NPJ Biofilms Microbiomes. 2017 Jun 22;3:14. doi: 10.1038/s41522-017-0022-5. eCollection 2017.

Unexplored diversity and strain-level structure of the skin microbiome associated with psoriasis.

Tett A1, Pasolli E#1, Farina S#2, Truong DT#1, Asnicar F1, Zolfo M1, Beghini F1, Armanini F1, Jousson O1, De Sanctis V3, Bertorelli R3, Girolomoni G4, Cristofolini M2, Segata N1.

Abstract

Psoriasis is an immune-mediated inflammatory skin disease that has been associated with cutaneous microbial dysbiosis by culture-dependent investigations and rRNA community profiling. We applied, for the first time, high-resolution shotgun metagenomics to characterise the microbiome of psoriatic and unaffected skin from 28 individuals. We demonstrate psoriatic ear sites have a decreased diversity and psoriasis is associated with an increase in Staphylococcus, but overall the microbiomes of psoriatic and unaffected sites display few discriminative features at the species level. Finer strain-level analysis reveals strain heterogeneity colonisation and functional variability providing the intriguing hypothesis of psoriatic niche-specific strain adaptation or selection. Furthermore, we accessed the poorly characterised, but abundant, clades with limited sequence information in public databases, including uncharacterised Malassezia spp. These results highlight the skins hidden diversity and suggests strain-level variations could be key determinants of the psoriatic microbiome. This illustrates the need for high-resolution analyses, particularly when identifying therapeutic targets. This work provides a baseline for microbiome studies in relation to the pathogenesis of psoriasis.

PMID:

28649415

PMCID:

PMC5481418

DOI:

10.1038/s41522-017-0022-5