We recently read with great interest the paper entitled “Probing Genomic Aspects of the Multi-
Host Pathogen Clostridium perfringens Reveals Significant Pangenome Diversity, and a
Diverse Array of Virulence Factors” by Kiu et al., Front. Microbiol., December 2017. In the
study, comparative genomic analyses and genetic relatedness of 56 Clostridium perfringens
(including 51 genomes available in GenBank and 5 C. pefringens strains sequenced by
these researchers) was assessed using various bioinformatic approaches (Kiu et al., 2017) …

We firstly would like to express our appreciation for the comments and efforts made by
Gohari and Prescott regarding their detailed commentary of our Clostridium perfringens
Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) based genomic and phylogenetic study we published in
December 2017. We are particularly pleased to note that the authors acknowledge that our
“work has contributed significantly to understanding of genomic diversity of this bacterium.”
The aim of our study was to conduct a robust large-scale WGS study on this important …