skin microbiome – Naturally Inspiring

October 27, 2025October 27, 2025

Skin Party Gone South: Meet the Eczema Wild Cards

Background:

Eczema is that one clingy friend who always crashes your party. It shows up unannounced and messes with your plans by staying way too long, making a scene and ensuring everyone gives it attention. All jokes aside, eczema is a chronic inflammatory condition of skin that negatively impacts millions of people around the world with flakiness, itchiness, irritation, inflammation and downgrading all victim’s self esteem and damaging quality of life.

The big picture from all of the studies that are mentioned below is a solid indication that eczema is not just one simple problem. It is a problem that overlaps with many aspects of life such as aging, immune function and microbial communities.

October 23, 2025

Hey! You’ve got something on your face.

Take a Q-tip. Swipe it across the space between your eyebrows. That Q-tip now holds tens of thousands of bacteria. Before you scrub your face with an SOS pad, know that this is completely normal. Swabbing a 1 cm² patch of skin on the human body typically collects about 10,000 bacterial cells (Grice et al., 2008). Not only is finding your skin covered in bacteria normal, it is a vital part of having healthy skin.

December 2, 2024

When Healing Hurts: The Hidden Toll of Radiation on Skin Health

Background

As advancements in cancer treatments emerged, they brought along unavoidable side effects. Radiation therapy, now a cornerstone in oncology, comes with persistent impacts on the body, one of the most significant being radiation-induced skin injury (RISI) (Jaschke et al., 2017). This condition remains a common and challenging complication for both patients and clinicians.

The skin serves as a physical shield and a habitat for a diverse ecosystem of microorganisms, collectively known as the microbiota. These microbes play a critical role in maintaining skin health by supporting wound healing, regulating inflammation, and preventing infections. Any disruption to this microbial balance can have extensive consequences for recovery and immune response.

November 5, 2024November 6, 2024

The Friends (or Enemies) That Live on Our Skin

Introduction:

Acne vulgaris, more commonly known as acne, is a disease that mostly everyone deals with at some point in their life, most likely in their adolescent years, and can lead to self-esteem issues and negative impacts on mental health (Lee, et. al., 2019). Of course, there are some people who maybe get the occasional pimple, but generally do not have acne-prone skin and to them, people might say they are blessed with good genetics. But is genetics really the outstanding cause of whether you have acne or not? Microbiologists would suggest it is the microbes inhabiting our skin, which are microscopic sized organisms. The skin microbiome, or collection of microbes living on and in your skin, is diverse and can contribute to a number of skin conditions, acne being one of them. There is one specific microbe known to inhabit the skin quite pervasively and progress acne: Propionibacterium acnes. This microbe is able to survive without oxygen within a layer beneath your skin and deep within the hair follicles of the skin.

A study done by Jacob Hall and colleagues in 2018 offers a comparative analysis of the three methods best suited for sampling the skin to determine the presence of microbes. The use of pore strips is one method used in this study, but it is stated that previous studies have emphasized concern they do not reach deep enough to obtain an accurate analysis (Fitz-Gibbon, et al., 2013). Another method used was swabbing the skin surface with a cotton swab, which only obtains information from the surface of the skin and not internal layers, where we know P. acnes to be most abundant. The third method used was cyanoacrylate glue which was able to obtain 50% deeper into the hair follicle than the pore strips were able to. The two methods of data analysis used in this study were 16S rRNA sequencing and whole-genome sequencing (WGS). 16S rRNA sequencing offers microbial identification by amplifying a highly conserved region within all bacteria, while WGS takes the entire DNA sequence and matches the parts of DNA to sequences that are available on public databases to determine which taxa are present.

October 31, 2019

How the Environment Affects the Microorganisms of Our Skin

Background

Microorganisms are present all around us, but our interaction does not stop at that. There are millions of these microscopic creatures living in and on our bodies. While this may seem alarming at first, most of these microbes cause no harm, and in many cases play an important role in our health. Studies have shown that our microbiota, which are microscopic organisms that live in our bodies, have a wide range of functions from supporting our immune system (Mazmanian et al., 2008), to helping us stay free of infection (Fredricks et al., 2005). Scientists are trying to distinguish the range of what a healthy human microbial composition is. By establishing this range, the hope is to use the microbiome to detect and treat a variety of diseases (Rosenthal et al., 2011). Continue reading “How the Environment Affects the Microorganisms of Our Skin”