The human body is home to a diverse range of microorganisms, estimated to outnumber human cells in a healthy adult by ten fold. The importance of characterizing human microbiota for understanding health and disease is highlighted by the recent launch of the Human Microbiome Project by the National Institutes of Health. This report describes the investigation of healthy human skin for microbiota diversity and establishes the basis for determining a core microbiome.
The Human Microbiome Project aims to characterize the microbial communities of several regions of the body, including skin, where determining the core microbiome is essential to understanding and developing new treatments for skin conditions and diseases such as acne and atopic dermatitis (eczema).
In this study, researchers led by Dr. Julie Segre of the National Human Genome Research Institute have generated a diversity profile of human skin microbiota by sequencing 16S rRNA, a component of the prokaryotic ribosome, isolated from a specific region of skin. “We focused this study on the inner elbow to inform future clinical studies of the extremely common inflammatory skin disorder atopic dermatitis, which affects this area of the skin and is associated with Staphylococcus infections,” explains Segre.
