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Fig. 1 | Microbiome

Fig. 1

From: Cleanliness in context: reconciling hygiene with a modern microbial perspective

Fig. 1

a Diversity of the hand microbiome is variable, with different studies finding different dominant groups (though Proteobacteria and Actinobacteria are common members of the hand microbiome across studies): data presented from [52, 54, 57]. Interactions between taxa may modulate their ecological roles, and community variation across a range of ecological traits may be altered by changes in community membership or structure [124]. b Pre-hand hygiene intervention. Both resident and transient microbes are abundant on the hands (in this conceptualization, colored dots represent individual microbes: many colors are used to show the diversity of microbes present on the hands). c Hand hygiene intervention, such as washing with soap and water, reduces the total number of microbes (microbial load) present on the hands. d Cultivation-dependent detection (CDD) is commonly used to study aspects of hand hygiene; cultivation yields data showing changes in the numbers of colony-forming units (counts), though many microbes are not detectable using this methodology (represented as non-colored, open circles). Some studies identify colonies using morphological or molecular methods, yielding limited taxonomic information. e Cultivation-independent detection, including high-throughput DNA sequencing, is commonly used to study the microbial ecology of the skin. Using these methods, it is possible to quantify alterations in relative abundance of bacterial populations with treatment (such as handwashing), to obtain deep, comprehensive taxonomic diversity estimates. Depending on technique, it may also be possible to also obtain information on functional metabolic pathways (using metagenomics and metatranscriptomics)

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