By Joy Leng, John Tyson-Carr, Suzi Adams, Margaret Scott, Anna Thomas, Timo Giesbrecht, Nick Fallon, Barry Murphy, Michael Hoptroff, Carl Roberts and Steve Paterson
Large-scale skin microbiome studies are often restricted due to the need for participants to visit a research centre to have their skin swabbed by a trained individual. If samples taken by participants at home returned high quality data, similar to that generated from samples taken by trained experts under controlled conditions, it would provide the potential for studies to have larger cohorts, include participants from multiple locations, and facilitate longitudinal sample collection. Here, we describe the development of a novel unsupervised skin microbiome sample collection method and compare data quality with supervised, in lab sample collection. We enrolled 57 participants to collect skin swabs of their axilla, forearm, cheek and scalp. Initially samples were collected in our research centre under strict supervision by a trained expert. Participants then collected swabs from the same body sites 24 hours later, unsupervised, at home, which they returned to the research centre within 3 – 5 days. All samples then underwent bacterial DNA extraction and 16S rRNA gene sequencing.
Editorial
