I deeply appreciate your interest in our study.

First of all, what you pointed out was the subject to think about.

We recognize that culture and broth microdilution method is still the gold standard for the detection of Mycoplasma hominis (M. hominis) and Ureaplasma urealyticum (U. urealyticum) in clinical samples. However, commercially available diagnostic assays offer a simple alternative to conventional culture. One of the assays is Mycoplasma IST-2 kit (BioMérieux, Marcy l'Etoile, France), which has been widely used for the detection of M. hominis and U. urealyticum because of simultaneous identification, enumeration and susceptibility tests for 9 antibiotics.

We realize that we should have described in the article that the antibiotics susceptibility test (AST) of IST-2 kit was according to MIC breakpoints set by the manufacturer, which are based on their own validation and Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) guideline. Since our study was conducted between 2009 and 2014 and the IST-2 kit had been developed earlier, it was difficult to apply the current CLSI guidelines in our study. We understand that updated kit in accordance with the current CLSI guideline is being developed; therefore, comparative evaluation of the new kit in future would be extremely meaningful.

Since the IST-2 kit is a simple assay to perform both identification and AST simultaneously, not sequentially, the results for nine identical antibiotics in the article were obtained for both strains and included naturally resistant antibiotics. Fortunately, all of our results showed resistance against antibiotics which each strain should be intrinsically resistant to. Our article contains information on the results of antibiotic susceptibility test when two strains existed together.

We carefully reviewed our article again under consideration of your suggestion. We gained new perspectives and learned what to supplement for future research.