Comment by caycep
2 years ago
the last time I looked at microbiome stuff, someone at Stanford tried to chop up all the microbes in poop and sequence all the RNA/DNA sequences they could collect from that soup. It amounted to several petabytes of data or something ridiculous. Has anyone come up w/ a better way of analysis?
The 16S rRNA sequencing you are referring to is now quite cheap and efficient. [1]
Viome is one of many companies offering this as a service. Viome isn't so good at giving you the underlying data, some of the others may be better; look at their example reports or ask their support. Ombre, BIOHM, Tiny Health, Floré, etc.
In terms of whether the add-on services they offer are valuable (tailored prebiotics / probiotics / diet advice based on their reading of the literature) I think only time and randomized controlled trials will tell. Not that any of these services have any incentive to run trials! But it may be a useful time-saver for a self-experimenter who would have been digging through the literature to try to come to the same conclusions on things to test.
[1]: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-13036-1
That's mind boggling. Is this published anywhere?
not sure...the talk was at NEURIPS 2016 https://nips.cc/virtual/2016/invited-talk/6190
ubiome offered this service before the shutdown. Can't speak to the technical process. Anyone work ubiome in the past?