Last modified: 2019-07-17
Abstract
Background: Microbiota studies have been gaining more attention due to its role in human health. Bacteria is known to be associated with diseases, however certain strains of bacteria are considered beneficial, which are known as probiotics. Mixture of several bacteria (bacterial cocktail) isolated from targeted organs have showed promising modulatory activity in skin therapeutics. Objective: The objectives of our study were to determine and identify the microbial communities on the skin which potentially be used as probiotics by performing simultaneous NGS profiling and cultivable bacterial isolation. Materials and Methods: Samples were collected by swab technique from eight Indonesian young volunteers with healthy skin conditions in the age range 17-25 years from densely populated Depok city, West Java, Indonesia. Thus, around twenty bacterial isolates with different characteristics were selected and identified by both culture-based method and 16sRNA sequencing. Non-cultivable microbiome profile was obtained using next generation sequencing (NGS) from directly extracted DNA from swab samples as the template. Results: We found that Firmicutes and Actinobacteria are the most abundant phylum present on the skin. Staphylococcus hominis, Staphylococcus warneri, and Micrococcus luteus (AN MK968325.1; AN MK968315.1; and MK968318.1 respectively) were obtained in the samples and potentially act as probiotics. Conclusion: Skin microbiome is considered to provide several probiotics for skin therapeutic. However, some opportunistic pathogens were discovered in this study.