Introns of plant pri - miRNAs enhance miRNA biogenesis and function

As you will see, all referees acknowledge that the findings are potentially interesting and suitable for publication in EMBO reports. However, both referees 1 and 2 point out that the observed effect of introns on enhancing mature miR163 levels should be extended to other miRNAs. Both referees also mention the inconsistency between your study and the one from Voinnet's lab regarding the requirement of the 5' splice site of introns for the enhanced levels of mature miRNAs. This inconsistency must be addressed and at least a possible explanation should be provided. Referee 2 suggests that the constructs used in both studies should be compared in order to address the opposing results. This referee finally also indicates missing statistical analyses of the data that need to be performed.