Figure 1.

Overview of a standard skin microbiome analysis pipeline. A skin microbiome analysis pipeline includes study design, sample collection, processing, sequencing, and bioinformatic analysis. Some steps within sample processing and bioinformatics may be specific to certain sequencing approaches (e.g., amplicon target within sample processing is specific for targeted or amplicon sequencing and host removal may be specific for untargeted sequencing). The figure also shows several of the steps that may add biases to a skin microbiome pipeline (discussed in this review); these were also previously described for microbiome studies and applied in skin microbiome research [24]. PCR: polymerase chain reaction.