Culture of Gracilaria gracilis and Chondracanthus teedei from Vegetative Fragments in the Field and Carpospores in Laboratory
, José Lucas Pérez-Lloréns 1, Felipe Barrena 1, Claudia M. Pérez-González 2 and Ignacio Hernández 1
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscript presented to me for review is interesting, but it contains a lot of ambiguity and therefore it is quite difficult to read and even incomprehensible.
When reading, you get the impression that the authors wrote this manuscript in a hurry and made a lot of errors (substantive and editorial), and the descriptions of the experiment are unclear and require expansion, as well as the results and summary.
first, it suggests that the authors consider the title to encourage reading.
The abstract is incomprehensible and does not correspond to the manuscript's content. Does this mean that the authors conducted a field experiment (rather, it is reserved for crops in agriculture) and in an aquarium? did they focus only on in vivo breeding?
Line. The 3rd is L.Irvine, and it should be L. Irvine
The 4th line of the title is not finished with a period, please delete it.
Line. 50-51. in one repetition please change it. "Countries such as Chile, Norway, Canada, and even major powers in use and 50 consumption of macroalgae such as China and Japan, still exploit and harvest wild pop-51 ulations [8]"
Line 53. Has the word "wild harvesting" been used correctly or is it better to use it in the wild?
Line 61 is in a similar situation to Line 53.
Line 75. this sentence is taken out of context “These types 75 of cultures create genetic variability [25, 27]. Please expand it or delete it.
Line 100. it is better to use 20 cm than 200 mm, please change.
Line 117. 2.3 Cultivation in the natural environment (in situ)
2.3.1 Characteristics of the culture site.
in this section, the authors describe the place of breeding. Please describe it in more detail.
Line. 122. the authors write: "The soil of the floodgate is rocky in 122 nature,… .." the word soil refers to the cultivation of agriculture, or it is better to write floor or bottom of the serv.
Line 124. "… .between 15.4 and 21.6 ºC [42]." is this a new unit? usually, the temperature is oC
Line 128. subsection 2.3.2 Cultivation system and growth rate. is unclear and it seems that the ropes were sunk in sea water, right? please describe it clearly.
Line 145- 146. "The collection was carried out during the months of February-August 2019 and February-March 2020." Please explain why the experiment was conducted in different months and not in the same?
Line 176, 180, and 181, 188, please choose and align the spellings of the units with or without spaces.
Line 189. for what purpose "..were cut and four fragments were deposited in multi-well plates" something is missing, an extension is required
Line 215. Please explain why 15 and not 50 individuals, then the results would be more reliable.
in general, the work is interesting, but the methodological part requires significant corrections.
In the following part
Line. Figures 2 and 4 are illegible.
Figure 3. is barred in the methodology and the description under the photos of what they were made of, and the scale is invisible.
Figure 4 appears twice in the text.
Line 402 should be Figure 5
Line 439 should be Figure 6.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear Authors,
the manuscript ID jmse-1822652 is very interesting and focuses on an important topic. Red seaweeds, as the two tested in the study, are in fact collected from wild population for high values phycocolloids extraction. Despite this, the intraspecific variability among different wild population can led in different phycocolloid extraction yields. Indeed, is of fundamental importance to create sustainable and reproducible unialgal culture techniques, starting from carpospore. The structure of the paper is of good quality. Despite this, come corrections and suggestions are listed below:
- please avoid the use of term like in vitro
- please avoid, in the whole text, to use acronyms before than define what they mean. e.g. "ES", line 19 (abstract)
- please consider to wide in the introduction section the potential applications of G. gracilis and agar having a look to "Capillo, G.; Sanfilippo, M.; Aliko, V.; SpanoÌ€, N.; Spinelli, A.; Manganaro, A. Gracilaria gracilis, Source of Agar: A Short Review. Curr. Org. Chem. 2017, 21, 380–386."
- in material and methods it is preferable to add information about salinity values
- please consider to provide a better map, georeferenced in figure 1
- all figures and tables present lines numeration in the left part of the item, please delete
- in figure 3 some pictures seem to be deformed, please consider to fix the problem
- line 158, please check the value of fresh weight
All the best regards
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
