ATLAS^™

The hindgut is where equine nutrition and immune tolerance largely happen. The microbial community living there — bacteria and fungi together — shapes how much energy a horse pulls out of forage, how well the gut wall holds up, and how the whole system handles stress and change.

For most horses, that community is never looked at, so decisions get made around it instead: a supplement added, a feed swapped, a slow recovery waited out. That isn't for lack of care on anyone's part — until recently there wasn't a practical way to see inside it.

ATLAS is that way in. Deep bacterial and fungal sequencing of a single fecal sample shows what's present in the hindgut, in what proportions, and how that pattern sits against equine-specific reference ranges. One test gives you a baseline; repeat it after a diet change, an antibiotic course, or a health event and you can see what shifted and whether it recovered.

What you compare a result to matters as much as the sequencing itself. Metaboly is Canada's only private equine laboratory sequencing the gut at this depth, and our reference database is the largest equine microbiome dataset in the country, built from horses across different provinces, climates, forage bases, and management styles. That means your horse is read against horses living through the same winters and eating similar hay, rather than against human gut data or a herd on the other side of the world.

In practice: say a horse goes on antibiotics. Test beforehand, test again a few weeks later, and you can see how much the gut community was affected and whether it's rebuilding — rather than guessing from what you can see in the stall.