Researchers working with the Small Animal Clinic at the University of Veterinary Medicine and Pharmacy in Košice analyzed 64 canine skin samples and reported distinct differences in bacterial composition and diversity between healthy skin and inflammatory lesions.

The study, which sampled dogs between December 2019 and June 2020, compared communities of skin bacteria and found that healthy canine skin was predominantly colonized by phylum Bacillota, followed by Actinomycetota, Pseudomonadota and Bacteroidota. Inflammatory lesions, by contrast, showed dysbiosis with a marked predominance of staphylococci, a pattern the authors linked to altered microbial balance.

Researchers collected samples over the six-month window and worked in cooperation with the Small Animal Clinic, University of Veterinary Medicine and Pharmacy to assemble the dataset of 64 samples from dogs in the Košice area. The paper frames its findings as a region-specific contribution to efforts to distinguish resident from transient bacterial taxa on canine skin and to inform future diagnostic and therapeutic approaches.

On healthy skin, the reported bacterial profile was dominated at the phylum level by Bacillota, with Actinomycetota, Pseudomonadota and Bacteroidota present at lower relative abundances. The authors emphasize that inflammatory lesions depart from that pattern: diversity declines and staphylococci become comparatively dominant in many lesion samples, a shift the study characterizes as dysbiosis.

The researchers describe the compositional and diversity differences as significant, indicating altered microbial ecosystems on inflamed skin. Those changes, the study states, are consistent with a loss of microbial homeostasis in inflammatory dermatologic conditions and point toward microbial imbalance as a feature of diseased skin.

Methodological details and region-specific results are set out in the peer-reviewed paper published in Frontiers in Microbiology, which provides the full sequencing and analysis supporting the conclusions. The publication links the Košice dataset to broader efforts to map canine skin microbiota and to develop microbiome-aware diagnostics and treatments.

By documenting a predominance of Bacillota on healthy canine skin in this cohort and a clear overrepresentation of staphylococci in lesions, the study adds geographic specificity to a growing literature that associates reduced microbial diversity with canine inflammatory skin disease. The authors note that species-specific anatomy—thick fur and a different distribution of skin glands compared with humans—means canine skin requires its own profiling rather than direct transfer of human site classifications.

The study’s cooperation with the Small Animal Clinic, University of Veterinary Medicine and Pharmacy in Košice provided the clinical access needed to collect samples across healthy and diseased skin. Those 64 samples form the core dataset on which the comparisons and statistical analyses were performed.

Taken together, the findings point to consistent shifts in bacterial community structure between healthy and inflamed canine skin in the Košice cohort, and the authors position the work as a building block for future microbiome-based approaches in veterinary dermatology.

Source

Original reporting: view the original article.