We’re excited to announce a major addition to our reporting. At no extra cost, we’ll be providing all our users with information about their oral microbiome – the unique collection of bacteria living in their mouths. We are the first and only personal genomics company that is providing oral microbiome reporting.
How is this possible? Unlike most DNA testing companies, we use next-generation DNA sequencing. This technology enables us to sample all DNA that is present in a saliva sample. Most of it belongs to you, but some of it comes from the bacteria living in your mouth.
There is a growing body of research that links various diseases with changes in the oral microbiome. For example, the oral microbiome has been found to change in people suffering from gastrointestinal diseases like inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), systemic diseases like diabetes and even neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
By launching our oral microbiome report, we hope to give our users access to more useful research and personalized content. To learn more details about the reporting, read on.
First, for each bacterium, we provide its relative abundance, which is its percent composition relative to the total number of bacteria. For example, a relative abundance of 43% means that this bacterium makes up 43% of your oral microbiome.
Second, we calculate a percentile that tells you how the relative abundance in your sample compares to other people. For example, the 95th percentile means that 95% of people have a lower relative abundance of this bacterium.
Third, we provide access to curated research studies that demonstrate links between oral microbiome composition and various diseases. However, it is important to keep in mind that correlations do not imply causation or predict disease onset. This is not a diagnostic test and we provide you these results for educational purposes only.
Here you can learn how the oral microbiome of people with various medical conditions compares to your oral microbiome composition. However, please keep in mind that our results are not perfectly comparable to the findings of various publications due to differences in testing methods. We also provide additional information relevant to the study and link to other sources that we think you might find interesting. As new research is published, we will curate the new findings and make them available to you.
If you’re already an existing Nebula user, just log into the portal to view your microbiome results. For those of you that haven’t been sequenced by Nebula yet, you can check out our products or subscribe to our email list for updates!