Microbiome Monitoring: Smart Toilets, Precision Medicine, and the Post-Genomic Bowel

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Megan MacGregor can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/08/microbiome-monitoring-smart-toilets-precision-medicine-and-the-post-genomic-bowel/. About the post: Imagine that every time you poop, your hygiene routine involves depositing your used toilet paper into a toilet-side receptacle. As you wash your hands, the device mixes, processes, and extracts microbial DNA from your stool. It sequences the microbial DNA for a real-time readout of your microbiome (the microbial genomes from within your gut, or at least the ones that made it to your stool), automatically sending the information to a large-scale microbiome database that integrates it into its data, algorithms, and analytic programs. The program connects to an app on your phone, telling you that based on your personal version of a healthy microbiome, today your microbiome is looking a little low in the bacterial species Akkermansia municiphila and high in some risky metabolites (the molecular outputs of some of your gut microbes).