Leprous lesion reveals disturbed skin-resident microbiota
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Genetics, Microbiology, Taxonomy
- Keywords
- 16S rRNA gene, Leprosy, skin, diversity, microbiota
- Copyright
- © 2014 Nascimento et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2014. Leprous lesion reveals disturbed skin-resident microbiota. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e623v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.623v1
Abstract
Leprosy is a chronic infectious disease that remains a major challenge to public health in endemic countries. Increasing evidence has highlighted the importance of microbiota for human general health and, as such, the study of skin microbiota is of interest. But while studies are continuously revealing the complexity of human skin microbiota, the microbiota of leprous cutaneous lesions has not yet been characterized. Here we used Sanger and massively parallel SSU rRNA gene sequencing to characterize the microbiota of leprous lesions, and studied how it differs from the bacterial skin composition of healthy individuals previously described in the literature. Taxonomic analysis of leprous lesions revealed main four phyla: Proteobacteria, Firmicutes, Bacteroidetes, and Actinobacteria, with Proteobacteria presenting the highest diversity. There were considerable differences in the distribution of Proteobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Firmicutes, and Actinobacteria, with the first two phyla enriched and the other markedly diminished in the leprous lesions, when compared with healthy skin. Propionibacterium, Corynebacterium and Staphylococcus, resident and abundant in healthy skin, were underrepresented in skin from leprous lesions. Most of the taxa found in skin from leprous lesions are not typical of human skin and potentially pathogenic, with the Bulkorderia, Pseudomonas and Bacillus genera being overrepresented. Our data suggest significant shifts of the microbiota with emergence and competitive advantage of potentially pathogenic bacteria over skin resident taxa.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.