Bacterial Community Variation in Human Body Habitats Across Space and Time

By E. Costello, C. Lauber, Micah Hamady, Noah Fierer, Jeffrey I. Gordon, Rob Knight. Science, 2009

3,151 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Growing on You The human gut and skin harbor diverse microbial communities that are known to vary strikingly among individuals. Here, Costello et al. (p. 1694, published online 5 November) analyzed microbial diversity among several distinct body habitats (including the gut, mouth, inside the ears and nose, and skin) of the same person at different times. They found that body habitat had more influence on microbial community composition than temporal differences and variation among people. Some skin locations, such as the index finger, back of the knee, and sole of the foot, on occasion harbored higher microbial diversity than the gut or oral cavity. The composition of microbial communities on the human body is primarily determined by their location. Elucidating the biogeography of bacterial communities on the human body is critical for establishing healthy baselines from which to detect differences associated with diseases. To obtain an integrated view of the spatial and temporal distribution of the human microbiota, we surveyed bacteria from up to 27 sites in seven to nine healthy adults on four occasions. We found that community composition was determined primarily by body habitat. Within habitats, interpersonal variability was high, whereas individuals exhibited minimal temporal variability. Several skin locations harbored more diverse communities than the gut and mouth, and skin locations differed in their community assembly patterns. These results indicate that our microbiota, although personalized, varies systematically across body habitats and time; such trends may ultimately reveal how microbiome changes cause or prevent disease.

Subfields: Ecology, Food Science, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b857050df77d93d18acd5d4b11d4f2efede85fa4

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology

In Food Science

In Molecular Biology

Citations in the corpus

Rapid denoising of pyrosequencing amplicon data: exploiting the rank-abundance distribution (2010, methodology): “These techniques have been used to gain striking new insight into microbial processes on scales ranging from continents 3 to within an individual’s body 4 .”
A microbial clock provides an accurate estimate of the postmortem interval in a mouse model system (2013, background): “DOI: 10.7554/eLife.01104 8 of 19 Research article which they are in contact (Costello et al., 2009; Song et al., 2013), and this convergence may also arise because the low biomass initially found on the skin is easily overwhelmed by soil taxa.”
The human milk microbiota: origin and potential roles in health and disease. (2013, background): “acterial communities associated with a particular individual over ime are often stable and highly personalized [33].”
Oral microbiomes: more and more importance in oral cavity and whole body (2018, background): “There were some approaches and other gene database to add more information to current public database (Eren et al., 2014; Costello et al., 2009; Ding and Schloss, 2014).”
Role of the Microbiota in Immunity and inflammation (2014, background): “Unbiased microbial sequencing has shown the presence of highly diverse and specific commensal niches along distinct topographical sites of the skin (Costello et al., 2009; Grice et al., 2009).”
Environmental biodiversity, human microbiota, and allergy are interrelated (2012, result): “The structure of the commensal microbiota showed much variation among the study subjects and was influenced by the environment, consistent with previous studies demonstrating significant differences between persons in commensal microbiota (12, 13, 15).”
Host genetic variation impacts microbiome composition across human body sites (2015, background): “Recent advances in high-throughput sequencing technologies have unveiled wide variability in the microbial communities that coat the human body [1, 2].”
Bacterial diversity in the oral cavity of ten healthy individuals (2010, background): “The distinctness of the phylogenetic structure of the human oral microbiota in relation to the microbiota of the skin and feces in nine individuals was revealed in a recent study (Costello et al., 2009).”
Microbial Co-occurrence Relationships in the Human Microbiome (2012, background): “(B) further agrees with published measures of body sites’ alpha diversity [84].”
Clustering metagenomic sequences with interpolated Markov models (2010, background): “Successful metagenomics projects have sequenced DNA from ocean water sampled from around the world [4], microbial communities in and on humans [5-8], and acid drainage from an abandoned mine [9].”