Researchers have glimpsed the complexities of human skin by creating a three-dimensional (3D) map of the chemicals and microbes found on the body's largest organ.
Pieter Dorrestein of the University of California in San Diego and his colleagues swabbed 400 locations on the skin of two healthy human volunteers who abstained from bathing for three days before sampling. Using mass spectrometry and DNA sequencing, the researchers identified the chemical compounds and microbes on the skin. They used a supercomputer to combine the data and to build a map covering the whole body (pictured is the chemical map for one volunteer; blue is low molecular diversity, red is high).
The team now plans to characterize more skin chemicals and microbes, and say that their technique could be used in fields from forensics to beauty-product development.
Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA http://doi.org/3h8 (2015)
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A 3D map of skin microbes and molecules. Nature 520, 266 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/520266a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/520266a
