Reviewer name and names of any other individual's who aided in reviewer	Peter Mulhair
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	This manuscript is clear and concise. However, there are some issues with consistency in species names used throughout the manuscript. First, on line 99 Eubasilissa regina should be italicised. Secondly, I would recommend after the initial use of the full names of the species (Plodia interpunctella and Eubasilissa regina) that these be referred to as P. interpunctella and E. regina in the rest of the text. There is inconsistent use of full species names, shortened species names and genus name alone which may cause confusion. Please read through and correct these inconsistencies throughout the manuscript text.
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>	No
Additional Comments	Missing items from the metadata checklist include (1) Coding gene annotations (GFF), Coding gene nucleotide sequences and Coding gene translated sequences (fasta) and (2) Full (not summary) BUSCO results output files (text).
Is the data acquisition clear, complete and methodologically sound?	Yes
Additional Comments	Is there a specific reason why fifth instar larvae were used for RNA sequencing of silk glands of P. interpunctella? If this stage is biologically important than it may be worth stating why this specific stage is used.
Is there sufficient detail in the methods and data-processing steps to allow reproduction?	Yes
Additional Comments	However, the code used for Heavy fibroin gene annotation could be made publicly available to enable reproducibility of this analysis (using other species for example or to annotate other repeat rich genes). This could be uploaded to the rest of the relevant code at https://github.com/AshlynPowell/silk-gene-visualization
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	One point worth making is that on Line 161 you state that "The assembly for E. regina is the most contiguous Trichoptera genome assembly to date.". However, there are currently 3 chromosome level assemblies available for Trichoptera on NCBI. I would recommend removing this statement, or changing it by also pointing to these other genomes available.
Any Additional Overall Comments to the Author	This work was carried out to a very high quality and I am particularly happy to see more high quality genomic and transcriptomic data for these groups of insects. I also think that annotation of the Heavy fibroin genes is of particular importance and relevance to researchers interested in silk evolution and evolution and annotation of repeat rich proteins.
Recommendation	Minor Revision