Diurnal variation in the human skin microbiome affects accuracy of forensic microbiome matching

Microbiome

Christopher E. Mason¹  David Wilkins²  Marcus H. Y. Leung²  Xinzhao Tong²  Patrick K. H. Lee² 

[1] Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, NY, USA;The HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud Institute for Computational Biomedicine, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, NY, USA;The WorldQuant Initiative for Quantitative Prediction, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, NY, USA;The Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, NY, USA;School of Energy and Environment, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China;

关键词: Built environment;    Forensics;    Microbiota;    Skin;    Surface;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s40168-021-01082-1

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundThe human skin microbiome has been recently investigated as a potential forensic tool, as people leave traces of their potentially unique microbiomes on objects and surfaces with which they interact. In this metagenomic study of four people in Hong Kong, their homes, and public surfaces in their neighbourhoods, we investigated the stability and identifiability of these microbiota traces on a timescale of hours to days.ResultsUsing a Canberra distance-based method of comparing skin and surface microbiomes, we found that a person could be accurately matched to their household in 84% of tests and to their neighbourhood in 50% of tests, and that matching accuracy did not decay for household surfaces over the 10-day study period, although it did for public surfaces. The time of day at which a skin or surface sample was taken affected matching accuracy, and 160 species across all sites were found to have a significant variation in abundance between morning and evening samples. We hypothesised that daily routines drive a rhythm of daytime dispersal from the pooled public surface microbiome followed by normalisation of a person’s microbiome by contact with their household microbial reservoir, and Dynamic Bayesian Networks (DBNs) supported dispersal from public surfaces to skin as the major dispersal route among all sites studied.ConclusionsThese results suggest that in addition to considering the decay of microbiota traces with time, diurnal patterns in microbiome exposure that contribute to the human skin microbiome assemblage must also be considered in developing this as a potential forensic method.3rx_gMdDV2df1kQKP4s232Video Abstract

【 授权许可】

CC BY