Reply to Wade and Laub, 'Concerns about "Stress-Induced MazF-Mediated Proteins in Escherichia coli"'.

We thank Dr. Wade and Dr. Laub for taking the time to offer comments regarding our paper “Stress-Induced MazF-Mediated Proteins in Escherichia coli,” but we disagree with the points raised by them, and we answer all the questions as follows. In response to the first concern raised by Dr. Wade and Dr. Laub, namely, that there is no significant enrichment of ACA sequences upstream of MazF-induced genes, we did not claim that “there is a significant enrichment of ACA sequences upstream of MazF-induced genes.” Rather we claim that MazF-induced genes carry an ACA sequence in the region 100 nucleotides upstream of the AUG initiator of their mRNAs. We did not use the phrase “enrichment of ACA sequences.” Furthermore, as noted our criticized paper (1), our results corroborated previous findings (2) showing that in E. coli, the stress-induced MazF-mediated stress translation machinery (STM) …