COS 127-4 - Community assembly of the human piercing microbiome

Background/Question/Methods

We propose human piercings as a model for studying the community assembly of human skin microbiomes. Modern piercing practices begin with local sterilization, which we hypothesize functions as a major environmental disturbance to the skin microbiome. The change in the physical topology of the skin along with the addition of a metal stud is then expected to produce a novel ecological niche that differs from the previously non-pierced skin in many ways such as average temperature, acidity, humidity, and exposure to wind, UV light, and immigrant species. This rapid environmental change should impose strong fitness costs, and the short generation time of typical microbiome species makes it tractable to observe subsequent community changes. A novel and distinct piercing microbiome is expected to develop through a combination of stochastic migration of new immigrant species and deterministic ecological selection.

In collaboration with Tattoo Lounge in Montreal, Canada, we explored the composition and assembly of the human ear piercing microbiome using 16S metabarcoding. We hypothesized that 1) certain core taxa are consistent across piercing microbiomes while some accessory taxa will vary according to individual characteristics, and 2) alpha and beta diversity will increase during ecological succession of the piercing microbiome.


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Results/Conclusions

We found that human piercings significantly alter the composition of the ear skin microbiome demonstrating that human piercings have major ecological impacts that cause the skin microbiome community to shift to a novel and distinct piercing microbiome. Few core taxa were present across most piercing microbiomes while significant heterogeneity in community composition was observed across individuals. Preliminary results suggest that human piercings cause skin microbiomes to diversify along different trajectories.

It is general knowledge that infection of body piercings is a common complication, and medical studies have identified a variety of specific bacterial, fungal, and viral culprits. However, little had been known about the community composition and temporal dynamics of human piercing microbiomes prior to this study. Investigating these unexplored communities will provide data that could be useful in preventing piercing infections in the future. More broadly, this knowledge will help improve understanding of the general processes underlying skin microbiome community assembly.


TRANSLATE with x

English

Arabic	Hebrew	Polish
Bulgarian	Hindi	Portuguese
Catalan	Hmong Daw	Romanian
Chinese Simplified	Hungarian	Russian
Chinese Traditional	Indonesian	Slovak
Czech	Italian	Slovenian
Danish	Japanese	Spanish
Dutch	Klingon	Swedish
English	Korean	Thai
Estonian	Latvian	Turkish
Finnish	Lithuanian	Ukrainian
French	Malay	Urdu
German	Maltese	Vietnamese
Greek	Norwegian	Welsh
Haitian Creole	Persian

TRANSLATE with

COPY THE URL BELOW



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