Guiding longitudinal sampling in inflammatory bowel diseases cohorts

We report microbiome changes consistent with other studies of CD, including the impact of surgical resection, and find that properties of the microbiome dynamics themselves, notably instability, are associated with clinical features. We observe that using three time points provide the most marked benefits to explore dynamics and characterize the microbiome, collecting 4-7 samples provides a slight additional improvement, and collecting beyond 7 samples might be useful primarily for monitoring changes linked to specific clinical variation or therapeutic interventions.