The Gut Zoomer assay uses deep metagenomic PCR to semi-quantitatively assess the abundance of commensal bacterial species.
Reported reference values such as “<10,” “10–20,” or “>20” represent normalized index scores rather than absolute counts or percentages.
Because each organism’s baseline abundance varies substantially, some comprising several percent of the microbiota and others less than 0.1%—the assay applies organism-specific normalization before mapping results onto a common reference scale.
Thus, the same numerical range can be used for all taxa (e.g., family, genus, and species)- it denotes how that organism’s measured signal compares to its own expected distribution, not a direct comparison of abundance across species.
These semi-quantitative ranges therefore reflect whether each commensal is within, above, or below its expected population range, supporting comprehensive yet standardized microbiome profiling.