| Human skin is covered with bacteria, but little is known about which species live there. To find out, researchers swabbed the forearms of six volunteers and sequenced the microbial DNA in the samples. They detected a grand total of 182 bacterial species (estimates for the human gut commonly fall between 300 to 500 species). Only 2% of the skin bacteria were found on all the subjects, and 71% of the species only colonized one or another of the six volunteers, the researchers report online the week of 5 February in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. When four of the subjects were swabbed again 8 to 10 months later, their bacterial profiles had changed dramatically, and 65 other species were identified.
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