Applying TRACS to metagenomic data from FMT triads and the UK babybiome also revealed cryptic transmission of minority strains which were frequently missed by alternative tools. 4/4

TRACS is designed to accurately estimate a lower bound on the genetic distances between strains at the SNP level from single isolate, population, and metagenomic sequencing data. Importantly, it effectively handles intra-species diversity within hosts. 2/4

Although this was a conservative approach, there was not an obvious cancer specific microbial signature in the re-normalised data of 1,809 cancer samples.

The Cancer Genome Atlas was not initially intended to investigate the microbiome and batch effects including hospital and sequencing centre correlate strongly with specific cancer types.