Dear Drs. Hare, Grimwood, and Chang,

We sincerely thank you for your correspondence and appreciate you pointing out the unintended error in our publication’s citation. We agree with your response and feedback.

To clarify the point that there is heterogeneity in the literature about the use of NPS to understand lower lung microbiota in disease, we have added the following references to our sentence:

“Several studies assessed a possible correlation between BALF and nasopharyngeal swab (NPS) specimens in terms of chronic LRTI etiology, with inconsistent results [1,2,3,4,5].”

Carla A. Talarico, on behalf of the co-authors