PONE-D-19-22952

High temperature environment reduces olive oil yield and quality

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Ben-Ari,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Please take care to make the edits suggested by the Reviewer below.

The use of supplementary information has helped to reduce the manuscript to a manageable size, however, as outlined by the Reviewer, the text is still too long in places: In the introduction and Discussion. There is no need to discuss the impacts of abiotic stress on species other than olives (this is well covered elsewhere). Don’t discuss any of your results in the introduction.

Avoid repeating results in the discussion section. Shorten the conclusions.

The description of the statistical analysis in the methods section is sufficient, but the explanations in the text are not always clear and should be revised. Similarly, in the tables/figures (including the supplementary figures), more explanation of the statistics is needed in the figure headings. The figure heading should be extensive enough that the figure can be read without referring to the text.

We would appreciate receiving your revised manuscript by Dec 06 2019 11:59PM. When you are ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter.

To enhance the reproducibility of your results, we recommend that if applicable you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io, where a protocol can be assigned its own identifier (DOI) such that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). This letter should be uploaded as separate file and labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. This file should be uploaded as separate file and labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. This file should be uploaded as separate file and labeled 'Manuscript'.

Please note while forming your response, if your article is accepted, you may have the opportunity to make the peer review history publicly available. The record will include editor decision letters (with reviews) and your responses to reviewer comments. If eligible, we will contact you to opt in or out.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Aidan D. Farrell, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

1. When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements.

Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at

http://www.journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and http://www.journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf

2. Thank you for stating that “The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript” in your financial disclosure.

Please also provide the name of the funders of this study (as well as grant numbers if available) in your financial disclosure statement.

Please include your amended statements within your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf.

3. We note that you have stated that you will provide repository information for your data at acceptance. Should your manuscript be accepted for publication, we will hold it until you provide the relevant accession numbers or DOIs necessary to access your data. If you wish to make changes to your Data Availability statement, please describe these changes in your cover letter and we will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide.

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: No

**********

3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: No

**********

4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Dear Authors

I have found the manuscript very interesting to gain deeper knowledge of the potential effects of increasing temperatures on olive yield and quality. An extensive experimental work has been carried out including a high number or evaluations under proper experimental design. However, I still consider there are some important flaws to be improved before acceptance:

The objectives of the work must be clearly presented in the last paragraph of the introduction section

Data analysis: were both 3 and 2-ways ANOVA carried out separately by years? Provide results of both years in Table S4. Not sure to understand the values of Table S4 b-e, could you explain?

The paper should be considerably shortened to be clearer and easier to follow:

- In my opinion the first part of the introduction is beyond the objectives of the work and could be substantially shorten

- There is no need to describe standard procedure in detail, you can only underline the main steps or variation from literature.

- Result section can be shortened by avoiding detailed description of figures. Only the most significant results should be described in text.

- Avoid reporting results again in the discussion section.

Minor comments:

Line 116: is 25 the most appropriate reference to describing these processes?

General results presented in lines 162-164 of Intro section should be deleted.

I wonder whether the Israel meteorological service stations (Lines 181-183) were located nearby the locations under study to be considered representative.

I strongly recommend you they use of quicker and easier technologies for measuring oil content in future studies, such as NMR or NIR methodologies.

Harvesting time and maturity index at this time are not clearly identified in the work. In L276 and L391 it is explained that “fruits were harvested at a maturity index of approximately 3”. However, a wide variability can be observed in Table S3, as much as from 1.12 (Coratina) to 3.71 (Barnea) in MT location in 2017. In my opinion, everything could had been easier by determining common dates for sampling and harvesting times in all cases regardless the maturity index, avoiding the need to follow maturity index, which, on the other hand, is currently considered not related to oil pattern accumulation. Please, consider this suggestion for future works.

Lines 431-434 Correct fruit weight values

Line 443: MT instead of HT

**********

6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files to be viewed.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email us at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

High temperature environment reduces olive oil yield and quality

PONE-D-19-22952R1

Dear Dr. Ben-Ari,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it complies with all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you will receive an e-mail containing information on the amendments required prior to publication. When all required modifications have been addressed, you will receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will proceed to our production department and be scheduled for publication.

Shortly after the formal acceptance letter is sent, an invoice for payment will follow. To ensure an efficient production and billing process, please log into Editorial Manager at https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the "Update My Information" link at the top of the page, and update your user information. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to enable them to help maximize its impact. If they will be preparing press materials for this manuscript, you must inform our press team as soon as possible and no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

With kind regards,

Aidan D. Farrell, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Thank you for the revised manuscript. I am satisfied with the changes made and the manuscript now presents an acceptable summary of this extensive research.

Although the manuscript is still longer than normal, I appreciate the changes that have been made and am aware of the challenge of summarizing results from this many cultivars and parameters.

Some minor edits which you should attend to in the final stages:

Note the convention for reporting P -values, i.e. ‘Report exact p-values for all values greater than or equal to 0.001. P-values less than 0.001 may be expressed as p < 0.001, or as exponentials in studies of genetic associations.’

The image quality of the figures will need to be improved (as set out in the instructions to authors).

Reviewers' comments: