Testing for Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori)

H. pylori detection

Helicobacter pylori is a gram-negative bacterium. It can cause stomach inflammation and infections in the small intestine. As these are in the upper GI tract, and our samples (stool) primarily carry bacteria from the lower GI tract.

While H. pylori infection is associated with gut microbiome composition changes (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-56631-4), sequencing it from stool without PCR amplification is difficult. Concerns with extracting DNA from H. pylori, typically stem from medical samples that are trying to isolate H. pylori from intestinal epithelial cells, which results in an overabundance of human cells.

Similar methods to our DNA extraction method has been shown to extract DNA from H. pylori (https://journals.asm.org/doi/pdf/10.1128/mbio.00955-19). However, if the cells are not making it through the large intestine, the likelihood of capturing these cells is low. We have not detected H. pylori in any of our samples yet.

If you are specifically looking only to detect H. pylori, a qPCR test may be more sensitive in detecting it at very low abundances in the gut because it has an amplification step. 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.