Upload additional files	DRR-202205-01/form/gx-DR-1653683854_AK.pdf
Reviewer name and names of any other individual's who aided in reviewer	Andreas Kroh
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
Are all data available and do they match the descriptions in the paper?	No
Additional Comments	The data was not provided together with the manuscript, so I am unable to check this. The manuscript, however, states that the data will be deposited in GenBank
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	Lovality details missing, Voucher specimen number missing, Repository institution for voucher specimen not identified
Is the data acquisition clear, complete and methodologically sound?	No
Additional Comments	see details below
Is there sufficient detail in the methods and data-processing steps to allow reproduction?	No
Additional Comments	see details below
Is there sufficient data validation and statistical analyses of data quality?	No
Additional Comments	unclear - some detail is missing in the methods section to allow judegement - see details below
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?	No
Additional Comments	see above and below - voucher specimen number is missing, some methodological information is missing, references to original papers providing sequences used in the analysis are missing, etc. - see details below
Any Additional Overall Comments to the Author	The manuscript by Majeske et al. on the mitogenome of Diadema antillarum is an interesting contribution to the phylogeny of Echinoidea. There are, however, a number of issues which should be addressed in a revised version, in my opinion. 1) Please provide coordinates for the sampling site (and a locality name) instead of a general region 2) Please provide the repository number and institution where the voucher specimen has been deposited 3) Did you verify the identification and made sure that this is D. antillarum rather than D. africanum (which allegedly has repopulated some D. antillarum habitats in the Caribbbean and GoM) – for a morphological comparison see: Rodríguez, A., Hernández, J. C., Clemente, S. & Coppard, S. E. 2013. A new species of Diadema (Echinodermata: Echinoidea: Diadematidae) from the eastern Atlantic Ocean and a neotype designation of Diadema antillarum (Philippi, 1845). Zootaxa 3636, 144-170. 4) Please report the insert size that has been targeted during library prep. (typically either 350 bp or 550 bp for the kit mentioned) 5) Explain why the S. purpuratus mitogenome was uses to map the reads rather than one of the diadematid mitogenomes 6) Please explain why the custom assembly pipeline was used rather than one of the well-established assemblers like SPAdes, Abyss, Velvet, etc. 7) Please provide a coverage graph 8) Position of the non-coding region is given in # bp – but without information which feature is considered as zero in a linearized version of the circular sequence the position is useless 9) Please explain what exactly was used for the analysis – the full nucleotid sequence including non-coding regions, just the CDS of the protein coding genes, or …? 10) Please add the reference to original papers that published the sequences you use in the tree 11) Please explain the choice of the model used in the analysis – was some Modeltest run? 12) Please provide the fasta file together with a revised version to allow checking the quality of the annotation etc. 13) Fig. 1: please provide some information on the photo shown – is this the specimen that was sampled, add this info and the locality in the caption 14) Fig. 2: add the accession numbers in the tree and highlight the new sequence 15) Please see additional minor comments in the annotated version, which is attached Summing up, I recommend acceptance after major revision. Kind regards Andreas Kroh, NHM Vienna, 10/7/2022
Recommendation	Major Revision