All reviews of published articles are made public. This includes manuscript files, peer review comments, author rebuttals and revised materials. Note: This was optional for articles submitted before 13 February 2023.
Peer reviewers are encouraged (but not required) to provide their names to the authors when submitting their peer review. If they agree to provide their name, then their personal profile page will reflect a public acknowledgment that they performed a review (even if the article is rejected). If the article is accepted, then reviewers who provided their name will be associated with the article itself.
The authors addressed the Reviewers' concerns and consequently, it is now suitable for publication.
[# PeerJ Staff Note - this decision was reviewed and approved by Konstantinos Kormas, a PeerJ Section Editor covering this Section #]
The authors addressed all concerns raised by the reviewers, except the following:
"I consider it necessary to access some of the representative images of these experiments, where the beneficial effects of Trichoderma are shown. With their respective controls."
The authors consider this information relevant but mention the quality of the figures is poor. The authors are encouraged to include these figures as supplementary material. Alternatively, new pictures may be prepared by the authors, aiming to improve the quality.
We received three assessments of your work and all of them are positive. There are concerns though, which need to be attended to, but I think this will not be a problem for the authors. The recommendations include the improvement of figures, the rewriting of some manuscript sections, and the inclusion of more representative figures showing the beneficial effect of Trichoderma.
In general, the manuscript is easy to follow and the objective to be achieved is understood. The approach to conducting the experiments is appropriate. The raw data is shown, except that the data where the BLAST alignment was performed cannot be accessed ((http://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast).
The methods used are adequately described and with them, the hypothesis raised about the use of Trichoderma as a biocontroller of the Fusarium pathogen can be verified.
Although the results show that the consortia are effective in reducing the incidence, as well as the severity of the infection caused by Fusarium. I consider it necessary to access some of the representative images of these experiments, where the beneficial effects of Trichoderma are shown. With their respective controls. These images could be placed in supplementary material.
In the materials and methods section, there are some typographical errors.
for example: ml --> mL; gm --> mg; kgs --> kg
From the results section onwards, you can abbreviate the name of the microorganisms you mentioned before. For example: Fusarium oxysporum --> F. oxysporum. Etc.
In this work, Chohan et al. report the use of Trichoderma as a biocontrol agent to control the wilting of chickpea plants caused by Fusarium. Although several similar studies have already been published, the authors carried out these studies with indigenous strains isolated from the place where the disease was found, a situation that had not been explored.
The paper is generally acceptable; however, there are points in the structure that must be addressed. The antecedents shown in the introduction are repeated in the first part of the discussion. It is necessary to restructure both sections so that the discussion mainly addresses the data generated in the work.
The paper complies with the journal requirements in terms of aims and scope. The project addresses the study of antagonism between Trichoderma and Fusarium with the novelty of doing it with indigenous strains of Trichoderma.
The article mentions that the causal agent of chickpea wilt was isolated from diseased plants in a region of Pakistan and the indigenous strains of Trichoderma from soil samples from this region. However, the area covered by this region and how close the diseased plants were to the soil sample from which the Trichoderma strains were isolated are not specified. This is important to determine the environmental correlation of the strains studied, especially when considering Trichoderma strains as indigenous. The soil composition in this area needs to be reported, and its possible correlation with the soil formulated to carry out the experiments. At the very least, this should be addressed in the discussion of results.
The conclusions are presented as a list of results. It is desirable to present them as concrete statements. Also, the perspectives of the work are presented in the conclusions section, which should be part of the discussion section and not the conclusions.
In general, the communication is good work; once the suggested corrections have been completed, I consider the article ready for publication for the next revision in order to be published.
This is good study conducted by the authors. The data presented in this article technically sound in its field. Overall structure of the article is good.
Research design of the study is up to the standards as per pervious methods reported
no comments
Fig. 1 resolution is not good, resolution should be like that of fig. 2.
Delete the old reference of 70s or 80,
All text and materials provided via this peer-review history page are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.