How to choose a microbiome standard

In this application note, Zymo Research provides a detailed overview on how to choose a microbiome standard. The advancement of next-generation sequencing-based technologies has led to rapid growth in the field of microbiome research and deciphering microbial community composition, function, and interactions. Many studies conclude that technical variability in microbiome processing methods leads to significant variations in results. A lack of proper controls or comparison to microbiome reference materials means that important and high-impact conclusions cannot be reproduced or reliably compared to similar data sets. By selecting a common control to measure and evaluate performance, microbiome standards indicate biases allowing users to verify and optimize methods, enable inter-lab comparisons and ensure reproducibility.