Editor’s comments on bg-2017-270

Dear Becca and Kirsten,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript “Ferrihydrite associated organic matter (OM) stimulates reduction by Shewanella oneidensis MR-1 and a complex microbial consortia” to Biogeosciences. Two expert reviewers and I have assessed your submission and we all agree that it is a well-written paper and a nice study that addresses important questions on the effect of microbial iron cycling and organic matter interactions. The reviewers highlighted the significance of the work and pointed out some corrections/edits to improve the manuscript. Your responses to the reviewers’ comments are satisfactory, therefore, I am making the decision of “publish subject to minor revisions.” Please revise your paper based the reviewers’ and my comments (below) and resubmit for final editorial review. When resubmitting, please include a version of your paper showing all changes marked as track changes.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions.

Sincerely,
Dr. Denise M. Akob

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Editor’s Comments

L. 41, 56 and elsewhere: correct “n.d.” for the in text citation and update the reference in the bibliography
L. 120: specific here that you are extracting live organisms for cultivation
L. 129: what do you mean by “duplicated triplicates”?
L. 138-139: I’m not understanding what “AFhA 0.4, AFhB 1.3, and AFhD 4.2” means—are the letters extraction names? If so, define this (applies to L. 141 too).
L. 143: were these actually hungate tube or Balch tubes? The ones with the big blue rubber stoppers are actually Balch tubes.
L. 144-145: define all abbreviations at first use
L. 154 and elsewhere: please give all centrifugation speeds as “x g”
L. 185: add a space between Bacterial and 16S
L. 201: µl
L. 325: can you provide any more information about the database?
L. 883: remove the duplicate citation
L. 265: add a space between Bacterial and 16S
L. 298: it should be Gammaproteobacteria
L. 392 and 413: remove the comma after the author name
L. 402-403: provide a reference for Geobacter and nanowires.

Dear Becca and Kirsten,

Thank you for your detailed responses to the comments of the reviewers and for the revised manuscript. I am happy to now accept your paper for publication in Biogeosciences.

Best,
Denise