Titan-1 Technology
The new gold standard in microbiome sequencing and analysis.
A proprietary assay, a patented amplicon, and our own AI-driven classification.
Developed and manufactured by
Published in
Peer-reviewed journals
- Microbial Genomics
- mBio
- Scientific Reports
- PLOS ONE
- Frontiers in Microbiology
- ISME Communications
- Communications Biology
- International Journal of Molecular Sciences
The sequence
From sample to whole-ecosystem view
A new generation of microbiome technology, going beyond 16S-only and shotgun metagenomics. Titan-1 is precision, targeted sequencing — it reads the complete 16S-ITS-23S region in one piece rather than sequencing everything present and sorting it out afterwards. A proprietary assay we manufacture, a patented amplicon, and our own AI-driven classification: the resolution comes from the whole workflow, not from any single step in it.
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It starts with the sample
A stool sample carries a community of many thousands of organisms. Everything downstream depends on representing that community faithfully, so the first question is not how precisely you can read - it is how much of it you managed to capture at all.
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Opened, but not damaged
What identifies a bacterium is its DNA, and that DNA sits inside the cell. So before anything can be read, every cell in the sample has to be opened. That step is harder than it sounds, because it has to do two opposing things at once. Structurally robust organisms, many gram-positive species among them, resist conventional methods and go uncounted. More fragile organisms give up their DNA easily, but can have it broken in the process. Titan-1 begins with a proprietary lysis and extraction step, developed and manufactured in-house, that opens the tough ones while keeping the DNA intact across the rest - and intact DNA is what makes reading a long fragment possible at all.
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Amplified whole, and patented
A patented amplification step generates a single fragment of roughly 2.5 kilobases spanning the complete 16S-ITS-23S ribosomal region - conserved stretches that place an organism, and hypervariable stretches that separate close relatives. This is targeted sequencing: one informative region, read deliberately, rather than sequencing everything present and sorting it out afterwards. Nothing outside that region is generated, so there is no redundant off-target data to wade through. This amplicon is the heart of the platform.
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Read end to end, then read again
The whole fragment is carried in one continuous long read rather than reconstructed from short pieces, and each molecule is read repeatedly so that a highly accurate consensus is built from those passes.
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Not limited to a reference database
Our own AI-driven bioinformatics platform assigns identity from the complete operon sequence rather than matching short markers against a fixed database, which makes the approach largely database-independent. That improves detection and differentiation of previously uncharacterized and poorly represented bacteria, which conventional methods may miss or classify inaccurately.
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Read as an ecosystem
It is the combination - proprietary lysis, patented amplicon, our own classification - that delivers species- and strain-level identification while preserving accurate relative abundance. That is what makes the result an ecosystem view rather than a species list.
Side-by-side
How Titan-1 compares
Every sequencing approach makes a trade between how much of the community it sees and how precisely it can name what it finds. This is where Titan-1 sits against the three approaches in common use.
| qPCR | 16S-only | Shotgun metagenomics | Titan-1 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What is read | A fixed panel of chosen targets | One short variable stretch of the 16S gene | Everything present, in short fragments | The complete 16S-ITS-23S region, in one ~2.5 kb read |
| Targeted or untargeted | Targeted, but only at what you already suspect | Targeted, but short | Untargeted - much of the output is off-target | Targeted, and complete across the region |
| Typical resolution | Only the organisms on the panel | Genus, sometimes species | Genus to species; strain only at sequencing depths not used in practice | Species and strain |
| Unfamiliar organisms | Not detected - absent from the panel | Often unresolved or mis-assigned | Depends on the reference database | Identified from the sequence itself, largely database-independent |
| Relative abundance | Not comparable across targets | Distorted by copy number and primer bias | Affected by genome size and fragmentation | Preserved across the community |
| Analysis burden | Minimal, but the answer is narrow | Small | Very large, and much of it redundant | Focused - no off-target data to discard |
Rows describe the general characteristics of each method class, not any specific commercial product. Comparison of sequencing approaches informed in part by independent peer-reviewed work: Gehrig et al., Microbial Genomics, 2022.
What it produces
This is what an ecosystem view looks like
Resolution is only worth having if you can see what it bought you. The report renders the whole community in one figure, so a dominant organism, a thin spread or a recovering gut is visible before a single number is read.
One sample, drawn as a community
This is a GutID Target Plot from a real report. Each ring is a level of classification, working outward from phylum at the center to species at the edge, and the width of every band is how much of the sample that organism actually accounts for. Nothing here is a category score or an index - it is the community itself, drawn to scale.
See your own
Titan-1 is what runs on every GutID test. Collect at home in about five minutes, post it back, and your report arrives in your portal.
Shop the testsWhich test do I need?For clinicians
See and manage the microbiome
Most microbiome testing sorts bacteria into good and bad. That runs out quickly in practice, because what matters is how the community behaves as a whole — its diversity, its balance, and how well it recovers. GutID reports the gut microbiome that way, and we help your team learn to work with it that way.
Beyond good and bad bacteria
Diversity, balance and how well a gut community recovers tell you more than a list of organisms sorted into helpful and harmful.
A method you can follow
A written, six-step way of reading a report, so it is repeatable across your team and across a patient's follow-up.
Training and clinical support
A certified practitioner programme, and our clinical team on hand when a case is complicated.
The GutID Clinician Guide
- The Ecosystem Approach
- A six-step interpretation sequence
- Clinically authored, fully referenced
Research and technology partners
