The manuscript " Chromosome-level genome assembly of the spotted sea bass, Lateolabrax maculatus" is another important contribution to the scientific community working on comparative teleost genomics. As with similar studies, this manuscript appears to be submitted with the purpose of releasing this valuable dataset to the public, and holds no claim to solve any specific scientific question, but rather put up possibilities for the future use of this dataset.

Major comments

The authors have made a good attempt to chromosomal level sequencing of the spotted sea bass genome, using several paired-end, mate-pair libraries and Hi-C sequencing. However, the results, and especially authors reported very restricted assembly stat. Even though scaffolding greatly improved the assembly, I wonder how many gaps in the assembly scaffolds, that is very critical for gene information.

The authors haven't performed an evaluation of their genome assembly or their predicted gene set. Such evaluations are usually done by tools such as BUSCO.

For gene annotation, the author used de novo and homolog-based gene prediction with other fishes, why don't used transcriptome data of this fish? So all of this annotated gene were only predicted genes. The authors should add the transcriptome data, and reevaluate evidence-based annotation.

Level of interest Please indicate how interesting you found the manuscript:
An article whose findings are important to those with closely related research interests

Quality of written English Please indicate the quality of language in the manuscript:
Acceptable

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Authors' response to reviews: (https://drive.google.com/open?id=1VNOysYduc9BBnKrzVAr6q6iTLpt0Gs4l)