Privacy-Preserving Microbiome Sequencing Analysis and Storage Systems

We examine adapting proposed privacy-preserving analysis and storage systems for human genome sequences to the realm of human microbiome sequencing. To begin, we discuss the methodology and statistics of interest in microbiome sequence-based analysis, referred to as metagenomics. Next, we investigate the capability of microbiome sequencing to uniquely identify an individual. Then, we detail the differences in metagenomic analysis and genome-wide association studies while reviewing a privacy-preserving genome-wide association study approach. We conclude with a discussion of a system for secure storage and disease risk computation using human genome sequences along with design considerations for extending the system to microbiome sequencing.