A Comparison of Skin Microbiota under Adhesive Bandages versus Uncovered Adjacent Skin

The skin is the largest organ in the human body and interacts directly with the exterior environment. It is also a habitat for bacteria. We are interested in the perturbing effects of adhesive bandages on the skin’s bacterial populations. We compared covered versus uncovered finger skin using three kinds of over the counter adhesive bandages. We found that skin covered with an adhesive bandage is home to approximately 80 fold more culturable bacteria than is uncovered skin and that type of bandage makes little difference to expansion of the bacterial population. Diversity of bacteria was measured by two different techniques: one culture dependent and one culture independent, both found no significant diversity difference between covered vs. uncovered skin in number of taxa present. The culture dependent analysis found that most samples were dominated by a single bacterium, whereas the culture independent 16S rDNA analysis found more diversity. Evidence of seasonal cycling of dominant culturable skin bacteria