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Review
. 2011 Jul;11(5):839-48.
doi: 10.1016/j.meegid.2011.03.022. Epub 2011 Apr 2.

Skin microbiota: microbial community structure and its potential association with health and disease

Mariana Rosenthal  1 , Deborah Goldberg, Allison Aiello, Elaine Larson, Betsy Foxman
Affiliations
Review

Skin microbiota: microbial community structure and its potential association with health and disease

Mariana Rosenthal et al. Infect Genet Evol. 2011 Jul.

Abstract

Skin, the largest human organ, is a complex and dynamic ecosystem inhabited by a multitude of microorganisms. Host demographics and genetics, human behavior, local and regional environmental characteristics, and transmission events may all potentially drive human skin microbiota variability, resulting in an alteration of microbial community structure. This alteration may have important consequences regarding health and disease outcomes among individuals. More specifically, certain diversity patterns of human microbiota may be predictive or diagnostic of disease. The purpose of this review is to briefly describe the skin microbiota, outline the potential determining factors driving its variability, posit the likelihood of an association between the resulting microbial community structure on the skin with disease outcomes among individuals, and finally, to present some challenges and implications for studying the skin microbiota.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflicts of Interest: None declared.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Conceptual framework of the driving forces behind the relationship between microbial species diversity / community structure of the human microbiota and health outcomes. Specific examples are shown as bullet points within each factor.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Schematic representations of the potential temporal variability of the human skin microbiome.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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