Skin Microbiome Analysis for Forensic Human Identification: What Do We Know So Far?

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.