*Gusakov critiques our methodology for comparing the cellulolytic activity of the bacterial cellulase CelA with the fungal cellulase Cel7A. We address his concerns by clarifying some misconceptions, carefully referencing the literature, and justifying our approach to point out that the results from our study still stand. G usakov (1) argues that the pH used in our study (2) for the enzymatic assays of Cel7A was not within the range of optimal pH values for this enzyme and that the substrate loading data were missing. He provides various references that we believe are hard to interpret, because they do not show curves representing activity versus pH. However, we have found such data in a paper by Boer et al. (3), according to which Trichoderma reesei Cel7A at pH 5.5 retains 95 to 96% of the activity it had at pH 5.0 [see figure 5 in (3)]. Nevertheless, we realized that there was a typographical error in the supplementary material (SM) of our paper, stating that our assays were performed at pH 5.5; the Cel7A assays were in fact run at pH 5.0, and the SM has been corrected. Regarding the substrate loading, the data in figure 1 in our paper were measured using 10 mg glucan/ml [1% (w/v)] of buffer for the Avicel experiments and comparable loadings for the other substrates. The original SM specified that the mass loading of the substrate was 1% for carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC), Avicel, and oat spelt xylan but did not explicitly clarify that it was similar for all the assays.Gusakov also argues that the experiments to compare the activity of CelA/b-glucosidase with Cel7A/b-glucosidase should have been conducted instead of referencing published work. We feel that the articles we referenced for this discussion were sufficient in this regard because they evaluated the effects of b-glucosidases on the performance of Cel7A using a wide range of b-glucosidase loadings (4-6). Additionally, our manuscript focused on the characterization of CelA, and the comparison to Cel7A was only conducted without the presence of b-glucosidases. Given that our Cel7A assays were actually conducted at pH 5.0, we feel that the addition of b-glucosidase could not provide more than a 30% improvement.Gusakov also argues that our results would be less dramatic if other mixtures or individual cellobiohydrolases, thought to be more efficient than those produced by T. reesei, were to have been used instead of Cel7A. However, the point of our paper was to compare single enzymes, not mixtures of enzymes, and in doing so, we selected the most commonly used single enzyme in commercial preparations, T. reesei Cel7A. We chose to compare purified enzymes because the variability in microbial broths can be considerable.Additionally, Gusakov mentions a patent showing the existence of a cellobiohydrolase I (CBH I) more active than the enzyme from T. reesei. This patent compares T. reesei CBH I and Penicillium funiculosum CBH I on a timeto-target basis-in other words, time to achieve a certain level of conversion (7). If we compare enzyme activities in terms of ...