This manuscript presents a timely and broad overview of synthetic microbial cocultures for lignocellulosic biomanufacturing, structured around four design objectives and their application across different pretreatment scenarios. The topic aligns well with the journal’s sustainability scope, and the inclusion of emerging tools is commendable. However, as a Tutorial Review, the manuscript requires substantial revision to better fulfill the educational, introductory mandate of the article type and to explicitly meet Green Chemistry’s requirement that published work demonstrate a significant advance in green chemistry and a clear comparison with existing methods. In its current form, the manuscript reads more as a conventional review than a pedagogical tutorial, and the green chemistry narrative remains implicit rather than analytically demonstrated.
1. Consider include a dedicated section or summary table comparing coculture-based lignocellulose processes against conventional monoculture or chemical routes using sustainability metrics (e.g., E-factor, carbon yield, energy intensity, life-cycle indicators) drawn from literature or modeling studies.
2. Discuss under what conditions microbial cocultures offer genuine environmental advantages over less complex monoculture systems, beyond conceptual benefit.
3. The extracted Tables 1 and 2 exhibit severe formatting corruption (repetitive numerical strings) that make them unreadable. The authors should: Reformat all tables to be self-contained, consistent in strain nomenclature, and, where possible, include quantitative performance indicators (titer, yield, productivity) to enable direct comparison among designs.
4. Consider adding a summary table that links each coculture design objective specifically to green chemistry metrics and to the constraints imposed by major pretreatment types.
5. The paper currently treats scalability and economic viability as afterthoughts. For a journal focused on greener chemical enterprise, a tutorial review must prepare researchers to evaluate processes holistically. The authors should add a subsection on “Sustainability assessment and process evaluation” that introduces basic techno-economic analysis (TEA) and life-cycle assessment (LCA) concepts applicable to coculture bioprocesses, referencing case studies where possible.
6. Discuss how coculture complexity affects downstream processing, energy demand, and waste generation, and outline strategies to align laboratory design with industrial constraints.
7. The review describes advantages of cocultures extensively but underrepresents persistent challenges such as long-term genetic instability, emergence of cheater populations, phage contamination, and difficulty of online monitoring. While these are mentioned, they are not systematically analyzed.

The authors have addressed the comments suitably, and the MS can be accepted now.