About a year and a half ago I learned that the epicenter of citizen microbiome science is just a half-hour away from my house. So, naturally, I wanted to give them my poo.* And my dog’s, too. (The results of the quest are detailed in a four-part series on NPR’s Shots blog)
More specifically, I wanted to see how this new field of science worked–from soiled swab to colorful graphs. So I signed my family up (some members requiring more cajoling than others) for the American Gut Project and then followed our samples down to the lab at University of Colorado, Boulder. There, I met the scientists, technicians, robots, and super computers that make the microbe magic happen.
Read more about how the microbiome goes “from poo to you” in my four-part series for NPR:
“Poo and You: A Journey Into the Guts of a Microbiome”
“To Get to the Bottom of Your Microbiome, Start with a Swab of Poo”
“Behind the Scenes at the Lab that Fingerprints Microbiomes”
*Apologies for the excessive use of the word “poo” in this post.
Katherine Harmon Courage 
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