Reviewer name and names of any other individual's who aided in reviewer	Inge Seim
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?	No
Please add additional comments on language quality to clarify if needed	The authors need to polish their English further. This is particularly obvious in the Abstract and is likely to result in an unwarranted lower readership of the work.
Are all data available and do they match the descriptions in the paper?	Yes
Additional Comments	I want to commend the authors for sharing data and associated code.
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
Is the data acquisition clear, complete and methodologically sound?	Yes
Additional Comments
Is there sufficient detail in the methods and data-processing steps to allow reproduction?	Yes
Additional Comments
Is there sufficient data validation and statistical analyses of data quality?	Not my area of expertise
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	• R2 should be R^2 (that is, please superscript the '2'). • The sentence 'Further comparison between sequencing platforms would be useful for for exploration using as similar amplification conditions as possible. This data being provided as one such benchmark' at the end of Results is vague and needs to be rewritten. • You need to more clearly state that you do not recommend to combine MGI and Illumina data sets for metabarcoding -- unlike e.g. BGISEQ-500 and Illumina RNA-seq/short-insert WGS data which can be readily combined.
Recommendation	Minor Revision