There’s a world of information to be gleaned from your poop, which makes it a pretty important part of the ZOE test.

With your sample, we can measure the diversity of bacteria in your gut (your gut microbiome) and how it links to nutrition and health. With this knowledge, you can start to better understand your body.

First we separate all the DNA in your sample from other cell content. Then we put this in a machine that will split and sort all the different strands in there, showing us how many individual DNA fragments you have inside your gut.

From there we move from the lab to computers. Computational biology is where things get super advanced. Our scientists use every high-tech process at their disposal (sequence mapping, machine learning, large databases of curated data) to take all those DNA fragments we’ve found and identify exactly what they are.

The result is we discover which bacteria you have in your gut. Once we know this, we can compare this to your diet, health profile, metabolic responses, as well as to the results from other participants in our research. Knowing how that bacteria is affecting your unique responses to food means we can give you personalized recommendations for how to improve your gut health. Pretty cool, huh?