Biogeography and individuality shape function in the human skin metagenome

By Julia Oh, Allyson L. Byrd, C. Deming, Sean Conlan, H. Kong, J. Segre. Nature, 2014

1,048 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The varied topography of human skin offers a unique opportunity to study how the body’s microenvironments influence the functional and taxonomic composition of microbial communities. Phylogenetic marker gene-based studies have identified many bacteria and fungi that colonize distinct skin niches. Here metagenomic analyses of diverse body sites in healthy humans demonstrate that local biogeography and strong individuality define the skin microbiome. We developed a relational analysis of bacterial, fungal and viral communities, which showed not only site specificity but also individual signatures. We further identified strain-level variation of dominant species as heterogeneous and multiphyletic. Reference-free analyses captured the uncharacterized metagenome through the development of a multi-kingdom gene catalogue, which was used to uncover genetic signatures of species lacking reference genomes. This work is foundational for human disease studies investigating inter-kingdom interactions, metabolic changes and strain tracking, and defines the dual influence of biogeography and individuality on microbial composition and function.

Subfields: Dermatology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a9369c12b47a62a7380a706b67faebe06fb63e25

How researchers see this paper

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In Dermatology

1. Allyson L. Byrd
2. J. Segre
3. H. Kong
4. Julia Oh
5. Morgan Park
6. J. Lennon
7. K. Locey

Citations in the corpus

• Temporal Stability of the Human Skin Microbiome (2016, positive): “…Sampling, Processing, Sequencing, and Classification Expandingourpreviousmetagenomicsurvey,weresampled12healthyvolun-teers from our original study (Oh et al., 2014) approved by the institutional review board of the National Human Genome Research Institute (http://www.…”
• Assembling metagenomes, one community at a time (2017, methodology): “Consequently, investigators can analyse unassembled reads [11], optimize their assembly parameters or even develop their own tools to assemble their data prior to further analysis [55].”
• Interaction between microbiota and immunity in health and disease (2020, background): “High throughput sequencing-based studies revealed a diversity of sitespecific but temporally stable microbial communities in the healthy human skin(200,201) featuring inter-individual variability.(202) The skin microbiota induces protective and regulatory immunity that contributes to host-microbe mu”