Response to comment on 'Initiation of chromosome replication controls both division and replication cycles in E. coli through a double-adder mechanism'

Last year we published an article (Witz et al., 2019) in which we used time-lapse microscopy in combination with microfluidics to measure growth, division and replication in single E. coli cells on the one hand, and developed a new statistical analysis method to calculate the ability of different cell cycle models to capture the correlation structure observed in the data on the other hand. This led us to propose a new model of cell cycle control in E. coli which we called the double-adder model. Recently Le Treut et al. published a comment (Le Treut et al., 2020) on our article which made a number of highly critical claims, including allegations that our own data support a different model than the one we proposed, and that our model cannot reproduce the adder phenotype observed in the data. We here show that all these allegations are false and based on basic analysis errors. Although our focus is on explaining the errors in the analysis of Le Treut et al, we have attempted to make the presentation of interest to a broader scientific audience by discussing the issues in the context of what our current understanding is of the bacterial cell cycle, and to what extent recent data either support or reject various proposed models.