Transcriptomic responses of 3D human skin tissue to individual skin microbiome representatives and a mixed community of skin microbiome representatives

Populations of microorganisms--the skin microbiome--reside on and within human skin and these microorganisms influence cutaneous processes critical to human health and disease. In order to understand how individual bacteria contribute to cutaneous processes, we co-cultured skin microbiome representatives alone or in a mixed community at the air-tissue interface of 3D skin tissue. The following prevalent microbiome representatives were examined, and each was isolated from healthy human skin: Staphylococcus sp., Micrococcus sp., Paenibacillus sp., Streptococcus sp., Acinetobacter sp., Roseomonas sp., Corynebacterium sp., and Bacillus sp. In each case, axenic skin tissue was inoculated with 500,000 colony forming units of bacteria, and tissue was harvested for transcriptomics 18 hours later.