Thankyou for your detailed responses to the reviewers comments. There are quite a number of substantive changes and improvements which the reviewers recommend to improve the clarity and presentation of the manuscript. If you would amend the manuscript as you have described in your responses then the manuscript will be reconsidered for publication. On one specific issue, reviewer 1 comment 23 recommends the table and figure titles need to be more precise. Your suggested changes result in titles which are too long and contain methodological information which does not need to be included. I would encourage the authors to construct specific titles which enable the reader to understand the table or figure without reference to the text but in a more concise way. Where a figure has related data in a table this can be simply referenced to the respective table.
Your sincerely
Jeanette Whitaker

Thankyou for your detailed responses and the substantive changes you have made to the manuscript. The manuscript is significantly improved from the original version and just needs some minor revision before publication. These are detailed below.

Title, reviewer 2 indicated the title needed changing and you have suggested an alternative. It seems from your discussion that replacing purified phytases with either "phytate-degrading enzymes" or "commercial phytases" would clarify the scope of the paper.

The abstract needs 1 or 2 sentences at the beginning to explain the context of the study, why is this study necessary and what is the relevance, before you go into the methods and what you have done.

You have two hypotheses in the introduction, but these are not referred to again until the conclusions section. I would like to see them referred to in the methods and results/discussion sections so it is clear how your experiments test these two hypotheses.

Dear authors, I am glad to communicate that your manuscript has been accepted for publication in SOIL.

Kind regards

Jorge
On behalf of Executive Editors of SOIL