Skip to main content
Fig. 2 | Microbiome

Fig. 2

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

Fig. 2

Conceptual illustration of important ecological factors impacted by hygienic practice. a Dispersal is the movement of organisms across space; a patch of habitat is continuously sampling the pool of available colonists, which vary across a variety of traits (dispersal efficiency, rate of establishment, ex host survivability, etc.) [125]. b Environmental filtering works on the traits of dispersed colonists—microbes that can survive in a given set of environmental conditions are filtered from the pool of potential colonists [125]: the resources and conditions found there permit the survival/growth of some organisms but not others. c Protective mutualisms function through the occupation of niche space; harmful microorganisms are excluded from colonization via saturation of available habitat by benign, non-harmful microbes [126]. d Host/microbe feedbacks occur via the microbiota’s ability to activate host immune response and the host immune system’s ability to modulate the skin microbiota [106, 127, 128]. Such feedbacks between host immune response and the skin microbiota are thought to be important to the maintenance of a healthy microbiota and the exclusion of invasive pathogenic microbes [87]. All of these ecological factors are affected by features of the e skin habitat, which includes appendages such as hair follicles, sebaceous glands, and sweat glands; microbes (bacteria, fungi, virus particles, and skin mites) reside not only on the surface but deeply within glands and the roots of hairs, as well as within the squamae of the epidermis (illustration redrawn from [53])

Back to article page