The research out of UC San Diego and the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) offers promise for non-invasive diagnostic tools by taking the genetic sequencing of fecal samples as opposed to blood sampling. There are trillions of bacteria, viruses and other microbes that live in the human gut that could be insightful for diagnosing diseases and gauging the health of humans.
Researchers used the genetic sequencing technique metagenomics that breaks up the DNA of microbes in the human large intestine, or the gut, with 30 healthy people and 30 people who have inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease. Around 600 billion DNA bases were sequenced and put into a supercomputer that reconstructed the abundance of a microbe species.
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