The South American MicroBiome Archive (saMBA)

The South American Microbiome Archive (saMBA) is the largest archive of gut microbiome samples from South American populations analysed under an unified workflow. Note that while the workflow was deployed to build an archive of gut microbiome samples from South Americans, it can be used to build similar resources using samples from other bodysites or pupulations living in other neglected world regions. The motivation to start this project is described here.

The main outputs generated while building saMBA can be downloaded from this Zenodo repository. The analysis of those outputs is described in this preprint.

Plans for future developments

Below I share some ideas I’d like to implement to improve saMBA and to make it a useful resource for the entire community in the long run. I made this public to keep the users informed and to invite people interested in contributing in any of these points to reach out.

• Build an R package to facilitate the download of the outputs in Zenodo
• Implement the workflow as a Docker image so users can deploy it.
  • Update (01/Jun/2025): Docker image here
• Expand saMBA (the resource) to include samples from other bodysites of southamericans.
• Expand the workflow to include the analysis of projects using whole genome sequencing.