Archive Meta Data

Author(s)

Christopher J Barnes, Maja-Lisa Clausen, Maria Asplund, Linett Rasmussen, Caroline Olesen, Yasemin Topal Yüsel, Paal Skytt Andersen, Thomas Litman, Anders Johannes Hansen and Tove Agner

Title

Temporal and spatial variation of the skin-associated bacteria from healthy participants and atopic dermatitis patients

Description

A number of factors have been shown to influence the composition of the bacterial communities associated with healthy skin, variation between different individuals and body locations. Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a chronic skin disease also associated with changes in the skin-associated bacterial communities. While the effects of each of these have been shown to be significant, little is known about their relative importance in determining the skin microbiome. Here, we characterised the skin-associated bacterial communities of healthy control skin, and of lesional and non-lesional skin of AD patients by metabarcoding the universal V3-V4 16S rRNA region from tape strip samples. We constructed a hierarchy of effects correlating with the skin-associated bacterial community, including inter-individual variation, skin depth, body location (elbow crease, volar forearm, lesion), temporal variation and skin condition (lesional, non-lesional, healthy control). Inter-individual variation correlated with the bacterial community far more strongly than the other factors, followed by skin depth and then skin condition. There was a small significant amount of temporal variation, while sampling location effects were driven by differences between lesions and non-lesional skin, rather than between the elbow crease and volar forearm. In the future, the genomic, immunological and environmental factors behind the substantial inter-individual variation observed here are worthy of further investigation. Furthermore, future studies may benefit from considering AD as a continuum, as AD severity was a better indicator of the bacterial community than AD as a presence-absence disorder.