High reproducibility demonstrated in a direct-to-consumer microbiome testing workflow under real-world conditions using fecal reference material

Processing 10 replicates of NIST human fecal reference material RM 8048 through a direct-to-consumer microbiome workflow produced highly concordant community profiles, with median Bray-Curtis dissimilarity of 0.04.

• Why it matters: Prior direct-to-consumer testing has shown substantial profile variation across providers and sometimes within providers, creating a need for transparent, published analytical performance assessments.
• What they did: The team shipped replicates from five U.S. sites over 35 days, processed them through DNA extraction and sequencing in nine runs alongside 6,000+ customer samples, then analyzed with their standard pipeline.
• The result: Technical variability was minimal (median Bray-Curtis 0.04) versus same-day (0.08), within-week (0.25), 1–2 weeks apart (0.28), and unrelated individuals (0.88), with maximum pairwise COD 0.045 below 0.073.

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