The article “Mold-deteriorated Archaeological Egyptian Papyri: Biodeteriogens, Deterioration Mechanism and Treatment Approach” by Hanadi Saada et al. presented a thorough investigation on biodegradation of papyri. I don’t think the degradation mechanism is actually discussed in depth, and I would probably remove it from the title, but overall I found the science correct and solid.
I have a major reservation about the article actually being more appropriate for other journals, for example International Biodeterioration & Biodegradation. However, I leave this to the editor.
In addition to that, although I find the study of interest, I have some major comments that need to be addressed before considering publication
The introduction is quite repetitive and the same concepts are repeated multiple times. It can be more concise. It should also cover more aspects related to the investigation undertaken in this work, such as how the impact of fungi is evaluated, what analytical techniques are generally used?
The novelty of this work is not clear and should be emphasised in the Research Aim paragraph.
Lines 95-101: this part is a bit confusing. Can it be said more clearly?
Line 140: can you show an image of the papyrus samples before and after thermal ageing?
Line 165: “compared to the standard” does this mean compared to unaged non-deteriorated samples? Please, clarify. Additional SEM conditions should be reported.
Same for the FTIR description
Line 173: references needed
Section 2.6: all the details about the procedure used for GC-MS analysis must be added.
Section 3.1: I find this section repetitive. It seems like the same result is repeated several times. I also think Table 2 and Table 3 can be combined.
In section 2.4.1 Talaromyces purpureogenus is also listed as a fungus used in these samples, but the results are not reported.
Section 3.3.2: what about all the other samples? Considering that only 4 figures are reported, maybe there is room for additional SEM images. Even if not, the main observations should be reported.
Section 3.3.3: which kind of normalisation has been adopted to evaluate the actual decrease of certain bands? Have ratios been considered? The results here are poorly presented.
Figure 2: the legend in the figure does not match the caption. The x axis label is wrong.
In most figures and tables the name of some fungi are abbreviated and some are not. Please, correct and be consistent.
Section 3.5: was the composition of only fennel oil investigated? These results must be presented more accurately. Alpha, beta, etc are misspelled in the text and in the table. Also, I imagine this is not the first time fennel oil is studied, so please cite the relevant literature. The molecular identification must be supported by discussion of the mass spectra as well. m/z values should be added to the table and you should explain how the identifications were obtained.
Table 6: who is Dr Duke?
Discussion: this section is extremely repetitive, overlapping with both the results and the introduction. You should not use this section as a second introduction or to repeat your results, but to discuss them in the light of the available literature and previous studies, to underline the advancement represented by this work (if any…). I actually believe this section can be completely removed and the relevant parts can be moved to Introduction and Results. However, I would leave it to the authors to choose, but this needs a complete rewriting.
Conclusions: I think here you can actually expand and elaborate a little bit more on your main results. You mention a treatment method but you do not specify with what.
The English can definitely be improved