Archaea on Human Skin

Archaea on Human Skin

The recent era of exploring the human microbiome has provided valuable information on microbial inhabitants, beneficials and pathogens. Screening efforts based on DNA sequencing identified thousands of bacterial lineages associated with human skin but provided only incomplete and crude information on Archaea. Here, we report for the first time the quantification and visualization of Archaea fro...

Archaea on the move.

Methanogenic Archaea and human periodontal disease.

Archaea have been isolated from the human colon, vagina, and oral cavity, but have not been established as causes of human disease. In this study, we reveal a relationship between the severity of periodontal disease and the relative abundance of archaeal small subunit ribosomal RNA genes (SSU rDNA) in the subgingival crevice by using quantitative PCR. Furthermore, the relative abundance of arch...

Role of archaea in human disease

A decade ago a hypothesis was proposed that, similar to the Bacteria and Eukarya, the archaeal domain of life might harbor certain species capable of causing disease (Cavicchioli et al., 2003; Eckburg et al., 2003). Now, a decade later, it is time to revisit the topic in the light of new data available. The last decade witnessed a massive use of molecular ecology tools in clinical microbiology,...

Archaea

A headline on the front page of the New York Times for November 3, 1977, read "Scientists Discover a Way of Life That Predates Higher Organisms". The accompanying article described a spectacular claim by Carl Woese and George Fox to have discovered a third form of life, a new 'domain' that we now call Archaea. It's not that these microbes were unknown before, nor was it the case that their pecu...