Human Skin Microbiome: Finding Friends Amongst the Foes

A science lecture titled "Human Skin Microbiome: Finding Friends Amongst the Foes", part of Rockefeller University's Friday Lecture Series, held in the Caspary Auditorium. The speaker is Julie Segre, Ph.D., professor of microbiology and immunology and Mary Sue Coleman Director of the Life Sciences Institute at the University of Michigan, formerly an NIH Distinguished Investigator and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine. Her talk explains how the varied topography of human skin shapes its microbial communities, and how her group combined culturing and computational pipelines to build metagenomic assembled genomes of the skin microbiome. She also describes research on global skin microbiome diversity, including the fungal pathogen Trichophyton concentricum among the Orang Asli of Malaysia, multi-drug resistant pathogens in long term care facilities, and commensal bacteria that persist from childhood.