Despite myriad challenges, clinicians see room for progress.
Image credit: Shutterstock/David Tadevosian.
New Research In
Physical Sciences
Featured Portals
Articles by Topic
Biological Sciences
Featured Portals
Articles by Topic
-
Edited by Jeffrey I. Gordon, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO, and approved September 23, 2008 (received for review August 11, 2008)
Article Figures & SI
Figures
- Fig. 1.
Relative abundances of the most abundant bacterial groups on the hand surfaces, with the hand samples divided into categories of sex (A), time since last hand washing (B), and the dominant versus the nondominant hand (C). Error bars are 1 standard error of the mean. For the number of sequences and number of samples included in each category and the full taxonomic description of the hand surface bacterial communities see Table S1. Superscripts on the taxon name indicate the phylum or subphylum: 1, Actinobacteria; 2, Firmicutes; 3, Betaproteobacteria; 4, Gammaproteobacteria; 5, Alphaproteobacteria; 6, Bacteroidetes.
- Fig. 2.
Average pairwise bacterial community similarity between left and right hands from the same individual (circles) and between hands from different individuals (squares) as measured by using the unweighted UniFrac similarity index (bottom axis, open symbols) or the percentage of phylotypes that are shared between pairs (top axis, filled symbols). Average pairwise values and 95% confidence intervals are shown. For these analyses, 2,500 sequences were randomly selected per sample, and only those samples represented by >2,500 sequences were included (n = 51 and 5,100 pairwise comparisons for intraindividual comparison and interindividual comparisons, respectively).
- Fig. 3.
Differentiation in hand-surface communities between sexes (A), dominant versus the nondominant hands (B), time since last hand washing (C), and time since last hand washing for each sex (D) determined by using the unweighted UniFrac algorithm. The length of the branches corresponds to the degree of differentiation between bacterial communities in each category. All of the branch nodes shown here were found to be significant (P < 0.001), indicating that each of these categories harbored distinct bacterial communities.
- Fig. 4.
Rarefaction curves showing differences in bacterial diversity on palm surfaces from men and women. (A) Phylogenetic diversity estimated by measuring the average total branch length per sample after a specified number of individual sequences have been observed (36). (B) Diversity estimated by determining the average number of unique phylotypes per hand. For these analyses, we randomly selected 2,400 sequences per hand sample, and thus the average number of phylotypes per hand is lower than for the full dataset (Table 1). Bars indicate 95% confidence intervals.
Tables
- Table 1.
Summary description of the sampling effort, the number of sequences collected, and the levels of bacterial diversity discovered
No. of hands sampled Total no. of sequences Average length of sequence reads, bp (range) Total no. of classifiable bacterial sequences Total no. of phylotypes across all hands sampled Average no. of sequences per hand (range) Average no. of phylotypes per hand (range) 102 (from 27 men and 24 women) 351,630 228 (200–267) 331,619 4,742 3,251 (2,410–5,838) 158 (46–401) -
Phylotypes were determined at the 97% sequence similarity level.
-
Data supplements
Supporting Information
Files in this Data Supplement:
The influence of sex, handedness, and washing on the diversity of hand surface bacteria
Sign up for Article Alerts
Article Classifications
- Biological Sciences
- Microbiology
Jump to section
You May Also be Interested in
Better explicating the strengths and shortcomings of these models will help refine projections and improve transparency in the years ahead.
Image credit: Witsawat.S.
Using CRISPR, researchers showed that a region some used to label “junk DNA” has a major role in a rare genetic disorder.
Image credit: Nathan Devery.
Mara Reed and Michael Manga explore why Yellowstone's Steamboat Geyser resumed erupting in 2018.
A study demonstrates how two enzymes—MHETase and PETase—work synergistically to depolymerize the plastic pollutant PET.
Image credit: Aaron McGeehan (artist).