isolation of 42 skin isolated phages. Staphylococcus phage sp.

Human skin is colonised by diverse microbial communities that are important for skin health. Species of coagulase-negative Staphylococcus are highly abundant and vary across the different skin regions, with S. epidermidis being the most frequent. We seek to investigate how the skin virome influences the dynamics of staphylococcal populations in bacterial communities of the skin microbiome, with focus on skin bacteriophages infecting Staphylococcus spp.We collected swabs from >80 healthy volunteers across different skin sites to isolate cutaneous phages that infect different Staphylococcus spp. From the swabs we isolated, purified and sequenced the genomes of 42 phages that infect 8 different Staphylococcus species.