of harvest? Stage of ripening?
3. How many fruits were harvested and considered for extraction?
4. this part doesn't belong to M&M, rather to Introduction or Discussion
5. for how long?
6. not sampls, but treatments, samples were 36 x 3 (triplicates samples) = 108
7. why mg? Has the extract been lyophylized? Pls clarify
8. was (this is a general procedure, for all the extracts you obtained)
9. Ten
10. An aliquot (2.5 mL) was
11. .. (what?)
12. this statistical parameters is not shown in Tables and Figures.

The part “Material and methods was modified in order to answer to all the reviewer’s requests.

13. Only one antioxidant assay is not enough to assess the antioxidant capacity of an extract. Moreover, you do not follow the original test as for Brand-Williams, and the are several drawback using this test (see J. Agric. Food Chem. 2005, 53, 4290-4302, Prior et al.)

Some selected samples coming from the first harvest (2019) were subjected to ABTS, CUPRAC and FRAP assays, which confirmed the trend shown by the results obtained with the DPPH method. The same samples were also tested on enzymes Acetylcholinesterase, Butirylcholinesterase, α-amilase and α-glucosidase, but they did not exert activities. For these reasons, but also because the harvest 2020 and 2021 showed a lower content of polyphenolic compounds we decided not to carry on these experiments.

The results relative to the analyzed samples of vintage 2019 are now reported in a Section “Supplementary Material”, together with the used Materials and Methods and a sentence was inserted in the Results and Discussion section, in lines 391-398

 

Reply to the Comments on page 5-12:

1. This is a repetition of M&M
2. Figures and Tables captions must be self-explanatory. Pls re-write the table caption accordingly.
3. it is lower in a statistically significant meaning?
4. again, figure caption needs more details
5. mg?
6. Figure caption more detailed: nor 'average trends...' but 'Content of...'
7. what are these numbers for?
8. Not good English!
9. you cannot compare DPPH antiradical activity with antioxidant activity assessed by ORAC
10. Pls, revise all the references for the journal's name, as it is not written correctly (lower case starting letter).

The manuscript was deeply revised in agreement with the reviewer’s suggestions.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

It is a methodologically sound manuscript, which presents data on the content of anthocyanins and flavonols in a local Italian variety of sour cherries. Novelty and originality of the manuscript are limited. However, its findings could find practical application in the processing of those local sour cherries into food products. There are some serious issues that should be addressed by the authors:

1The title of the manuscript is misleading and does not represent well the essence of the study. In its current form, it resembles more title of a review paper. It should be revised to be more specific.

2Abstract should contain more qualitative data, i.e. the most important results expressed with numbers.

3The denotation of the samples is very confusing for the reader. For example, it is very difficult to follow results in Table 1.

4Line 142-143: Were purified methanol extracts dried or freeze-dried? Author should specify that.

5 Figure 2, lower panel: Is it 280 nm or 520 nm?

6Authors should show which values are significantly different in Table 2 and Table 4 and standard deviations should be presented.

7What is the purpose of figure 1 and what information does it show? It is very difficult for the reader to compare between different panels of the figure.

8 From materials and methods and from table 4 it is not clear how results for DPPH scavenging activity were expressed. Is it per gram fresh weight? Authors should specify that.

9Figure 5 should contain units of DPPH scavenging activity.

1In general, the quality/formatting (text size and formatting, presence/absence of titles, gridlines and so on) of all excel figures must be improved.

1 English language and quality of presentation must be improved.

Author Response

Replies (in red) to the Reviewer’s Comments

 

We would like to thank the reviewers for their work, which allowed us to improve greatly the quality and the presentation of our manuscript.

 

Reviewer 1.       In this study, 36 samples of different harvesting time and process were collected and was anlayzed by CIEL*a*b*, HPLC-DAD and DI-ESI-MS analysis. Further, antioxidant activity was evaluted. Lots of work has been done. However, there are some mistakes and suggestions to the authors.

1. The tables and figures were poor and needed to further improved. The format of the table is very strange, some of them have no header. The vertical axis of figures is missing.
2. The wavelength of figure 2 was needed to confirmed, which was inconsistent in figure and caption.

The Tables and the Figures were improved and modified in agreement with the reviewer’s suggest.

 

3. Figure 4 and MS chromatographs of other peaks(need to provide) could be moved to the Supplementary materials.
4. The peaks (labeled by *) needed to be further analyzed to obtain the name of compound(which achieve large peak areas).

Part of the reported results was moved in Supplementary material. Some information about the peaks (labeled by *) were inserted in the manuscript (line 304-306) and a new reference was cited. (Wojdyło, A., Nowicka, P., Laskowski, P., & Oszmianski, J. Evaluation of sour cherry (Prunus cerasus L.) fruits for their polyphenol content, antioxidant properties, and nutritional components. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 2014, 62(51), 12332-12345).

 

 

Reviewer 2.       It is a methodologically sound manuscript, which presents data on the content of anthocyanins and flavonols in a local Italian variety of sour cherries. Novelty and originality of the manuscript are limited. However, its findings could find practical application in the processing of those local sour cherries into food products. There are some serious issues that should be addressed by the authors:

1. The title of the manuscript is misleading and does not represent well the essence of the study. In its current form, it resembles more title of a review paper. It should be revised to be more specific.

The title was modified accordingly.

2. Abstract should contain more qualitative data, i.e. the most important results expressed with numbers.

Some data were added in the abstract as suggested by the reviewer.

3. The denotation of the samples is very confusing for the reader. For example, it is very difficult to follow results in Table 1.

The denotation of samples was better explained in the text, with the aim to facilitate the comprehension of data reported in the Tables.

4. Line 142-143: Were purified methanol extracts dried or freeze-dried? Author should specify that.

It was specified

5. Figure 2, lower panel: Is it 280 nm or 520 nm?

It was corrected.

6. Authors should show which values are significantly different in Table 2 and Table 4 and standard deviations should be presented.

Standard deviations were reported as maxima values of relative standard deviation for all the reported data.

7. What is the purpose of figure 1 and what information does it show? It is very difficult for the reader to compare between different panels of the figure.

Figure 1 shows the reflectance of the samples (here considered as mean values for each considered cluster) in the range 400-700 nm, that is the color appearance of a sample, expressed in a physical mode as wavelength absorbed rather than reflected by a matrix. This concept was inserted in the discussion of Figure 1. The meaning of the reported reflectance curves was also deepened in the discussion, in lines 268-278.

8. From materials and methods and from table 4 it is not clear how results for DPPH scavenging activity were expressed. Is it per gram fresh weight? Authors should specify that.

It was specified.

9. Figure 5 should contain units of DPPH scavenging activity.

It was corrected.

10. In general, the quality/formatting (text size and formatting, presence/absence of titles, gridlines and so on) of all excel figures must be improved.

It was implemented.

11. English language and quality of presentation must be improved.

All the manuscript was deeply revised in terms of English language and quality of presentation.

 

Reviewer 3.       your manuscript ‘Sour Cherry: an underutilized high valuable functional food’ is not acceptable in its present form. The subject matter may be of possible interest to the food science community, but the manuscript is in such bad condition that I have spent considerable time with it to improve the imprecise writing and other blemishes. However, since reviewers are not in a position to rewrite a manuscript for authors, I recommend the manuscript is sent for accurate revision by a specialized proofreading service (providing a certificate).

As the content of the manuscript, the authors are encouraged to revise the literature of the topic (some have been cited inside the manuscript, as comments) and to rewrite part of the Introduction and Discussion, in a more ‘scientific’ style, without exaggerating.

As the journal is ‘Antioxidants’ it is needed to provide at least two different antioxidant assays (as also other renowned journals require), not only the DPPH assay, which has a limited scientific value (at biological level) and also the authors did not apply the original assay of Brand-Williams and co-workers.

Statistics is not reported in Tables and Figures. 

Some marked-up pages are attached to point out what is wrong or imprecise with it. 

Replies (in red) to the Comments on page 1-2

1. really it is a well-known fruit species, it is not so spread as the sweet cherry. Moreover, you cannot say: 'sour cherry is a fruit' rather is a fruit species (it is a tree, sour cherries are fruit)
2. it is not a berry, it is a drupe. Pls revise accordingly
3. not all sour cherries are intense reddish, some are dark, some are light. pls change following bibliographic references:

Webster and Looney, Cherries: Crop Physiology, Production and Uses (Cabi), 1995 , ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0851989365

Blando and Oomah 2019   here already cited

4. be more precise, what are you referring to?
5. change to 'this fruit' (you have not mantion yet the health valu of the fruit, pls, introduce this feature first)
6. pls cite which are
7. and cite which are

The introduction was deeply revised according to all the reviewer’s suggestions.

 

8. not true, pls see other paper which report cyanidin-3 rutinoside, as in sweet cherry,

Chaovanalikit, A., & Wrolstad, R. E. (2004). Anthocyanin and polyphenolic composition

of fresh and processed cherries. Journal of Food Science, 69(1), FCT73

https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2621.2004.tb17859.x

 

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfca.2011.03.004

 

or other Prunus species

- Blando, F., Albano, C., Liu, Y., Nicoletti, I., Corradini, D., Tommasi, N., et al. (2016).

Polyphenolic composition and antioxidant activity of the underutilized Prunus mahaleb

 

9. this is a too generall sentence: pls see the huge bibliography related to cyanidin derivatives bioactivitiy.
10. For your reference, see among the others:

https://doi.org/10.1111/1750-3841.13398

https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms19010169

and references therein

The introduction was revised according to the reviewer’s suggestionss.

 

11. the present paper was performed with the aim to deepen the knowledge of the poly-81 phenolic profile and, at the same time, enhance a native species of the Lazio region, eval-82 uating the effect of some simple technological procedures on the bioactive component.

pls re-formulate in a correct English.

The sentence was re-formulate as suggested by the reviewer.

 

Reply to the comments on page 3,4:

1. specify the cultivar
2. time of harvest? Stage of ripening?
3. How many fruits were harvested and considered for extraction?
4. this part doesn't belong to M&M, rather to Introduction or Discussion
5. for how long?
6. not sampls, but treatments, samples were 36 x 3 (triplicates samples) = 108
7. why mg? Has the extract been lyophylized? Pls clarify
8. was (this is a general procedure, for all the extracts you obtained)
9. Ten
10. An aliquot (2.5 mL) was
11. .. (what?)
12. this statistical parameters is not shown in Tables and Figures.

The part “Material and methods was modified in order to answer to all the reviewer’s requests.

13. Only one antioxidant assay is not enough to assess the antioxidant capacity of an extract. Moreover, you do not follow the original test as for Brand-Williams, and the are several drawback using this test (see J. Agric. Food Chem. 2005, 53, 4290-4302, Prior et al.)

Some selected samples coming from the first harvest (2019) were subjected to ABTS, CUPRAC and FRAP assays, which confirmed the trend shown by the results obtained with the DPPH method. The same samples were also tested on enzymes Acetylcholinesterase, Butirylcholinesterase, α-amilase and α-glucosidase, but they did not exert activities. For these reasons, but also because the harvest 2020 and 2021 showed a lower content of polyphenolic compounds we decided not to carry on these experiments.

The results relative to the analyzed samples of vintage 2019 are now reported in a Section “Supplementary Material”, together with the used Materials and Methods and a sentence was inserted in the Results and Discussion section, in lines 391-398

 

Reply to the Comments on page 5-12:

1. This is a repetition of M&M
2. Figures and Tables captions must be self-explanatory. Pls re-write the table caption accordingly.
3. it is lower in a statistically significant meaning?
4. again, figure caption needs more details
5. mg?
6. Figure caption more detailed: nor 'average trends...' but 'Content of...'
7. what are these numbers for?
8. Not good English!
9. you cannot compare DPPH antiradical activity with antioxidant activity assessed by ORAC
10. Pls, revise all the references for the journal's name, as it is not written correctly (lower case starting letter).

The manuscript was deeply revised in agreement with the reviewer’s suggestions.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Authors,

your manuscript ‘Sour Cherry: an underutilized high valuable functional food’ is not acceptable in its present form. The subject matter may be of possible interest to the food science community, but the manuscript is in such bad condition that I have spent considerable time with it to improve the imprecise writing and other blemishes. However, since reviewers are not in a position to rewrite a manuscript for authors, I recommend the manuscript is sent for accurate revision by a specialized proofreading service (providing a  certificate).

As the content of the manuscript, the authors are encouraged to revise the literature of the topic (some have been cited inside the manuscript, as comments) and to rewrite part of the Introduction and Discussion, in a more ‘scientific’ style, without exaggerating.

As the journal is ‘Antioxidants’ it is needed to provide at least two different antioxidant assays (as also other renowned journals require), not only the DPPH assay, which has a limited scientific value (at biological level) and also the authors did not apply the original assay of Brand-Williams and co-workers.

Statistics is not reported in Tables and Figures.

 

Some marked-up pages are attached to point out what is wrong or imprecise with it. 

Author Response

Replies (in red) to the Reviewer’s Comments

 

We would like to thank the reviewers for their work, which allowed us to improve greatly the quality and the presentation of our manuscript.

 

Reviewer 1.       In this study, 36 samples of different harvesting time and process were collected and was anlayzed by CIEL*a*b*, HPLC-DAD and DI-ESI-MS analysis. Further, antioxidant activity was evaluted. Lots of work has been done. However, there are some mistakes and suggestions to the authors.

1. The tables and figures were poor and needed to further improved. The format of the table is very strange, some of them have no header. The vertical axis of figures is missing.
2. The wavelength of figure 2 was needed to confirmed, which was inconsistent in figure and caption.

The Tables and the Figures were improved and modified in agreement with the reviewer’s suggest.

 

3. Figure 4 and MS chromatographs of other peaks(need to provide) could be moved to the Supplementary materials.
4. The peaks (labeled by *) needed to be further analyzed to obtain the name of compound(which achieve large peak areas).

Part of the reported results was moved in Supplementary material. Some information about the peaks (labeled by *) were inserted in the manuscript (line 304-306) and a new reference was cited. (Wojdyło, A., Nowicka, P., Laskowski, P., & Oszmianski, J. Evaluation of sour cherry (Prunus cerasus L.) fruits for their polyphenol content, antioxidant properties, and nutritional components. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 2014, 62(51), 12332-12345).

 

 

Reviewer 2.       It is a methodologically sound manuscript, which presents data on the content of anthocyanins and flavonols in a local Italian variety of sour cherries. Novelty and originality of the manuscript are limited. However, its findings could find practical application in the processing of those local sour cherries into food products. There are some serious issues that should be addressed by the authors:

1. The title of the manuscript is misleading and does not represent well the essence of the study. In its current form, it resembles more title of a review paper. It should be revised to be more specific.

The title was modified accordingly.

2. Abstract should contain more qualitative data, i.e. the most important results expressed with numbers.

Some data were added in the abstract as suggested by the reviewer.

3. The denotation of the samples is very confusing for the reader. For example, it is very difficult to follow results in Table 1.

The denotation of samples was better explained in the text, with the aim to facilitate the comprehension of data reported in the Tables.

4. Line 142-143: Were purified methanol extracts dried or freeze-dried? Author should specify that.

It was specified

5. Figure 2, lower panel: Is it 280 nm or 520 nm?

It was corrected.

6. Authors should show which values are significantly different in Table 2 and Table 4 and standard deviations should be presented.

Standard deviations were reported as maxima values of relative standard deviation for all the reported data.

7. What is the purpose of figure 1 and what information does it show? It is very difficult for the reader to compare between different panels of the figure.

Figure 1 shows the reflectance of the samples (here considered as mean values for each considered cluster) in the range 400-700 nm, that is the color appearance of a sample, expressed in a physical mode as wavelength absorbed rather than reflected by a matrix. This concept was inserted in the discussion of Figure 1. The meaning of the reported reflectance curves was also deepened in the discussion, in lines 268-278.

8. From materials and methods and from table 4 it is not clear how results for DPPH scavenging activity were expressed. Is it per gram fresh weight? Authors should specify that.

It was specified.

9. Figure 5 should contain units of DPPH scavenging activity.

It was corrected.

10. In general, the quality/formatting (text size and formatting, presence/absence of titles, gridlines and so on) of all excel figures must be improved.

It was implemented.

11. English language and quality of presentation must be improved.

All the manuscript was deeply revised in terms of English language and quality of presentation.

 

Reviewer 3.       your manuscript ‘Sour Cherry: an underutilized high valuable functional food’ is not acceptable in its present form. The subject matter may be of possible interest to the food science community, but the manuscript is in such bad condition that I have spent considerable time with it to improve the imprecise writing and other blemishes. However, since reviewers are not in a position to rewrite a manuscript for authors, I recommend the manuscript is sent for accurate revision by a specialized proofreading service (providing a certificate).

As the content of the manuscript, the authors are encouraged to revise the literature of the topic (some have been cited inside the manuscript, as comments) and to rewrite part of the Introduction and Discussion, in a more ‘scientific’ style, without exaggerating.

As the journal is ‘Antioxidants’ it is needed to provide at least two different antioxidant assays (as also other renowned journals require), not only the DPPH assay, which has a limited scientific value (at biological level) and also the authors did not apply the original assay of Brand-Williams and co-workers.

Statistics is not reported in Tables and Figures. 

Some marked-up pages are attached to point out what is wrong or imprecise with it. 

Replies (in red) to the Comments on page 1-2

1. really it is a well-known fruit species, it is not so spread as the sweet cherry. Moreover, you cannot say: 'sour cherry is a fruit' rather is a fruit species (it is a tree, sour cherries are fruit)
2. it is not a berry, it is a drupe. Pls revise accordingly
3. not all sour cherries are intense reddish, some are dark, some are light. pls change following bibliographic references:

Webster and Looney, Cherries: Crop Physiology, Production and Uses (Cabi), 1995 , ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0851989365

Blando and Oomah 2019   here already cited

4. be more precise, what are you referring to?
5. change to 'this fruit' (you have not mantion yet the health valu of the fruit, pls, introduce this feature first)
6. pls cite which are
7. and cite which are

The introduction was deeply revised according to all the reviewer’s suggestions.

 

8. not true, pls see other paper which report cyanidin-3 rutinoside, as in sweet cherry,

Chaovanalikit, A., & Wrolstad, R. E. (2004). Anthocyanin and polyphenolic composition

of fresh and processed cherries. Journal of Food Science, 69(1), FCT73

https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2621.2004.tb17859.x

 

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfca.2011.03.004

 

or other Prunus species

- Blando, F., Albano, C., Liu, Y., Nicoletti, I., Corradini, D., Tommasi, N., et al. (2016).

Polyphenolic composition and antioxidant activity of the underutilized Prunus mahaleb

 

9. this is a too generall sentence: pls see the huge bibliography related to cyanidin derivatives bioactivitiy.
10. For your reference, see among the others:

https://doi.org/10.1111/1750-3841.13398

https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms19010169

and references therein

The introduction was revised according to the reviewer’s suggestionss.

 

11. the present paper was performed with the aim to deepen the knowledge of the poly-81 phenolic profile and, at the same time, enhance a native species of the Lazio region, eval-82 uating the effect of some simple technological procedures on the bioactive component.

pls re-formulate in a correct English.

The sentence was re-formulate as suggested by the reviewer.

 

Reply to the comments on page 3,4:

1. specify the cultivar
2. time of harvest? Stage of ripening?
3. How many fruits were harvested and considered for extraction?
4. this part doesn't belong to M&M, rather to Introduction or Discussion
5. for how long?
6. not sampls, but treatments, samples were 36 x 3 (triplicates samples) = 108
7. why mg? Has the extract been lyophylized? Pls clarify
8. was (this is a general procedure, for all the extracts you obtained)
9. Ten
10. An aliquot (2.5 mL) was
11. .. (what?)
12. this statistical parameters is not shown in Tables and Figures.

The part “Material and methods was modified in order to answer to all the reviewer’s requests.

13. Only one antioxidant assay is not enough to assess the antioxidant capacity of an extract. Moreover, you do not follow the original test as for Brand-Williams, and the are several drawback using this test (see J. Agric. Food Chem. 2005, 53, 4290-4302, Prior et al.)

Some selected samples coming from the first harvest (2019) were subjected to ABTS, CUPRAC and FRAP assays, which confirmed the trend shown by the results obtained with the DPPH method. The same samples were also tested on enzymes Acetylcholinesterase, Butirylcholinesterase, α-amilase and α-glucosidase, but they did not exert activities. For these reasons, but also because the harvest 2020 and 2021 showed a lower content of polyphenolic compounds we decided not to carry on these experiments.

The results relative to the analyzed samples of vintage 2019 are now reported in a Section “Supplementary Material”, together with the used Materials and Methods and a sentence was inserted in the Results and Discussion section, in lines 391-398

 

Reply to the Comments on page 5-12:

1. This is a repetition of M&M
2. Figures and Tables captions must be self-explanatory. Pls re-write the table caption accordingly.
3. it is lower in a statistically significant meaning?
4. again, figure caption needs more details
5. mg?
6. Figure caption more detailed: nor 'average trends...' but 'Content of...'
7. what are these numbers for?
8. Not good English!
9. you cannot compare DPPH antiradical activity with antioxidant activity assessed by ORAC
10. Pls, revise all the references for the journal's name, as it is not written correctly (lower case starting letter).

The manuscript was deeply revised in agreement with the reviewer’s suggestions.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript was significantly improved after the first round of reviews and could be accepted for publication. 

Author Response

All the authors would like to thank the reviewer for his report.

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Authors,

the manuscript has been revised and improved. It is acceptable now for scientific aspects. It still needs an English revision, as I already said. Too long sentences, and other features of not good English style. You should ask an English lecturer or a proofreading service (providing a certificate) to have the manuscript accepted.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

We would like to thank the reviewer for the precious comments. All the requests and suggests were accepted. The modifications are reported in the uploaded manuscript version.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf