Thank you @ihmc2026seoul.bsky.social for organizing IHMC this year at Seoul and inviting Curtis to speak. Also pictured are Cherry and Yan who are lab alumni and also attended the conference!

Many exciting results to follow-up on! 1. The skin microbiome has unique “types” in every site - we call them dermotypes. The underarm has as many as 5 distinct ones defined by diverse microbes. We built ML classifiers to predict them w/ near-perfect accuracy with 5 species!

2. Dermotypes are highly coordinated across sites. For some sites, we can predict the dermotype just by knowing dermotype of another site. Left and right sides of the body are also highly correlated, suggesting that individual intrinsic factors strongly shape the skin microbiome.

3. Microbes behave very differently across dermotypes in terms of who they co-occur with! We can confirm this with culture-based experiments that show that oxygen gradients and nutrient availability likely shape why we see distinct dermotypes in various individuals. @atVidu

4. Dermotypes exhibit distinct associations w/ host, where ethnicity and gender play a role in some cases, while others are linked to skincare behaviors. Skin sensitivity, itch and eczema may be affected by dermotype function, highlighting utility for patient stratification & therapeutics

5. Exciting days ahead as we try to decipher the contributions of diverse factors that shape skin microbiome dermotypes, and in turn their influence on skin health! @cherrychengchenli.bsky.social

Which skin microbiome type do you have 🤔 Check out our exciting work from the Asian Skin Microbiome Program offering new insights of skin microbiome population heterogeneity👇 #skinmicrobiome #microbiomescience

Niranjan Nagarajan@niranjantw.bsky.social · last yr.

Super thrilled to share our labor of love from the Asian Skin Microbiome Program! We collected >3,500 skin samples, built metagenomic libraries w/ >70 billion reads and >10TB of data to study heterogeneity of the skin microbiome in the general population (200 adults, 18 sites) t.co/ZylbJMpvpw