16S sequencing reads just the nameplate of bacterial genera, while shotgun metagenomics opens the whole book of their genetic functions. Dysbiosis is a poem where the stanzas of microbes fall out of their harmonious rhythm. Transplants can rewrite it, but the new verses must find a home in the existing soil of a person. I see this in my own sequences—a patient's persistent inflammation quieted only when the donor's microbial ecology matched not in species, but in metabolic pathways.
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