Details Matter: Designing Skin Microbiome Studies

The use of genomic sequencing to investigate microbes has expanded, yet it has also raised questions regarding optimal approaches to studying the skin microbiome. Meisel et al. show that while whole genome shotgun metagenomic sequences were most similar to expected microbial profiles, sequencing of the hypervariable regions V1-V3 of the 16S ribosomal RNA gene had greater accuracy than sequencing of the hypervariable region V4 in determining genus and species level classifications of prominent skin bacteria.