Reviewer name and names of any other individual's who aided in reviewer	Dr. Lukas Becker
Do you understand and agree to our policy of having open and named reviews, and having your review included with the published papers. (If no, please inform the editor that you cannot review this manuscript.)	Yes
Is the language of sufficient quality?	Yes
Please add additional comments on language quality to clarify if needed	Line 65-66: coral should be written in plural: corals - I would use the following beginning: Unlike reef building corals, ...
Are all data available and do they match the descriptions in the paper?	Yes
Additional Comments
Are the data and metadata consistent with relevant minimum information or reporting standards? See GigaDB checklists for examples <a href="http://gigadb.org/site/guide" target="_blank">http://gigadb.org/site/guide</a>	Yes
Additional Comments	The Zenodo repository contains all information required to evaluate and reproduce the bioinformatic pipeline. The scripts are clearly documented, and the NCBI BioProject and associated FTP site provide all genomic data necessary to access, assess, and reuse this genomic resource.
Is the data acquisition clear, complete and methodologically sound?	No
Additional Comments	Please clarify the phrase “filtering for chimeric adapters.” Based on the reported Porechop v0.2.4 command using the --discard_middle option, it appears that reads containing internal adapter sequences were treated as putative chimeric reads and discarded. The wording should therefore be revised to distinguish between internal adapter sequences and chimeric reads.
Is there sufficient detail in the methods and data-processing steps to allow reproduction?	No
Additional Comments	At line 231, the authors state that Flye was run with default parameters. However, the reported command includes the explicit options --genome-size 275m and --scaffold. Please revise the Methods to mention these settings and avoid describing the analysis as having been performed entirely with default parameters.
Is there sufficient data validation and statistical analyses of data quality?	Yes
Additional Comments
Is the validation suitable for this type of data?	Yes
Additional Comments
Is there sufficient information for others to reuse this dataset or integrate it with other data?	Yes
Additional Comments
Any Additional Overall Comments to the Author	As the animal was maintained under aposymbiotic conditions, it could be informative to provide a brief summary of the BlobToolKit taxonomic assignments, particularly the taxa represented among the sequences removed during decontamination. Given that the assembly size was reduced from approximately 258 Mb to 237.34 Mb, the excluded contigs may contain useful information on residual symbionts, associated microorganisms, or other non-target sequences. Although not essential for the Data Release, the authors could consider providing the filtered contigs, together with their taxonomic assignments, as a supplementary file or in a public repository to facilitate transparency and future reuse. Although not essential for this Data Release, the manuscript could be further enhanced by providing a supplementary table listing the 325 genes predicted only in one strain, together with their orthogroup assignments and available functional annotations. This would facilitate reuse of the dataset and provide a useful starting point for future comparative analyses. The gene prediction and functional annotation are highly comprehensive and well executed, providing a valuable and thoroughly characterized genomic resource. I identified only two minor points that require clarification in the Methods: the wording concerning the removal of putative chimeric reads with Porechop and the description of the Flye assembly parameters. The remaining comments are optional suggestions that could improve transparency and facilitate future reuse of the dataset, but they are not essential for publication.
Recommendation	Minor Revision