A reply to the comment of Kim et al. on "Visible-light-driven, hierarchically heterostructured, and flexible silver/bismuth oxyiodide/titania nanofibrous membranes for highly efficient water disinfection" is presented. We would like to thank Kim et al. for being interested in our recent work [J. Song, J. Yu, G. Sun, Y. Si, and B. Ding, J. Colloid Interface Sci. 555 (2019) 636]. In response to the comment from Kim et al., we studied and discussed the effects of silver ions under both dark and visible light irradiation conditions on the inactivation of E. coli, and verified that Ag ions played quite minor roles in E. coli disinfection for Ag/BiOl/TiO2 under our experimental conditions. (C) 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.