[WS6-2/ODP-082] Single-cell level analysis of strain-level microbial diversity in human skin microbiome
Human skin is colonized by a diverse microbial community. Recent studies have provided insights into their strain-level diversity associated with host skin health and diseases. These studies are conventionally conducted with culture-based microbial genome sequencing to recover whole-genome sequences of bacterial strains, limiting sample size and problems of cultivation bias. Although shotgun metagenomic sequencing is widely used to study uncultured microbes, it is difficult to reconstruct strain-level genomes from a complex mixture of fragmented genomic sequences.In this study, we applied the platform for single-cell genome sequencing of microbes, SAG-gel (Chijiiwa et al. 2020 Microbiome) or bit-MAP®, to the human skin microbiome. Samples were collected by swabbing from the facial surfaces of healthy volunteers. Using bit-MAP®, we obtained over 700 single-amplified genomes (SAGs) of single bacterial cells collected from 8 healthy males and females. From these, we have successfully obtained draft genome sequences of multiple strains of skin microbes. This enabled us to analyze the strain-level diversity of skin microbiome among individuals.Our bit-MAP® generates a massive amount of SAGs without cultivation and enables strain-level analysis of skin microbiome. Such genomic data can accelerate the microbiome research for novel diagnostic and therapeutic approaches to skin disease.