SKINIPEDIA - Skin Encyclopedia: Human Skin Microflora

Human Skin Microflora: DNA Sequence-Based Approach to Examining Hand Disease by Dr. Julie Segre

Dr. Julie Segre's video presentation of Human Skin Microflora is here.

Hi. This is Julie Segre. So today I am going to talk about my own research project specifically examining the microflora, which are the bacteria, the fungi, the viruses so on that live on your skin and also give an overview of the larger projects. So what is really important to remember about this, and on slide 2 I do not seem to have control over the slides Sarah. On the next slide of this presentation, I wanted to - okay. I wanted to introduce some of the goals of the larger NIH Roadmap for Medical Research Human Microbiome Project.

And what is really important to realize here is that we tend to think of ourselves as humans, that we are these human cells. But in fact we are really made up of human cells that are living together with bacteria, fungi and other small microscopic organisms. And it is really remarkable because in and on our bodies, these microbial cells actually outnumber the human cells by about tenfold. So for every human cell that there - you have in your body, you actually have ten more microbial cells. But it actually - it is not that they outnumber us but they do not actually outweigh us because each human cells has about 1000 times more DNA and is about 1000 times bigger or - than - or at least 100 times bigger than a microbial cell. So we actually outweigh them even though they outnumber us.

Now as an example, the bacteria that live in the gut, in the intestine, we think that because of this microbial diversity and these large number of bacteria, that the bacteria and the other fungi and the other small organisms, they probably have 100 times more genes than our own human genome. So there is a tremendous amount of diversity. And this microbiome is really the - microbiome means the total microbial DNA - is really an important part of our genetic landscape and also of our bodies. So for example, when you take a drug, you probably think that it is your human cells that are metabolizing the drugs. But in fact, the bacteria that live in your gut are part of what metabolizes this drug.

And so it is really important for us to understand the complexity of our human DNA, but also to understand the complexity of our microbial DNA. So the overall goals of this project are really - the Human Microbiome Project - arereally to understand how the microbiode of the small organisms interact with our human cells and how that maintains health and disease. So I just talked about drug metabolism via bacteria, but of course these bacteria also break down food and aid in digestion and on our skin, they can break down the proteins that are made by the human cells of the skin and create sort of a, you know, contribute to creating natural moisturizing factor that keeps your skin supple and smooth. It is true on the skin they also have waste products that create part of what we think of as body odor. So, you know, we have to think about the full range of how the bacteria contribute to our health and to disease states. And that really is the goal of the larger Human Microbiome Project written here. We are bringing in 250 normal individuals and sampling them at five different body sites - the gut, the nose, the oral cavity, the vagina for women and the skin. And this giving us a baseline so that other investigators including myself are then doing clinical trials, we are examining the skin microbiota in people with common and rare skin disorders.

Human Skin Microflora Transcript Part II