The Effect of Salinity on Fruit Quality and Yield of Cherry Tomatoes
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors investigated the effects of sodium chloride at levels typically found in Malta on yield, physiology and fruit quality of tomato, the economically most important vegetable. This article has practical value. The design of the article is reasonable and the result analysis is accurate. It can be published on horticulturae. However, I have some questions.
1. Why did the authors choose NaCl concentrations of 17 mMand 34 mM. In Figure 1, the concentrations of sodium and chloride ions in groundwater in many places are less than 15mM. Whether NaCl(less than 15 mM ) treatment has an impact on tomato growth, and whether there is any pre experiment or responsive literature.
2. Why use wet digestion to quantify potassium, sodium, magnesium and calcium in tomato fruit. The previous sentence says dry matter of tomato fruits.13 g of homogenate was dry matter?
3. The average number of defective fruit of tomato cherry fruitsin figure 2D, I suggest to delete or put it in supplementary f Because the error is very large. Figure 5 B and F, the error bar of glutamine and γ-aminobutyric acid content of cherry tomato fruits were very large.What methods can improve the accuracy of the test.
Author Response
Response to Reviewer 1 Comments
We want to thank the reviewer for the positive evaluation and the helpful comments! We have corrected the manuscript accordingly and have included our response in blue.
Reviewer 1
The authors investigated the effects of sodium chloride at levels typically found in Malta on yield, physiology and fruit quality of tomato, the economically most important vegetable. This article has practical value. The design of the article is reasonable and the result analysis is accurate. It can be published on horticulturae. However, I have some questions.
1) Why did the authors choose NaCl concentrations of 17 mM and 34 mM. In Figure 1, the concentrations of sodium and chloride ions in groundwater in many places are less than 15 mM. Whether NaCl (less than 15 mM) treatment has an impact on tomato growth, and whether there is any pre experiment or responsive literature.
Response
We agree that the reasons for selecting the concentrations of 17 mM and 34 mM sodium chloride should be mentioned in more detail. We selected these concentrations since we wanted to investigate concentrations where an effect is expected and which are in the range of sodium chloride concentrations observed in the groundwater in Malta. According to the literature, salinity levels between 3.0 and 4.0 mS/cm have little impact on the yield. Moreover, in approximately half of the sites in Malta, the chloride concentration exceeds 15 mM. Therefore, we selected 17 mM as the lower level. 34 mM were selected since it is in the range of the salinity observed in the sites with the highest chloride levels. Indeed, our data show that both levels were appropriate since at 17 mM the analysed parameters were only slightly affected while many parameters were significantly affected at the higher level. We have included a description of the reasons for selecting these two concentrations in the revised manuscript (lines 271-277).
2) Why use wet digestion to quantify potassium, sodium, magnesium and calcium in tomato fruit. The previous sentence says dry matter of tomato fruits.13 g of homogenate was dry matter?
Response
Thank you for this comment! The explanation of the method was not clear. In the first sentence we describe determination of the dry weight. Unfortunately, we forgot to include a break before the paragraph describing of cation analysis. Thus, it appeared that the sample material was dried before wet digestion. However, we used 13 g of fresh homogenate for wet digestion. We have revised the description to present that in a better way (lines 202-204).
3) The average number of defective fruit of tomato cherry fruits in figure 2D, I suggest to delete or put it in supplementary f Because the error is very large. Figure 5 B and F, the error bar of glutamine and γ-aminobutyric acid content of cherry tomato fruits were very large. What methods can improve the accuracy of the test.
Response
We agree that the SD of the values for defective fruit is high. However, this is not surprising, because very view fruits were defective and thus the values were calculated from rare events, which causes high SDs. Nevertheless, Figure 2D shows that salinity in the tested range has no adverse effects on the number of defective fruits, which is a very important result for tomato cultivation. Thus, we would like to keep the figure in the main body rather placing it in the Supplementary Data section.
The relatively high SDs seen for the contents of glutamine and γ-aminobutyric acid represent biological rather than technical variation (all amino acids were measured by the same method, which is known to have approximately the same technical reproducibility for all amino acids). Since the SDs indicate biological variation rather than technical deviation using other analytical methods would not reduce the variation.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
In the manuscript “The Effect of Salinity on Fruit Quality and Yield of Cherry Tomatoes” authors Carlos Agius, Sabine von Tucher and Wilfried Rozhon tested the response of cherry tomatoes to salinity.
Abstract
L 11- 12 Second part of the first statement is unnecessary.
L 18 to what salinity the plants were exposed?
OK
Key words
OK
Introduction
P2 L 78 106 to 2431 mg/l and 63 to 1517 mg/l, respectively… The way of writing units? Through the text!
P2 L 81 The statement is not clear: Sometimes increased salt contents of up to 5 mS∙cm-1 in nutrient solutions for tomato
P3 L 113 The statement is not clear: …in contrast to the results from leaves, higher concentrations were also found for reducing sugars.
Aims or hypotheses are missing!
Materials and Methods
Which variety was used?
P3 L 123 transferredinto space is missing
P4 L 139 skip space before “%” 58.3±16.2 % with 1
Results
P 7 L 309: The following statement should be in “Introduction” section: The dry matter content and the total soluble solids (TSS) are important criteria for tomato fruit quality [31, 36]. Statements with references and basic statements should not be in the “Results” section.
P 13 l 452 Again, the highest contents for these ions was ,, change to “were”
Discussion
First paragraph should be in the “Introduction” section.
P 16 L553 of Yin et al. year is missing?
Conclusions
Special comments
The idea of MS is interesting and the results are clearly presented. The article is written in a clear and understandable way. I want to highlight the clear and comprehensive work of the authors. The methods employed are explained, and the results are consistent with the purposes. However, organization is not Ok, many statements should be removed to another section.
Author Response
Response to Reviewer 2 Comments
We want to thank the reviewer for the positive evaluation the helpful comments! We have given each point mention careful consideration and adapted the manuscript accordingly. Below we have included our response in blue.
Reviewer 2
In the manuscript “The Effect of Salinity on Fruit Quality and Yield of Cherry Tomatoes” authors Carlos Agius, Sabine von Tucher and Wilfried Rozhon tested the response of cherry tomatoes to salinity.
Abstract
L 11- 12 Second part of the first statement is unnecessary.
L 18 to what salinity the plants were exposed?
OK
Response
We agree that the second part is unnecessary and we have removed it (line 12). We also agree that the salinity levels used in the study should be mentioned in the abstract and thus we have now included this information (line 18).
Key words
OK
Introduction
P2 L 78 106 to 2431 mg/l and 63 to 1517 mg/l, respectively… The way of writing units? Through the text!
Response
Many thanks for this comment! We have corrected the units throughout the text, figures and supplemental material.
P2 L 81 The statement is not clear: Sometimes increased salt contents of up to 5 mS∙cm-1 in nutrient solutions for tomato
Response
We confused salt concentration, which is usually given in mM, and salinity, which is usually reported in mS cm-1. We have corrected the sentence and refer now to salinity.
P3 L 113 The statement is not clear: …in contrast to the results from leaves, higher concentrations were also found for reducing sugars. Aims or hypotheses are missing!
Response
We agree that this sentence was confusing. We have revised it and we have also explained the aims more clearly (lines 113 to 124).
Materials and Methods
Which variety was used?
Response
We used the cultivar Gustafano (see e.g. https://www.enzazaden.com/uk/products-and-services/our-products/Gustafano), which is very similar to cv. Sunstream (https://webkiosk.enzazaden.com/gemusesaatgut-katalog-2020-2021/64482524/58). We have included this information in the manuscript (lines 127, 511 and 671).
P3 L 123 transferredinto space is missing
Response
Corrected as suggested.
P4 L 139 skip space before “%” 58.3±16.2 % with 1
Response
Corrected as suggested.
Results
P 7 L 309: The following statement should be in “Introduction” section: The dry matter content and the total soluble solids (TSS) are important criteria for tomato fruit quality [31, 36]. Statements with references and basic statements should not be in the “Results” section.
Response
There are different ways how a manuscript can be written. We are aware that a number of authors mention in the results section only data obtained in the study. However, many authors prefer introducing the paragraphs of the results section with more general statements and/or references to the literature. There are many examples for that, including articles in renowned journals like Cell, Genes and Development many others. Just to name a few, examples for such practise can be found in the excellent works from the lab of Joanne Chory: Procko et al., 2016 Genes Dev 30, 1529-1541; Yin et al., 2005 Cell 120, 249-259; Nemhauser et al., 2006, Cell 126, 467-475 or from the lab of Xiaodong Wang: Liu et al., 1996, Cell 86, 147-157. Thousands of similar examples are available. We think that it is particularly for readers who are not perfectly familiar with the topic of the study helpful if the different parts of the results section are introduced by more general statements and a few references to the literature are given. Therefore, and since including such statements in the results section is a common practice, we would like to keep the style of the manuscript.
P 13 l 452 Again, the highest contents for these ions was ,, change to “were”
Response
Corrected as suggested.
Discussion
First paragraph should be in the “Introduction” section.
Response
Similar to the comment above, a brief summary of the topic is commonly found as starting paragraph for the discussion. Many examples can be found in renowned journals for instance Reinders et al., 2009, Genes Dev 23, 939-950; Mora-García et al., 2004, Genes Dev 18, 448-460; Szekeres et al., 1996, Cell, 85, 171-182 etc. Similarly, in Horticulturae many articles have a brief summary of the topic as first paragraph of the discussion, for instance VaštakaitÄ—-KairienÄ— et al., 2022, Horticulturae 8, 23; Hollad et al., 2022, Horticulturae 8, 20; Berni et al., 2018 Horticulturae 4, 51; Elvanidi et al., 2018, Horticulturae 4, 47; just no name a few. We absolutely agree that there are many different ways how the discussion section can be arranged. However, since the way we present it is a usual style we wold like to keep it.
P 16 L553 of Yin et al. year is missing?
Response
Thank you for pointing this out! We have included the year and the reference.
Conclusions
Special comments
The idea of MS is interesting and the results are clearly presented. The article is written in a clear and understandable way. I want to highlight the clear and comprehensive work of the authors. The methods employed are explained, and the results are consistent with the purposes. However, organization is not Ok, many statements should be removed to another section.
Response
Many thanks for the positive and helpful comments! Regarding article organisation please see our comments above.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
