GRAMMAR

I am working on submitting a paper, having a minor grammar struggle here.

"We can determine whether instances are co-resident in under 10 seconds and as few as 2.5 seconds for a given probe."

Should it be: "We can determine whether instances are co-resident in under 10 seconds and in as few as 2.5 seconds for a given probe."

(Added an 'in' after the 'and').

Thanks.

It's pretty obvious that the whole sentence is there to establish upper (10 second) and lower (2.5 second) bounds on calculation times for a single given probe. Thinking about it as a special case for one given probe makes little sense and sounds awkward. If it were "the given probe", I would agree with you, but it isn't. It's talking about an abstract, hypothetical probe, and not a single specific one.