Harnessing the Human Microbiome for Discovery

The composition and function of the human gut microbiome are linked to health and disease. Increasing evidence of gut microbes’ involvement in disease development has driven efforts to better understand the molecular mechanisms of pathogenesis from gut microbiota perturbation, to identify novel targets for therapeutic development.

This requires comprehensive profiling of microbial communities across populations, typically done via 16S amplicon sequencing. While this method detects broad microbial targets, its resolution is limited to distinguishing microbes at the family/genus level. Computational assignments are missing or inconsistent at the species level, making mapping difficult to compare across studies.

This challenge led Sapient to develop Reference-based Exact Mapping (RExMap) of microbial amplicon variants that enables mapping of microbial species from standard 16S sequencing data.