Preharvest Spraying of CaCl₂ Alleviates the Scape Bending of Gerbera ‘Harmony’ Flowers by Strengthening the Pectin Crosslinks through Ca²⁺ Bonds

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

 

Ln 16                      Provide a % increase in Ca, not just saying ‘more’.

Ln 28                      Cut is not capitalized

Ln 29-30               Yield and harvest intervals do not improve their popularity in the global market

Ln 61                     The procedure for measuring scape hardness is not provided.

Ln 69                     What was the Ca concentration in the nutrient solution…and the total Ca delivered per plant per day? This likely affects the potential benefits of exogenous applications of Ca

Ln 74                      Unclear. Was one scape spray three times…once as each stage of development? It would have interesting to measure Ca in the tissue as the flower scape developed.

Ln 77-78               Provide further description of the spray. How much solution came in contact with the stem? How did you manage to spray all sides of the round scape or did you just spray one side?

Ln 85-86               How high did the water come up the sides of the stem in the glass bottles?

Ln 86-88               We don’t know anything about the environmental conditions under which the plants were grown and the Ca treatments were applied.

Ln 72                      I would have like to seen higher concentrations up to 2% as these have been beneficial for the use of CaCl2 for botrytis control in petunia flower petals and cut flower roses. See Bennett or Muñoz papers over last several years.

Ln 140…                Abbreviate CaCl2 as previously done. What does ‘alleviated…symptoms’ mean as this was not a measurement. Be more specific, eg., Ca applied at 0.5% increased vase life by 49%.  

Table 1                  Scape bending was measured in degrees, so why is it being reported in %’s? Is this the % of stems exhibiting symptoms? If so, one can not do statistics on %’s unless you have a % value from multiple replications of the experiment. It is not clear that the experiment was conducted on more than one occasion.

Table 2                  How is scape hardness measured in degrees? This seems like an angle measurement, which is not hardness. You would need to use a penetrometer or something like that to quantify hardness.

Table 3                  Headings are missing in columns 4 and 8.

Fig 2                       A and C appear to be the same data as presented in Table 3. Delete in one location or the other (don’t present the same data twice)

Fig 3                       This also appears to be a repeating of data presented in Tables 1-3. Unclear how scape bending was calculated…e.g., the average of all of the days during its vase life?

 

Author Response

Thank you very much for providing a thorough and excellent review of our manuscript. The comments have been constructive for revising and improving our paper and guiding future research. We have carefully studied the comments and suggestions and made corrections that we hope to meet with your approval. We changed water-insoluble pectin (WIP) to insoluble pectin (IP) in the whole text, according to the other reviewer’s comments. The point-by-point response to the reviewer’s comments and questions was presented as attachment. Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Materials and Methods

- Define the temperature and relative humidity during the transport of cut flowers to the laboratory.

- Did you check the CDTA-soluble pectin in the scape?

- Change water-insoluble pectin (WIP) to insoluble pectin (IP)

Results

- Please show the photo or picture of scape bending of gerbera flowers.

- In figure 2, the author has to change the line graph to the bar graph.

- Table 3-4, the representative data of WSP+IP as Total pectin.

Discussion

- The big point for interpreting the data is why WSP increases in preharvest calcium spray at the vase-life start.

Conclusion

- Delete the sentence of Gerasopoulos and Chebli reported that......... (line 257-258).

Author Response

Thank you very much for providing a thorough and excellent review of our manuscript. The comments have been constructive for revising and improving our paper and guiding future research. We have carefully studied the comments and suggestions and made corrections that we hope to meet with your approval. We changed water-insoluble pectin (WIP) to insoluble pectin (IP) in the whole text, according to the other reviewer’s comments. The point-by-point response to the reviewer’s comments and questions was presented as an attachment. Please see the attachment. 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Significant revision