Effects of preharvest sprays of iodine, selenium and calcium on apple biofortification and their quality and storability

Paweł Wójcik

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0282873

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionDecember 22, 2022
14 Feb 2023 Decision Letter - Hasan Sardar, Editor PONE-D-22-35045Effects of preharvest sprays of iodine, selenium and calcium on apple biofortification and their quality and storabilityPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Wojcik, 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 submit your revised manuscript by Mar 31 2023 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're 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. 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The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf. 2. In your Methods section, please provide additional information regarding the permits you obtained for the work. Please ensure you have included the full name of the authority that approved the field site access and, if no permits were required, a brief statement explaining why. 3. We note that you have included the phrase “data not shown” in your manuscript. Unfortunately, this does not meet our data sharing requirements. PLOS does not permit references to inaccessible data. We require that authors provide all relevant data within the paper, Supporting Information files, or in an acceptable, public repository. Please add a citation to support this phrase or upload the data that corresponds with these findings to a stable repository (such as Figshare or Dryad) and provide and URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers that may be used to access these data. Or, if the data are not a core part of the research being presented in your study, we ask that you remove the phrase that refers to these data. 4. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions 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 Reviewer #2: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 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: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 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 Reviewer #2: 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: The manuscript presents an industrial progress on the quality enhancement of apples. I have following concerns to further improve its quality. What time of the day the treatments were applied? Authors are suggested to provide an overview picture showing their treatments and expected results, that would be easy for a variety of readers to understand their key findings Line 26; remove "with those nutrients" Reviewer #2: This manuscript focuses on examining the effects of iodine (I), selenium (Se) and calcium (Ca) on the enrichment of ‘Red Jonaprince’ (Malus domestica Borth.) apples as well as fruit quality and their storability. Although the research topic and the approach are appropriate, but minor correction are necessary before acceptance of manuscript. Following are my suggestions In introduction section, introduction of nutrients should be explained with detail and with latest examples of different fruit crops Line 111. What type of pesticides and herbicides were used and at what time? Line 141. Is there anything like water applied to the control plants? In the results section explain the results of all treatments Discussion is corroborative. The authors should highlight the reason of their result findings in the light of available literature. ****** 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 Reviewer #2: 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.] 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 PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0282873.r001
Revision 1
23 Feb 2023 Author Response According to the requirements of PLOS ONE: - we have added information in the Method section about permits received related to conducting field study and performing analyses/measurements (lines 90-94). - we have removed in our manuscript the phrase “data not shown” for fruit firmness at harvest (line 324) and the data of this parameter have been presented in Table 4. - we have checked the reference list and cited papers in the text. We have added also 3 literature items added (17, 18, 22). For that reason, we had to change the numbering of papers in both the reference list and text. Reviewer #1: 1) As suggested by the Reviewer, we should add information about time of the day when the tested spray treatments were applied. However, we would like to state that the above information was given in “The tested spray treatments and trial setup” (line 179) 2) As suggested by the Reviewer, we should add an overview picture showing the tested treatments and results obtained. It seems that this suggestion is not justified because, in our opinion, the set-up of the experiment used is not complicated and the results presented in the tables and their description in the Results and Discussion sections are clear. 3) We agree with the Reviewer's argument to remove the phrase “with those nutrients” from Abstract (line 25). Reviewer #2: 1) As suggested by the Reviewer, we have added in the Introduction section information about studies related to biofortification of tree fruits with iodine and selenium (lines 64-69). 2) Accordingly to the Reviewer’s suggestion, we have added information about pesticides and herbicides used and their application time (lines 130-138, 140-144). 3) As proposed by the Reviewer, we have added information that the control trees were not sprayed with water (lines 171-172). 4) As suggested by the Reviewer, in the Result section, we should explain the results of all treatments whereas in the Discussion section, we should highlight the reasons of their result findings in the light of available literature. However, the Reviewer did not indicate which parts in the sections of Results and Discussion require the improvement. According to our opinion, in the Results section, we precisely described the impacts of the tested spray treatments on individual characteristics/parameters of plants. Moreover, in the Discussion section, we confronted the results obtained with those of the available scientific literature. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0282873.r002
27 Feb 2023 Decision Letter - Hasan Sardar, Editor Effects of preharvest sprays of iodine, selenium and calcium on apple biofortification and their quality and storability PONE-D-22-35045R1 Dear Dr. Pawel Wojcik, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. 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 help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- 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. Kind regards, Hasan Sardar, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0282873.r003
Formally Accepted
1 Mar 2023 Acceptance Letter - Hasan Sardar, Editor PONE-D-22-35045R1 Effects of preharvest sprays of iodine, selenium and calcium on apple biofortification and their quality and storability Dear Dr. Wójcik: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. 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. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Hasan Sardar Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0282873.r004

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