The recent era of exploring the human microbiome has provided valuable information on microbial inhabitants, beneficials and pathogens. Screening efforts based on DNA sequencing identified thousands of bacterial lineages associated with human skin but provided only incomplete and crude information on Archaea.
Here, we report for the first time the quantification and visualization of Archaea from human skin. Most of the gene signatures analyzed belonged to the Thaumarchaeota, a group of Archaea we also found in hospitals and clean room facilities. The metabolic potential for ammonia oxidation of the skin-associated Archaea was supported by the successful detection of thaumarchaeal amoA genes in human skin samples.
However, the activity and possible interaction with human epithelial cells of these associated Archaea remains an open question.
Nevertheless, in this study we provide evidence that Archaea are part of the human skin microbiome and discuss their potential for ammonia turnover on human skin. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Archaea have long been thought of as an ancient form of microorganisms, restricted to extreme environments. However, the picture of Archaea changed within the last decade, when these organisms were found in high abundance in cold and moderate environments all around the world [1]. In the oral cavity, methanogens have been associated with some periodontal diseases [2] , although pathogenesis of an archaeon is yet to be confirmed.
