Healthy skin is home to a much wider variety of bacteria than scientists ever knew, says the first big census of our co-inhabitants.
And that’s not a bad thing, said genetics specialist Julia Segre of the National Institutes of Health, who led the research.
Sure they make your sneakers stinky, “but they also keep your skin moist and make sure if you get a wound that (dangerous) bacteria don’t enter your bloodstream,” she said. “We take a lot for granted in terms of how much they contribute to our health.”
People’s bodies are ecosystems, believed home to trillions of bacteria, fungi and other microbes that naturally coexist in the skin, the digestive tract and other spots. But scientists don’t have a good grasp of which microbes live where, much less which are helpful, even indispensable, in maintaining health. The NIH’s “Human Microbiome Project” aims to change that, recruiting healthy volunteers to learn what microbes they harbor so scientists can compare the healthy with diseases of microbes gone awry - from acute infections to mysterious conditions like psoriasis or irritable bowel syndrome.
The skin research, published in today’s edition of the journal Science, is part of that project. Scientists decoded the genes of 112,000 bacteria in samples taken from a mere 20 spots on the skin of 10 people. Those numbers translated into roughly 1,000 strains, or species, of bacteria, Segre said, hundreds more than ever have been found on skin largely because the project used newer genetic techniques to locate them.
