The American Gut is based out of Rob Knight’s lab at the University of California, San Diego-meaning all samples provided by American Gut citizen science participants are processed by technicians working in the Knight lab. The Knight lab is one of the largest microbiome research labs in the world, processing samples from hundreds of projects at a rate of ~100,000 per year. Notably, the protocols used by the lab to process these samples have been extensively tested and benchmarked and are freely available from the Earth Microbiome Project’s website.