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Reply

Reply to Comment on “Enumeration of Escherichia coli in Probiotic Products. Microorganisms 2019, 7, 437”

Department of Civil Engineering, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC V8P 5C2, Canada
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Submission received: 6 February 2020 / Accepted: 6 February 2020 / Published: 12 February 2020
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Probiotics: From Quality Assessment to Microbial Ecology)
We thank Wassenaar and colleagues for their Comment on our recent paper [1] and appreciate the opportunity to address it. Although not entirely explicit, their Comment seems to suggest that our assessment of E. coli in two probiotic products is possibly underestimated due to the enumeration technique we adopted.
In our work we utilized the Colilert Quanti-tray/2000 system [2] which is a well-known method for E. coli enumeration based on Most Probable Number (MPN). There is a plethora of published literature reporting on utilization of this technique to enumerate E. coli in a variety of matrices and in a wide range of concentrations. This is in stark contrast with their Comment that seems to imply that the applicability of such MPN technique is limited to surface water samples with low coliform concentrations.
We appreciate the underpinning differences between the enumeration technique chosen for our study and those recognized under the regulatory requirements of probiotic manufacturing. We are open to accept that there may be differences in results within and between these varied techniques. Our estimates of E. coli in the two sampled probiotics can be interpreted considering such a possibility, until such a comparison between methods (which was beyond the scope of our study) is done for these probiotics. For now, to our knowledge, they are the only published results that have been subject to peer review.

Funding

This research received no external funding.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

References

  1. Zimmer, C.; Dorea, C. Enumeration of Escherichia coli in Probiotic Products. Microorganisms 2019, 7, 437. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [PubMed] [Green Version]
  2. IDEXX. Colilert-IDEXX USA. Available online: https://www.idexx.com/en/water/water-products-services/colilert/ (accessed on 10 July 2018).

Share and Cite

MDPI and ACS Style

Zimmer, C.; Dorea, C.C. Reply to Comment on “Enumeration of Escherichia coli in Probiotic Products. Microorganisms 2019, 7, 437”. Microorganisms 2020, 8, 242. https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/microorganisms8020242

AMA Style

Zimmer C, Dorea CC. Reply to Comment on “Enumeration of Escherichia coli in Probiotic Products. Microorganisms 2019, 7, 437”. Microorganisms. 2020; 8(2):242. https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/microorganisms8020242

Chicago/Turabian Style

Zimmer, Camille, and Caetano C. Dorea. 2020. "Reply to Comment on “Enumeration of Escherichia coli in Probiotic Products. Microorganisms 2019, 7, 437”" Microorganisms 8, no. 2: 242. https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/microorganisms8020242

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