Skin microbiome profiling and cultivation of healthy adult Indonesian skin

Studies on the impact of skin microbiota on human health have been gaining more attention. The skin microbiome is considered to provide several probiotics for skin therapeutic. Beneficial bacteria mixtures (bacterial cocktail) isolated from targeted organs have shown promising modulatory activities for use in skin therapeutics. The objectives of this study were to determine and identify the microbial communities on the skin that can be potentially used as probiotics-postbiotics. Determination and identification of skin microbiota were carried out simultaneously by employing next-generation sequencing (NGS) of direct sampling, as well as by bacterial cultivation; twenty bacterial isolates with different characteristics were selected and identified by both culture-based methods and 16sRNA sequencing. We found that Actinobacteria and Firmicutes are the most abundant phylum present on the skin as presented by NGS data, which constitute to 67% and 28.59% of the whole bacterial population, consecutively. Three strains, i.e., Staphylococcus hominis (AN MK968325.1), Staphylococcus warneri (AN MK968315.1), and Micrococcus luteus (MK968318.1), were obtained from cultivable samples. They were potential to be developed further as probiotics in skin microbiome therapeutic as well as for postbiotic formulation. However, the promising formula of bacterial cocktail for skin microbiome therapeutic must be elucidated thoroughly to avoid unwanted effects by performing visual observation on agar plate and by molecular approach, q-PCR.