ReviewMicroorganisms2020
Skin Microbiome Analysis for Forensic Human Identification: What Do We Know So Far?
Review in Microorganisms, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Human microbiome and microbiota identification for preventing and controlling healthcare-associated infections: A systematic review.Frontiers in public health · 2022Pooled it
- The human skin microbiome: factors affecting individuality and application in forensic investigations.International journal of legal medicine · 2026Review
- Bioinformatics-driven discovery of skin microbiota bacteriocins as potential antibiotics and probiotics.The Journal of antibiotics · 2025Article
- Skin Microbiome alterations in heroin users revealed by full-length 16S rRNA sequencing.BMC microbiology · 2025Article
- Microbial genomics: a potential toolkit for forensic investigations.Forensic science, medicine, and pathology · 2025Review
- Microbiota-based biomarkers of infection risk in patients undergoing vascular endograft implantation: a pilot study.Frontiers in medicine · 2025Article
- Hand-to-surface bacterial transfer and healthcare-associated infections prevention: a pilot study on skin microbiome in a molecular biology laboratory.Frontiers in medicine · 2025Article
- Article
- Comparison of the full-length sequence and sub-regions of 16S rRNA gene for skin microbiome profiling.mSystems · 2024Article
- Transferability of Human and Environmental Microbiome on Clothes as a Tool for Forensic Investigations.Genes · 2024Article
- Decomposition in an extreme cold environment and associated microbiome-prediction model implications for the postmortem interval estimation.Frontiers in microbiology · 2024Article
- Research progress on the application of 16S rRNA gene sequencing and machine learning in forensic microbiome individual identification.Frontiers in microbiology · 2024Review
- Human Pangenomics: Promises and Challenges of a Distributed Genomic Reference.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- Application of Microbiome in Forensics.Genomics, proteomics & bioinformatics · 2023Review
- Post-Mortem Interval and Microbiome Analysis through 16S rRNA Analysis: A Systematic Review.Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
- Towards standardized and reproducible research in skin microbiomes.Environmental microbiology · 2022Review
- Microbial communities in the liver and brain are informative for postmortem submersion interval estimation in the late phase of decomposition: A study in mouse cadavers recovered from freshwater.Frontiers in microbiology · 2022Article
- Inborn errors of immunity and related microbiome.Frontiers in immunology · 2022Review
- Identifying individual-specific microbial DNA fingerprints from skin microbiomes.Frontiers in microbiology · 2022Article
- Methods used in microbial forensics and epidemiological investigations for stronger health systems.Forensic sciences research · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Microbiome research is a highly transdisciplinary field with a wide range of applications and methods for studying it, involving different computational approaches and models. The fact that different people host radically different microbiota highlights forensic perspectives in understanding what leads to this variation and what regulates it, in order to effectively use microbes as forensic evidence. This narrative review provides an overview of some of the main scientific works so far produced, focusing on the potentiality of using skin microbiome profiling for human identification in forensics. This review was performed following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. The examined literature clearly ascertains that skin microbial communities, although personalized, vary systematically across body sites and time, with intrapersonal differences over time smaller than interpersonal ones, showing such a high degree of spatial and temporal variability that the degree and nature of this variability can constitute in itself an important parameter useful in distinguishing individuals from one another. Even making the effort to organically synthesize all results achieved until now, it is quite evident that these results are still the pieces of a puzzle, which is not yet complete.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.