Tansy (Tanacetum vulgare L.)—A Wild-Growing Aromatic Medicinal Plant with a Variable Essential Oil Composition

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Since no genetic assays have been conducted, the title is misleading. Perhaps, a better option would be to entitle: " Chemical Diversity of Wild-Growing Tansy (Tanacetum vul-2 gare L.) on different sites in Poland", or so. Also, an extensive study simply cannot be done on a mere 4 samples. The paper is well written though, but in my opinion way too extensive to presents the results of these 4 samples-please reconsider to condense it-perhaps a into a short communication. If possible, the quantification of essential oil components should be done on GC-FID, not GC-MS, due to the differences in detection response. In my opinion, there are too few results to draw such an extensive discussion and conclusions based only on 4 chemotypes.

Author Response

Review 1. The text reports essential oil and oil. make uniform with essential oil considering the proximity between the sampling sites and theentomophilic pollination of the species, it is likely that the chemotypical differences between the populations are exclusive of an environmental nature, but molecular type analys should be performed.

Our respons. Thank you very much for your valuable comments on our manuscript. We agree that the causes of chemical variability in tansy are largely genetic, but we believe that possible environmental variability should not be overlooked as well. For these reasons, we have made an attempt to analyze these reasons, noting at the same time that these are only possible explanations for the complex problem of variability. We agree that further genetic research is needed, as we noted in the manuscript revision (Conclusions section).

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The text reports essential oil and oil. make uniform with essential oil

considering the proximity between the sampling sites and the entomophilic pollination of the species, it is likely that the chemotypical differences between the populations are exclusive of an environmental nature, but molecular type analys should be performed.

Author Response

Review 2. Since no genetic assays have been conducted, the title is misleading. Perhaps, a better option would be to entitle: " Chemical Diversity of Wild-Growing Tansy (Tanacetum vul-2 gare L.) on different sites in Poland", or so. Also, an extensive study simply cannot be done on a mere 4 samples. The paper is well written though, but in my opinion way too extensive to presents the results of these 4 samples-please reconsider to condense it-perhaps a into a short communication. If possible, the quantification of essential oil components should be done on GC-FID, not GC-MS, due to the differences in detection response. In my opinion, there are too few results to draw such an extensive discussion and conclusions based only on 4 chemotypes.

Our respons. Thank you very much for your valuable comments on our manuscript. We agree with the comment regarding the title of the article, which was not well-worded. It has been completely changed as suggested. We also shortened the discussion as suggested. However, we cannot fully agree with the opinion that the results of the 4 chemotypes are too small to be discussed. Our task is that such a strong chemical diversity of wild-growing plants is very interesting and must have some reasons. We have made an attempt to explain this phenomenon, always assuming that they are only conjectures. When studying the work of other authors, we have often noticed a brief description of the phenomenon (for example, the occurrence of chemotypes of aromatic plants), without attempting to explain. We always felt a certain scientific insufficiency in such a situation. We are aware of the size of our experiment, but we wanted to support the results and conclusions of other authors, which clearly indicate some dependencies. For these reasons, we want to present an interesting, in our opinion, discussion in a reduced form. Adding that, this is the first study of this type, aimed at the chemical analysis of wild tansy inflorescences in an attempt to explain the phenomenon of chemical dimorphism. As for the oil analysis method, we agree that the GC/MS-FID method is more accurate than the GC/MS method, but unfortunately we were not able to use it. We will certainly take this into account in future studies. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf