SKINIPEDIA - Skin Encyclopedia: Human Skin Microflora

Human Skin Microflora: DNA Sequence-Based Approach to Examining Hand Disease by Dr. Julie Segre

Dr. Julie Segre's video presentation of Human Skin Microflora is here.

DISCUSSION CONTINUES...

Sarah Harding: Excellent. So I appreciate this. There are a number of you asking questions over the Web portion of this webinar which I think is excellent. And I will just bring it to your attention to those of you who maybe haven’t seen it. But we did get a question from Ke Chen at Boston University. The question is, are you considering the impact of environmental factors such as the level of sun exposure or living in an area of more damp or dry area in to the relationship of human cells and microbial cells, sorry, in your study population? If so how, and what type of impact would these environmental factors have?

Julie Segre: So sounds another - and these have all been just great questions. And that is another thing that just makes this so complex. When we are trying to capture what is normal, of course we are finding individuals who live in a dry community, people who, I mean, even a dry environment like, you know, living in Arizona and people who live in a moister community. And even that can change between if it is the winter time and you are spending your days inside, you know, a heated environment which dries out your, you know, is a dry environment. So there are many variables here. It may be important, you know, just the sun exposure, all those things may really be important. And we are actually trying to capture as many of those variables as we can. And we are asking people, you know, who they live with. We are asking them do they have a pet. It turns out people have a lot of contact with their pets. And so we are asking them all those questions. I am not sure that we will have a great enough population that we can determine if there is statistical significance to any one of those factors. And it may be that what we find out is that the variance is just so great that you really cannot tell a difference. But we are capturing all of that information in our questionnaires to see if there is a correlation between where someone lives and who they live with and, you know, what they eat and what allergies they have and those, you know, those types of questions to try to get to see if those are affecting their microbiota.

Sarah Harding: Great. So are there any other questions from the audience? All right. Well I want to thank Dr. Segre for speaking today. I think this was very interesting and certainly added some insight into one of the many programs that are going on here at the NHGRI. This is a series of talks that we will be holding pretty much every other month for the next - for the significant future. And so we will be announcing more of these webinars as time goes on. So we hope to see you again. There is a Web site that I believe went out with some of the emails that you would have received from me that would have information on our other webinars that happened last year. So again we look forward to seeing you in future webinars and if in fact you would have other ideas of other topics that you would like to hear from, I would be very excited to hear about those as well. So you will receive more information from me. But again, thank you very much for participating and I hope you all have an excellent afternoon. Thanks very much. Bye-bye.