Multiple techniques exist for characterizing the urinary microbiome. Two commonly used methods include expanded quantitative urine culture (EQUC) and 16S ribosomal RNA amplicon sequencing (16S sequencing). Even with enhanced techniques, culture-based methods may still fail to detect several organisms that are difficult to grow.1,2 Sequencing methods also have limitations, such as failure to identify organisms with thick cell walls (eg, Gram-positive bacteria) owing to inefficient cytolysis.3 Given that each method of investigating the urobiome may present intrinsic biases toward detecting specific organisms, we aimed to compare the results between EQUC and 16S sequencing when both methods were performed on the same samples.
