Dr. Morgens Jakobsen

Dr. Morgens Jakobsen

Editor-in-Chief

International Journal of Food Microbiology July 4, 1999

Dear Dr. Jakobsen,

Thank for you help in processing our manuscript entitled “Incidence of Highly Genetically Diversified Vibrio parahaemolyticus in Seafood Imported from Asian Countries”. The manuscript has been revised according to the suggestions provided by you and the reviewers. The dispositions are listed as follows:

Reviewer A (Comments on manuscript)

1.  All the wordings are corrected according to reviewers suggestions.

2.  Detail about he PCR assay added as recommended: See P.5 line 17-22, “DNA amplifications were carried out in buffer (50 mM KCl, 1.5 mM MgCl2, 10 mM Tris HCl, pH 8.8) containing 200 mM (each) dATP, dCTP, dGTP, and dTTP, 0.25 mM primer, 2.0 DyNAZyme II thermostable DNA polymerase (Finnzymes Oy, Espoo, Finland), and 100 ml of template DNA. Amplification was performed in a thermal cycler, Personal cycler 20 (Biometra biomedizinische analytik Gmbh, Gottingen, Germany)”.

3.  Comments on Kelly and Stroh (1989) and Okuda et al.(1997a) added as recommended. P.8. line 23-28 “The urease positive and KP- strains were reported to be related to locally acquired extraintestinal infections (Kelly and Stroh, 1989). In another report by Okuda et al.(1997a) the clinical originated urease positive strains show stronger correlation with the trh gene than with the tdh gene. The three urease positive and KP- isolates were probably not enteropathogenic.”

4.  P.9 line 4 “presence of toxin” changed to “presence of toxin gene (tdh)”.

5.  About Table 2. Due to the highly genetic diversity of these isolates, there is no specific relationship amoung the origin country, products and PFGE types.

6.  The Legends for Figures are corrected according to suggestions.

Reviewer B

1.  P.2 line 15. Changed to “different but mostly”.

2.  Corrected.

3.  10% of glycerol was added to the bacterial culture in broth-3% NaCl medium, frozen and stocked at –85oC.

4.  This paragraph is meaningful showing the high quantity of seafood imported to Taiwan and that will help to disseminate the food-borne pathogens. This paragraph is moved to Introduction, P3 line 26-P.4 line 7.

5.  In this manuscript, only incidence of V. parahaemolyticus in seafood samples are compared.

6.  Corrected.

7.  P.10 line 15. The sentence is rewritten as “Typing of the highly diversified environmental strains is extremely difficult.”

8-12.  All corrected according to suggestions.

Sincerely yours,

______

Hin-chung Wong, Ph.D.