Candida detection
Candida is a fungus and with their rigid cell wall it can be harder to extract DNA from them than bacteria. However, we use a DNA extraction method that has been well documented to work for a wide variety of fungal species, including Candida and molds (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6224647/). There are a number of papers that use a very similar extraction method for a wide variety of fungal species, and they do not have problems extracting DNA. One relevant paper: https://www.atsjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1164/ajrccm-conference.2018.197.1_MeetingAbstracts.A5491.
We do find Candida in a number of kits. The tricky thing here is that relative abundance is potentially less informative when comparing to bacterial genomes. So while we can detect the presence/absence of Candida, it could be in a higher abundance than our methodology suggests. In this case a qPCR test may be more sensitive in detecting Candida at very low abundances in the gut. But, because a qPCR test only tests for a specific microbes (~30-300 microbes) in the gut, it will show you a "small piece of the puzzle" of your gut community.
Tiny Health tests for over 120,000 microbes and will provide you with a "full picture" view of your gut community. Therefore, if you want to understand your entire gut community including the relative abundance of each microbe, and the role it's playing in your gut, shotgun sequencing technology used by Tiny Health may be the best fit for you. However, if you are specifically looking only to detect Candida, a PCR test may be more sensitive.
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