16s Providers

The following providers have had their reports verified to work on this site. They may not ship to your country. Be aware that the time from sample until report is available may be days or months – contact provider to get current processing times. This page may become stale… See this page for latest list. And this page for what you should expect for details..

NOTE: These are direct to customer services. There is no requirement for a physician to order these tests. Est is often inferred from the wayback machine and try to estimate the production date (not pre-orders).

Depth of Reports (number of taxa detected)

Xenogene

No photo description available.

Thryve

No photo description available.

The BEST download is FASTQ but it does require you to manual process these to upload on the site. For a walkthru see this video on the process. This provides the best consistency between different providers.

Most people are using: SequentiaBiotech web site.

Other providers – reports have not been verified to be uploadable (emailing them would help to make those reports happen — nagMail!) . If they have explicitly stated that downloads are not available they are on the not recommended list . Without downloads, we do not know how many different types of bacteria are tested for.

  • GutXY (Denmark) [Est. 2019 ]DKK 1,500 ($223)/ DKK 1,250 ($186) (depending on number of kits)
  • Sun Genomics (US) [Est. 2019]Bundled with their probiotics $300
    • Concerns over financial viability of firm, see this post.
    • Test alone for $149
  • Gut Zoomer [Est. 2016]  – 170 -200 species (per their advertising) must be ordered thru a physician
  • Microba (Australia) [Est. 2018] – $AU 279 to $AU 349 – ONLY Australia
    • Reader reported trying to get download files without success
    • $US 192 – $240 depending on which package is ordered.
  • Psomagen $99(sale price)-199 (Regular)
    • GutBiome+ $129(sale price) – $299 (Regular)
    • Emailed on status of downloads

Vibrant Wellness has a “GutZoomer test” . It is a very limited testing (100). The report gives no measurements, just evaluations (good/bad)


NOT RECOMMENDED and Why

  • Viome (US) [Est 2017]- $149 – $349 (depending on if a campaign is active)
    • Requests from customers for downloads have been refused.

Provider Health Information

It is speculated that most providers are offering stale and very often only a small subset of available information. A review was done of Thryve (EXCELLENT for getting the bacteria), and illustrates what you should expected from most providers is old science.

Observation

uBiome was the early bird (and a kickstarter project) to the 16s microbiome market and their site was well designed. When I look at some other sites, I see many items that they are missing that uBiome had, for example:

  • Support to show samples over time (to me that seems like an obvious requirement if they want repeat customers)
  • Metabolite predictions
  • Download with taxon numbers
  • FASTQ downloads
  • Comparisons to reference populations properly done (i.e. using the same lab process — not borrowing data from American Gut or others that used different lab processes)

As a long time software developer and product manager too…. the old mantra was “the best of the best”. We look at all of the competition and try to match feature for feature, and then add some new ones to differentiate us objectively.

A lot of the sites seem to be going for the minimum cost “good enough” and then they spend money on telling people that they are good by advertising on facebook, when they fail to come up to the level of a kickstarter project.