
A Surprising Comparison of Male vs. Female Microbiomes - accarmichael
http://www.ubiomeblog.com/surprising-comparison-male-vs-female-microbiomes/
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jghn
I would think that the microbiome is so heavily influenced by one's
environment (what they ingest, etc) that things like gender wouldn't matter so
much. Considering that it's fairly easy to determine things like when someone
traveled by simply looking at time series data of their microbiome, locality
and diet would be the things that I'd expect to see differentiated.

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TrainedMonkey
Article concludes weaker statement as well:

"It turns out that in our dataset, there is no statistically significant
difference between male microbiomes and female microbiomes. And, given a
random sample, we would not be able to determine if it came from a man or a
woman."

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Panoramix
I found that completely unsurprising

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stcredzero
It's about as unsurprising as the MythBusters finding that both men and women
fart.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mNU6MFQP1k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mNU6MFQP1k)

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marssaxman
This article would have been more interesting if the author had explained the
context which made them expect to find a gender-linked difference in the
microbiomes. As someone unfamiliar with this field, the results of this study
were completely _un_ surprising; it's exactly what I would have naively
imagined to be the case.

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GregBuchholz
Pie charts? Why not a histogram for each bacterial phylum plotted for men and
women?

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gojomo
And some discussion of the statistical-significance test(s) used, since from
the tables, there _are_ some big differences in category proportions. (The
text and the charts aren't clearly in agreement.)

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gojomo
These seem to be results for the intestinal microbiome. There might be
different results for the skin microbiome, the sinus microbiome, or the
vaginal microbiome.

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jghn
"or the vaginal microbiome"

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you _can_ detect a gender
difference here.

On a serious note, for better or worse it seems that 'microbiome' is often
used colloquially to mean 'gut microbiome'

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muneeb
I won't be surprised if many new discoveries come out of the dataset uBiome is
constructing simply because no one has ever collected such a dataset before.
And at this scale.

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cplease
My mind is also unblown.

