Abstract
With a diverse physiological interface to colonize, mammalian skin is the first line of defense against pathogen invasion and harbors a consortium of microbes integral in maintenance of epithelial barrier function and disease prevention. While the dynamic roles of skin bacterial residents are expansively studied, contributions of fungal constituents, the mycobiome, are largely overlooked. As a result, their influence during skin injury, such as disruption of skin integrity in burn injury and impairment of host immune defense system, is not clearly delineated. Burn patients experience a high risk of developing hard-to-treat fungal infections in comparison to other hospitalized patients. To discern the changes in the mycobiome profile and network assembly during cutaneous burn-injury, a rat scald burn model was used to survey the mycobiome in healthy (n = 30) (sham-burned) and burned (n = 24) skin over an 11-day period. The healthy skin demonstrated inter-animal heterogeneity over time, while the burned skin mycobiome transitioned toward a temporally stabile community with declining inter-animal variation starting at day 3 post-burn injury. Driven primarily by a significant increase in relative abundance of Candida, fungal species richness and abundance of the burned skin decreased, especially in days 7 and 11 post-burn. The network architecture of rat skin mycobiome displayed community reorganization toward increased network fragility and decreased stability compared to the healthy rat skin fungal network. This study provides the first account of the dynamic diversity observed in the rat skin mycobiome composition, structure, and network assembly associated with postcutaneous burn injury.