A Jungle in There: Bacteria in Belly Buttons are Highly Diverse, but Predictable
Open Access
- 7 November 2012
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Public Library of Science (PLoS) in PLOS ONE
- Vol. 7 (11), e47712
- https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0047712
Abstract
The belly button is one of the habitats closest to us, and yet it remains relatively unexplored. We analyzed bacteria and arachaea from the belly buttons of humans from two different populations sampled within a nation-wide citizen science project. We examined bacterial and archaeal phylotypes present and their diversity using multiplex pyrosequencing of 16S rDNA libraries. We then tested the oligarchy hypothesis borrowed from tropical macroecology, namely that the frequency of phylotypes in one sample of humans predicts its frequency in another independent sample. We also tested the predictions that frequent phylotypes (the oligarchs) tend to be common when present, and tend to be more phylogenetically clustered than rare phylotypes. Once rarefied to four hundred reads per sample, bacterial communities from belly buttons proved to be at least as diverse as communities known from other skin studies (on average 67 bacterial phylotypes per belly button). However, the belly button communities were strongly dominated by a few taxa: only 6 phylotypes occurred on >80% humans. While these frequent bacterial phylotypes (the archaea were all rare) are a tiny part of the total diversity of bacteria in human navels (<0.3% of phylotypes), they constitute a major portion of individual reads (∼1/3), and are predictable among independent samples of humans, in terms of both the occurrence and evolutionary relatedness (more closely related than randomly drawn equal sets of phylotypes). Thus, the hypothesis that “oligarchs” dominate diverse assemblages appears to be supported by human-associated bacteria. Although it remains difficult to predict which species of bacteria might be found on a particular human, predicting which species are most frequent (or rare) seems more straightforward, at least for those species living in belly buttons.Keywords
This publication has 30 references indexed in Scilit:
- Environmental biodiversity, human microbiota, and allergy are interrelatedProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2012
- Beyond the Venn diagram: the hunt for a core microbiomeEnvironmental Microbiology, 2011
- The under-recognized dominance of Verrucomicrobia in soil bacterial communitiesSoil Biology and Biochemistry, 2011
- The skin microbiomeNature Reviews Microbiology, 2011
- Examining the global distribution of dominant archaeal populations in soilThe ISME Journal, 2010
- QIIME allows analysis of high-throughput community sequencing dataNature Methods, 2010
- PyNAST: a flexible tool for aligning sequences to a template alignmentBioinformatics, 2009
- Microbial community profiling for human microbiome projects: Tools, techniques, and challengesGenome Research, 2009
- A core gut microbiome in obese and lean twinsNature, 2008
- The Human Microbiome ProjectNature, 2007