How does the Tiny Health gut test compare to other stool tests? Vaginal tests?

Tiny Health uses shotgun metagenomic sequencing, which offers:

Advantages over qPCR:

• Detects entire microbial community vs. 20-50 targets
• Species- and strain-level resolution
• Quantifies relative abundance across the entire microbiome
• Reveals functional gene capacity

Advantages over 16S rRNA sequencing:

• Higher resolution of the microbial community
• Species-level identification (16S typically stops at genus)
• Functional pathway analysis (16S infers function, shotgun measures genes)
• More accurate quantification
• Better resolution of the microbiome

For vaginal testing: Shotgun sequencing is rare in clinical vaginal microbiome assessments. Most vaginal tests use culture or limited qPCR panels. Tiny Health provides comprehensive species identification, giving a full picture of the microbial environment, and reports on the vaginal community state type of the sample.