Bacteria Are Picky About Their Homes on Human Skin

Julie Segre is touring the microbial landscape of our body's biggest organ, the skin. In anticipation of a $115 million, 5-year effort by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), she's traveling from head to toe, conducting a census of some of the trillions of bacteria that live within and upon human skin. Although their project is just getting off the ground, Segre, a geneticist at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) in Bethesda, Maryland, and her colleagues have already uncovered a surprising diversity and distribution among skin bacteria. And a few oddities have emerged, too: Microbes known mostly from soils like healthy human skin, living in harmony with us; and the space between our toes is a bacterial desert compared to the nose and belly button.