The Skin Microbiome of Cohabiting Couples

Abstract

Our work characterizes the influence of cohabitation as a factor influencing the composition of the skin microbiome. Although the body site and sampled individual were stronger influences than other factors collected as metadata in this study, we show that modeling of detected microbial taxa can help with correct identifications of cohabiting partners based on skin microbiome profiles using machine learning approaches. These results show that a cohabiting partner can significantly influence our microbiota. Follow-up studies will be important for investigating the implications of shared microbiome on dermatological health and the shared contributions of cohabiting parents to the microbiome profiles of their infants.

Building upon current knowledge and techniques of indoor microbiology to construct the next era of theory into microorganisms, health, and the built environment

“…Architectural design affects human or animal behavior, i.e., their interactions with each other and their surroundings, indoors [42,43] and how and where we emit and deposit our unique individual microbial communities [44][45][46]. The occupant-associated proportion of indoor microbial communities can be directly attributed to the individuals who spend sufficient time within that space [43,[47][48][49][50][51][52] and what household activities are performed, allowing for epidemiological tracking of infectious organisms [53] or microbial forensics [54]. The amount of occupancy in buildings, influenced by building type, occupancy schedule, and indoor activity, facilitates the accrual of human-associated microorganisms [34,44,55,56].…”

“…A contrasting strategy to reducing human-human microbial transmission indoors that has only recently been proposed is simply a return to social practices that embrace positive hostmicrobial transfers to facilitate a diverse human microbiota. Cohabiting humans share microbiota with each other, the degree of which corresponds to the nature of their relationship and level of intimacy they share [49,71]. In terms of the built environment, this involves combining space types or otherwise fostering certain human-human interactions.…”

“…While we are beginning to describe the ways in which the built environment affects health, more research is clearly needed before any accurate conclusions can be reached. The majority of indoor microbiology studies rely on observations and variation within the microbial community, but have not connected these to any potential health outcomes [29,44,49,223,224]. Similar to the loss of host-associated microorganisms contributing to human immune dysfunction, it has been hypothesized that the loss of macro-and microorganism diversity seen in most urban environments has also reduced our environmental microbial exposures which help train the immune system [225].…”

Comprehensive skin microbiome analysis reveals the uniqueness of human-associated microbial communities among the class Mammalia

“…A total of 22,728 unique operational taxonomic units (OTUs) were obtained that corresponded to 44 prokaryotic phyla. The following general taxonomic distributions of the mammalian skin microbiota exclude the human samples that were published previously as part of a broader human cohabitation study (32). There were six phyla present above 1% abundance that constituted a mean of 96.0±4.0% of all reads ( Supplementary Table 1): Firmicutes (33.6±20.4%), Proteobacteria (28.5±19.1%), Actinobacteria (23.6±16.1%), Bacteroidetes (7.6±4.9%), Cyanobacteria (1.5±2.6%), and Chloroflexi (1.1±1.8%).…”

“…The back, torso, and inner thigh regions of 177 non-human mammals were collected using sterile foam swabs (Puritan) according to a previously published protocol (32). In addition, we included data from 77 equivalent samples (the right and left inner thigh were sampled from each participant) from 20 human participants from a previous study that were sampled from November 2015-February 2016 (32) in the analysis for comparison purposes, for a total of 589 samples. These regions were chosen to capture both moist and dry regions and avoid sensitive areas that may cause distress.…”