Blogs: Utkalendu The maturation of skin microbial communities during childhood is important for the skin of the children and development of the immune system into adulthood, but only a few studies have analyzed the presence of microbiota in young children. Recently investigators in China found that bacterial genera in children were more similar to those of their own mothers than to those of unrelated women. They suggest that the mode of delivery at birth could be an important factor in shaping the child's microbiome. To date, research into the maternal influence on her child's skin microbiome has been mostly limited to a narrow postpartum window in children younger than one year old and fewer studies have explored the maternal relationship with the child's microflora after infancy explained by chinese investigators. Therefore, we expanded the scope of our analysis to include sampling from different body sites and direct comparison to the mother of the child in order...