Excited to share our preprint on the South American MicroBiome Archive (saMBA)! 🌎🦠. We analysed one of the regions with the fewest microbiome samples but some of the highest biodiversities. 📄: shorturl.at/Lmvp5 🧵: What did we find—and why? Find out 👇 #microbiome #gut-microbiome (1/8) - ThreadSky

bvalderrama.bsky.social • 45 days ago

Excited to share our preprint on the South American MicroBiome Archive (saMBA)! 🌎🦠.

We analysed one of the regions with the fewest microbiome samples but some of the highest biodiversities.

📄: https://shorturl.at/Lmvp5
🧵: What did we find—and why? Find out 👇

#microbiome #gut-microbiome
(1/8)

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bvalderrama.bsky.social•45 days ago

We know public microbiome data is dominated by samples from Europe and North America. That’s a problem since microbe-health associations often don’t translate across global populations. (2/8)

bvalderrama.bsky.social•45 days ago

So, global compendiums have analysed gut microbiomes using unified workflows. But resource-driven choices can unintentionally perpetuate some representativity issues these efforts aimed to fix—like filtering based on project size and metadata annotation. (3/8)

bvalderrama.bsky.social•45 days ago

Inspired by their work and after talking with Richard (first author in https://shorturl.at/qT1I6), I recreated the workflow from the global compendium, which is currently unavailable to other users. Then, with my coauthors, we curated a list of projects to be included in our archive: saMBA (4/8).

bvalderrama.bsky.social•45 days ago

Why South America? Simple: it’s one of the regions with the fewest microbiome samples but some of the highest gut microbiome diversity among its inhabitants ☝️ (https://shorturl.at/qT1I6). Plus, I’m from Chile, so there's an emotional link 😂 (5/8)

bvalderrama.bsky.social•45 days ago

After analysing >30 projects—most not included in any compendium before—we show how saMBA expanded our understanding of the human gut microbiome with samples from nearly every country in the region 🌎. We also found that nearly a third were likely discarded due to past sample size restrictions (6/8).

bvalderrama.bsky.social•45 days ago

We improved estimates of regional biodiversity and identified countries with the greatest potential to uncover more biodiversity in future sampling efforts—an analysis that’s the first of its kind and a critical guide for regions with limited research resources. (7/8).

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