In the manuscript entitled 'Low coverage sequencing of three echinoderm genomes: the brittle star Ophionereis fasciata, the sea star Patiriella regularis, and the sea cucumber Australostichopus mollis' by Kyle et al., the authors performed the low coverage sequencing on five echinoderm species inclduing Crinoidea, Ophiuroidea, Asteroidea, Echinoidea and Holothuroidea; and performed a simple de novo assembly on them. The objective of this article is meaningful, and these sequencing reads would help the future echinoderm genomics studies. There are however, some major issues that the authors still need to address:

1. For a low coverage genome assembly, multiple k-mers should be used to get longer N50 and average contig length, therefore, more k-mers should be used in SOAP and ABySS (at least use same k-mers with Platanus)

2. The detailed Augustus gene prediction results were not provided, e.g., how many candidate genes were initial predicted through Augustus in each species. In additions, it's more reasonable to mask the repeat genome region first and then run the genome annotation to avoid the interference of repetitive elements.

3. Why the gene prediction were only performed on three species other than five species?

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