CARTA^™

CARTA characterizes the vaginal microbial environment of the mare and provides a depth of reproductive biological context that conventional reproductive protocols were not designed to deliver. It is built for breeding programs that expect more from the data available to them.

This is not a generic wellness service. CARTA is a specialized microbiome-based reproductive offering built specifically for mares and breeding management — part of Metaboly's EquiBIOME suite, alongside ATLAS.

CARTA uses deep bacterial sequencing of a vaginal swab to map the microbial community of the reproductive tract: what organisms are present, at what relative abundance, and how the overall pattern compares to reference populations drawn from mares across a range of reproductive contexts and outcomes.

Breeding programs are managed around timing, hormone response, cycle monitoring, and visible reproductive findings. These are the right things to track. But the reproductive environment also carries a microbial dimension that most breeding management never touches — one that shifts with cycle stage, treatment history, reproductive events, and systemic health, and that may carry meaningful biological signal.

The vaginal and vestibular microbiome is a dynamic system. In mares, this microbial layer has been associated with variation in reproductive tract health and stability. Yet it is almost never profiled as part of routine breeding management — even in programs where outcomes are inconsistent and the conventional picture is clean.

CARTA was built to make that layer accessible. It does not replace existing reproductive management. It adds the biological depth that existing management cannot provide on its own.

The standard approach in most reproductive laboratories is to swab the vaginal canal and attempt to grow the collected microorganisms on culture plates. When those plates come back clean — no pathogenic growth detected — the conventional interpretation is that the mare appears reproductively healthy. For mares that continue to fail despite clean culture results, that interpretation offers nothing new.

The limitation is structural. A large proportion of the microbial community living in the reproductive tract cannot be cultured under standard laboratory conditions at all. These organisms are real, biologically active, and potentially meaningful — but conventional culture is simply incapable of detecting them. A clean culture result does not confirm that the microbial environment is balanced or unremarkable. It confirms only that the organisms capable of growing on a plate were not present in high abundance.

CARTA operates on a fundamentally different principle. Rather than attempting to grow organisms, sequencing works directly from the DNA captured on the swab — including DNA from organisms that culture would never recover. From trace genetic material, sequencing identifies what is present, at what relative abundance, and how the overall community compares to reference profiles from mares across a range of reproductive contexts and outcomes.