[dougmccune]

My wife and I both got kits (reasonably quickly shipped) and got our results, also reasonably quickly (within a few weeks of sending them back if I recall). But the results were almost identical between us, even though we have very different digestive health systems/symptoms. There was one metric that was totally out of normal range, but the reading was exactly the same between the two of us. We were definitely left not being able to get any useful information out of the data and not trusting it at all. I think my wife emailed them asking why the results were basically identical to mine (including the totally abnormal metric), and I don't think she ever got a reply.

[Fomite]

I'd be far more surprised if you and your wife had markedly different microbiomes.

[bsder]

> I think my wife emailed them asking why the results were basically identical to mine (including the totally abnormal metric), and I don't think she ever got a reply.

Well, to be fair, one of the working hypotheses about human mating behavior is that one of its goals is to equalize the biome of the female (bacteria, viruses, etc.) to that of her partner before she gets pregnant.

So, husband and wife having the same biome is not surprising.

And, even if you have the same biome, your systems will almost certainly react differently depending upon the expressed receptors.

[dougmccune]

Totally fair, but then what use is the data? If we have totally different digestive reactions / problems, then can you really tell much of anything from the microbiome data?

[bsder]

> If we have totally different digestive reactions / problems, then can you really tell much of anything from the microbiome data?

Congratulations. You now understand why the folks trying to monetize microbiome are regarded as snake oil salesmen right now.

I'm sure there are broad strokes that are valid. You have a lot of bacterium X--that isn't good. You completely lack bacterium Y--that isn't good. Your overall diversity is low--you probably should try to correct that.

However, once you start getting into "you need specific bacterium X to solve specific problem Y", that's likely snake oil.

Biological systems are annoying like that. For any treatment X, there will be some, generally tiny, fraction of the population that responds to it.

The problem is finding a treatment that works in either 1) the vast majority of the population or 2) a readily identifiable minority of the population.

Microbiome work is probably going to produce some cool results, but it will take time to get there. Running experiments on people is time consuming and expensive.