Thorne Microbiome Tests Are Now Supported

A reader forwarded his results and ask if they could be uploaded. It was a CSV file which was a good sign. Inspecting the file I noticed two things:

  • No NCBI Taxonomy numbers were included 🙁
  • The report gave percentile numbers for every bacteria — a wonderful thing to see.

The reader approached Thorne support about getting the NCBI Taxonomy numbers added — with no success. After a few days of work I ended up with 99.9% success of matching their bacteria names to NCBI Taxonomy numbers. The import worked… but wait! The price is about the same as some 16s tests, but you get MORE DATA and more accurate data! See this study for the difference between 16s and Shotgun

This is whole-genome shotgun metagenomics which is more accurate. It provides percentiles against a much larger sample than I could hope to get. My site is focused on percentiles — so most thing flows nicely – even when there is just one sample!!!

There are items that will not work until we hit 100+ samples from Thorne (i.e. KEGG Percentile Ranking, Pub Med Condition Percentile, etc).

We use Thorne’s Percentiles
Insufficient Data To Use these options

We substitute Percentage Match for Percentile in this section (since we are less than 100 samples)

KEGG is based on Percentiles

Bottom Line

I have ordered Thorne for my next test and expect to keep using them if the pricing stays the same. These test costs are driven by technology — which keep dropping cost over time. I recall spending $1000 to get 1 Meg of RAM many decades ago, today for the same amount, I can get 320 GB of memory — that’s 320,000 x more! The same thing is happening with microbiome and DNA testing technologies.