
American Gut Project – Open-source human microbiome analysis - cromulent
http://americangut.org
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brightball
Oh this is awesome. I always wished there would be something like this along
the lines of blood tests. Keep an anonymous public database of blood tests
results with known diagnosis of the patient, age, ethnicity, global region,
etc and publish it out. Can be completely anonymous and people would basically
just get an immutable entry every time they have a blood test over their
lifetime with whatever the dataset happened to be that day.

Would be an excellent way to mine for commonalities among different
conditions. I just assumed there was already something like that, but private.
Seems like it would enable fairly significant study.

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EGreg
Why don't they have a public, encrypted database where anyone can use their
private key to sign certificates authorizing providers to post information
about them, and the providers sign it with their certificates also? So you can
share (some of) your health history with anyone you want to, but otherwise it
would be anonymous and private??

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state
I've often asked your first question, and I think the answer is because it's
just not simple for an ordinary person. The public benefit is obvious, but
it'd have to be decentralized and the technology for that just isn't easy
enough for most people to use.

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dpflan
I can't get the site to load. But how do things like this fit in?

1\. NIH Human Microbiome Project - [http://hmpdacc.org/](http://hmpdacc.org/)

2\. uBiome - [http://ubiome.com/](http://ubiome.com/)

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mmesh
From [http://americangut.org/our-results-so-far/](http://americangut.org/our-
results-so-far/) \- "The American Gut project has many more samples
representing more groups of people than other studies, such as the Human
Microbiome Project, Global Gut, or Personal Genome Project."

No hard numbers on their site, but there's over 7500 contributors on their
sample collection kit fundraising page.

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Govannon
They quantify the difference in samples here:

    
    
                        HMP  GG  PGP AGP
         Total Samples 4,788 531 683 4,658
    

[http://americangut.org/wp-
content/uploads/2016/02/mod1_main....](http://americangut.org/wp-
content/uploads/2016/02/mod1_main.pdf)

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marze
This is excellent and can only help to improve the (currently dismal)
understanding of the gut biome.

But, it only measures bacteria and archaea. To eukaryotes and fungi, it is
blind. And those are obviously I'm important components of gut flora.

Since they can be measured fairly inexpensively with more conventional means,
perhaps it would improve the science if they could charge double the $99, and
get a basic correlated measure of common eukaryotes and fungi in each sample.

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blacksmith_tb
And viruses, too! I am very curious to find out what sorts of bacteriophages
are part of the picture. In general we have some sense that actively changing
the ratios of different bacterial species (e.g. with antibiotics, or fecal
transplants) can address some health problems - but it's possible that a
targeted phage might be another way to accomplish that as well. (edited for
fuller thought)

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mmf
And will they share the data they collect so that everybody has a shot at
making discoveries?

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cromulent
According to the FAQ, yes.

"All of the microbial sequencing data and health and lifestyle information
that we collect are made public through the European Bioinformatics Institute,
enabling researchers from all over the world to ask groundbreaking questions
using the American Gut dataset."

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biofox
For those in the UK, there is the British Gut Project:

[http://britishgut.org/](http://britishgut.org/)

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danr4
This is a good step towards knowing more.

Even though it seems microbiome is a science buzzword, it might be our entry
to understanding, quantifying, the individual biologic differences between
humans.

I long for the day I can take a pill that analyzes your gut and tells you what
are the effects of your diet, and what you could do to improve ______
(concentration, tiredness, excrements, muscle buildup).

Gutyltics anyone?

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vibrio
The term "microbiome" has become tired and 'frothy'. I advocate using the
unglamorous but old school term "microbial flora" however futile and
unimportant my effort may be.

How about a smart toilet rather than a pill for the daily diet analysis?

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danr4
I agree. Microbial flora also sounds pretty, because flowers.

About the analysis... it's not about analyzing your poop, it's about analyzing
how your digestive system works on what you intake.

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ldoroud
You can check out
[http://humanfoodproject.com/americangut/](http://humanfoodproject.com/americangut/)
for more information on what to expect, analysis pipeline and privacy of your
data. Also, there is a very cool TED talk by Rob Knight on gut microbiome:
[https://www.ted.com/talks/rob_knight_how_our_microbes_make_u...](https://www.ted.com/talks/rob_knight_how_our_microbes_make_us_who_we_are?language=en)

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mrcactu5
Wait so I am going to pay money to send my shit to these guys?

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rubyfan
More info needed on privacy, data sharing, etc.

