title: Skin microbiota: microbial community structure and its potential association with health and disease.
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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA. rosenbr@umich.edu
authors.forename: Mariana
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rosenthal
authors.forename: Deborah
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Goldberg
authors.forename: Allison
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Aiello
authors.forename: Elaine
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Larson
authors.forename: Betsy
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Foxman
mesh_terms: D001419:Bacteria / Q000145:classification*; D044822:Biodiversity; D006801:Humans; D056265:Microbial Interactions; D012867:Skin / Q000382:microbiology*