Abstract

Significance Recent years have seen incredible growth in both the scale and specificity of projects analyzing the microbial organisms living in and on the human body (the human microbiome). Such studies typically require subjects to report to clinics for sample collection, a complicated practice that is impractical for large studies. To address these issues, we developed a protocol that allows subjects to collect microbiome samples at home and ship them to laboratories for multiple different types of molecular analysis. Measurements of microbial species, gene, and gene transcript composition within self-collected samples were consistent across sampling methods. In addition, our subsequent analysis of these samples revealed interesting similarities and differences between the measured functional potential and functional activity of the human microbiome.