Grain Quality of Maize Cultivars as a Function of Planting Dates, Irrigation and Nitrogen Stress: A Case Study from Semiarid Conditions of Iran
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Overview and general recommendation
The title is specific and reflects the main ideas of the article. The article structure is compact, sequential and logical. The data are adequate to support the conclusion. The methods section provides sufficient information on design, sampling, definitions, data collection and data analysis. References are up-dated adequate and correctly cited.
I recommend that a minor revision in term of English language.
Minor comments:
I consider that the part of the bibliography should be readjusted, it's too old, for example: 9 (1974), 16 (1983), 26 (1934), 27 (1960), 28 (1954), 29 (1953), 37 (1966)
Author Response
Dear reviewers and editors of the Agriculture journal,
Hello,
We are very grateful for your letter and the opportunity to revise our paper on “Grain quality of maize cultivars as a function of planting dates, irrigation and nitrogen stress”. Your insightful comments were very helpful in revising the paper.
We have included point-by-point response to the reviewers’ comments and concerns immediately after this letter and responded to them individually, indicating exactly how we addressed each concern or problem and describing the changes we have made. We have also highlighted the changes within the manuscript.
We hope the revised manuscript will better suit the Agriculture journal and look forward to hearing from you in due time regarding our submission and any further feedback you may have.
Sincerely,
Gholam.Abbas Akbari,
Department of Agronomy and Plant Breeding Sciences,
College of Aburaihan, University of Tehran, Pakdasht, Iran
Mobile: +98-912-2186-976
Email: [email protected]
Reviewer Comments, Author Responses and Manuscript Changes
Reviewer 1
Comment 1: The title is specific and reflects the main ideas of the article. The article structure is compact, sequential and logical. The data are adequate to support the conclusion. The methods section provides sufficient information on design, sampling, definitions, data collection and data analysis. References are up-dated adequate and correctly cited. I recommend that a minor revision in term of English language.
Responses and changes: We appreciate the time and efforts that you have dedicated to providing your valuable feedback on our manuscript. In response to your comment, we re-checked the article for spelling and grammatical errors.
Comment 1: I consider that the part of the bibliography should be readjusted, it's too old, for example: 9 (1974), 16 (1983), 26 (1934), 27 (1960), 28 (1954), 29 (1953), 37 (1966).
Responses and Changes: Thank you for your attention regarding the bibliography. Regarding 9 (1974), 16 (1983), they were the first papers to establish an idea, so we felt that it was important to credit the original studies. Regarding references 26 (1934), 27 (1960), 28 (1954), 29 (1953), they are laboratory protocols that we used for chemical analysis of the soil samples. In addition, reference 37 (1966) is one of the general standards used to determine phenological stages of maize. Of course, we agree that using newer references can be better and we tried to follow that where possible.
Reviewer 2 Report
The manuscript entitled "Grain quality of maize cultivars as a function of planting dates, irrigation and nitrogen stress" analyzed the effect of different plant date and rates of irrigation and N fertilization on quality characteristics such as content of starch, protein and oil two maize cultivars, etc. This research could be interesting for improving quality traits through filed management. Overall, the manuscript is organized well, but some drawbacks for this research are:
- It's better to introduce the materials in the beginning of the Materials and Methods.
- Only two cultivars were used, it's hard to say that the difference among different treatments will be consistent if more cultivars were included;
- Authors didn't mention if replications were used for each treatment. Only the length of the field is mentioned, but no any size dimension about the plot and how maize plants arranged in each plot;
- Data from two years may be good for analysis, but may not be sufficient for the solid scientific soundness if two years were quite different.
Author Response
Dear reviewers and editors of the Agriculture journal,
Hello,
We are very grateful for your letter and the opportunity to revise our paper on “Grain quality of maize cultivars as a function of planting dates, irrigation and nitrogen stress”. Your insightful comments were very helpful in revising the paper.
We have included point-by-point response to the reviewers’ comments and concerns immediately after this letter and responded to them individually, indicating exactly how we addressed each concern or problem and describing the changes we have made. We have also highlighted the changes within the manuscript.
We hope the revised manuscript will better suit the Agriculture journal and look forward to hearing from you in due time regarding our submission and any further feedback you may have.
Sincerely,
Gholam.Abbas Akbari,
Department of Agronomy and Plant Breeding Sciences,
College of Aburaihan, University of Tehran, Pakdasht, Iran
Mobile: +98-912-2186-976
Email: [email protected]
Comment 1: The manuscript entitled "Grain quality of maize cultivars as a function of planting dates, irrigation and nitrogen stress" analyzed the effect of different planting date and rates of irrigation and N fertilization on quality characteristics such as content of starch, protein and oil two maize cultivars, etc. This research could be interesting for improving quality traits through filed management. Overall, the manuscript is organized well, but some drawbacks for this research are: 1. It's better to introduce the materials in the beginning of the Materials and Methods.
Responses and changes: We appreciate the time and efforts that you have dedicated to providing your valuable feedback on our manuscript. In response to your first comment, due to the multiplicity and complexity of the laboratory analysis and the space limitations, we only referenced the protocols in the manuscript. We agree that introducing the materials in the beginning of the Materials and Methods can provide detail information to the reader. If there are any specific changes that you wish us to make, then please let us know.
Comment 2: Only two cultivars were used, it's hard to say that the difference among different treatments will be consistent if more cultivars were included.
Responses and changes: Thank you for your assessment. In the experiment we used two maize cultivars from different maturity groups (late and early maturity). We agree that it is better using more cultivars to better and more accurate results regarding treatments. In this regard, we highlighted the issue in the concluding sentences of the paper, we added the following text:
“The study was limited to two cultivars, and although there were clear differences between them, further studies that include additional cultivars would provide further confidence in the results.”
Comment 3: Authors didn't mention if replications were used for each treatment. Only the length of the field is mentioned, but no any size dimension about the plot and how maize plants arranged in each plot.
Responses and changes: Thank you for your comment. The materials and methods section is a little dense and the explanations regarding replication and plots attributes (at the bottom of table 1) might have been hard to find and read, so we moved them to a more appropriate place in the manuscript.
Comment 4: Data from two years may be good for analysis, but may not be sufficient for the solid scientific soundness if two years were quite different.
Responses and changes: Thank you for your valuable comment. We strongly agree with you that it is better to perform more trials across more years and locations to improve scientific soundness regarding maize grain quality as a function of planting date, irrigation and nitrogen stress. But due to the high cost of conducting such experiments and analyzing starch and oil, we limited this experiment to two years. We somewhat addressed this issue in the following part of the conclusion section:
“However, year-to-year variations in the effects of factors on amylose, amylopectin and amino acids suggests that the response of cultivars to the environment plays an important role in the final composition of starch and protein. The findings highlight the complicated relationship between the experimental factors and the large impacts of growing season conditions on quality attributes of maize grain.”
We mentioned in the introduction section:
“The aim of the research was to provide a basis of knowledge for defining future research and developing guidelines for improving maize grain quality.”
In future experiments, we intend to focus on the most important treatments identified in this study, with more factor levels.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
the revision improved little on the manuscript, and scientific soundness of this research is low due to limited number of lines and years used.
Author Response
Dear Editor,
We greatly appreciate the comment of the reviewer. Please let us to include a detailed response to the concern, indicating exactly how we addressed this limitations of the study and the changes we have made.
Comment: the revision improved little on the manuscript, and scientific soundness of this research is low due to limited number of lines and years used.
Responses and changes: In the experiment we used two maize cultivars from two different maturity groups (late and early maturity). There were two main reason for selection of these two cultivars: 1) in the previous study (Rahimi Jahangirlou, 2015) which is mentioned in the manuscript, we investigated grain yield and quality of 12 maize cultivars from different maturity groups under optimal growth conditions. The result of that experiment showed that KSC704 and KSC260 had the best grain yield and quality among cultivars in late and early maturity group, respectively. This is why they were specifically selected for this study. 2) In addition, the two selected cultivars are the most popular local cultivars and account for more than 80% of the cultivated area of the country. We definitely agree with you that it is better to use more cultivars. In this regard, we highlighted the issue in the concluding sentences of the paper, we added the following text:
“The study was limited to two cultivars, and although there were clear differences between them, further studies that include additional cultivars would provide more confidence in the results.”
Regarding your comment on limited number of years, we strongly agree with you that it is better to perform more trials across more years and locations to improve scientific soundness regarding maize grain quality as a function of planting date, irrigation and nitrogen stress. We referred to this issue in the following part of the conclusion section:
“However, year-to-year variations in the effects of factors on quality characteristics of maize grain suggests that the response of cultivars to the environment plays an important role in the final composition of starch and protein. The findings highlight the complicated relationship between the experimental factors and the large impacts of growing season conditions on quality attributes of maize grain.”
We also mentioned in the introduction section:
“The aim of the research was to provide a basis of knowledge for defining future research and developing guidelines for improving maize grain quality.”
In future experiments, we would like to focus on the most important treatments identified in this study, with more factor levels and experiments. But as we mentioned before, due to the high cost of conducting such experiments and analyzing starch and oil, we limited this experiment to two years.
This was quite a complicated experiment, which examined the interactions between 5 factors – irrigation, cultivar, planting date, nitrogen rate, and year. By choosing to look at these interactions we were unable to have many factor levels, because it would make the experiment too big. Every research project needs to work with the available resources, and this was already a large and costly experiment. At this stage, we cannot add more cultivars or add more years to the experiment, we can only explain our motivations for the design, recognize the inherent limitations, and address this in the paper.
We hope our response has been able to respond well to your concern. We realize that we have not significantly changed the text in our response, but we don’t see what else we can add at this stage. If there is something specifically that you think that we can add to the text of the paper to address any of these issues then please let us know.
Sincerely,
Gholam.Abbas Akbari,
Email: [email protected]
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
