The data shows the range of microbes in the human skin. Karen Arnott/EMBL.
The National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, the National Human Genome Research Institute, the European Bioinformatics Institute, and the National Institutes of Health have all collaborated to identify new species.
Microbiomes can be found in the ocean, soil, the human gut, and the surface of the skin. The skin is thought to have a key role in skin health and disease. Different skin conditions, such asAcne and Eczema, are associated with different types of skin infections.
In this study, the researchers took 594 samples of skin from 12 healthy people and then took the genomes of the organisms from them. The Skin Microbial Genome Collection was created by combining traditional laboratory cultivation with a metagenomics approach.
Our skin is diverse.
"We found a lot of jumbo phages, very big viruses that are usually found on the surface of the hands and feet of our volunteers," said Sara. The areas of the body have a lot of different microbiomes, which makes sense because we're constantly using our hands to touch new things in our environment. Our future work will aim to understand what these different microbes are doing.
The researchers used a variety of methods to get new insights into the extent of diversity within the skin microbiome. Future work will aim to expand the SMGC using samples from different populations, but this study focused on individuals from North America.
"This work is a major step towards obtaining a completegenomic blueprint of the skin microbiome," said Julie Segre, Senior Investigator at the NHGRI. "We hope these data will help us understand skin health and disease."
There are new organisms, likebacteria and viruses.
The SMGC collection includes 174 previously unknown bacterial species, four new eukaryotes and 20 new jumbo phages, which areviruses with a genome larger than 200 kilobases. Researchers have been working with incomplete knowledge of the skin microbiome. The research expands the catalog of skinbacteria by 26%.
We found twelve genomes from single celled eukaryotes, like yeast, from the human skin, in addition to the bacteria and viruses that we normally recover in metagenomics. Malassezia globosa, which has been associated with the healthy skin mycobiome but has also been associated with conditions such as dandruff, was already known. Rob Finn says that using the same methods that recovered eight known genomes gave them confidence in the four novel eukaryotes that they found. The patterns of the novel eukaryotes revealed that one of them was very common across the volunteers, and may be found on many of us.
All of these data will be made freely accessible soon as a new genome catalog in the MGnify data resource, where researchers can find a huge range of microbiome datasets including for the human gut.
More information: Sara Saheb Kashaf et al, Integrating cultivation and metagenomics for a multi-kingdom view of skin microbiome diversity and functions. There is a DOI titled: 10.1038/s41564-021-01011-w.
The journal contains information about Nature Microbiology.
The researchers identified newbacteria andviruses on human skin on January 4, 2022.
The document is copyrighted. Any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research cannot be reproduced without written permission. The content is not intended to be used for anything other than information purposes.
