[ReviewAZON asin="B0028K3J6W"]

The health of our skin - one of the body’s first lines of defense against illness and injury - depends upon the delicate balance between our own cells and the millions of bacteria and other one-celled microbes that live on its surface. To better understand this balance, National Institutes of Health researchers have set out to explore the skin’s microbiome, which is all of the DNA, or genomes, of all of the microbes that inhabit human skin. Their initial analysis, published in the journal Science, reveals that our skin is home to a much wider array of bacteria than previously thought.

The study also shows that at least among healthy people, the greatest influence on bacterial diversity appears to be body location. For example, the bacteria that live under your arms likely are more similar to those under another person’s arm than they are to the bacteria that live on your forearm.

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An exciting new batch of studies is showing that antioxidants can help protect against thymine dimers and consequently reduce your risk of getting skin cancer. Research has found that the powerful antioxidants Vitamins C and E can both reduce the severity of sunburns and significantly reduce the incidence of thymine dimers. Green tea has also been shown to have protective qualities.To protect yourself from skin cancer, it might help if you understand a bit about thymine dimers and their role in causing cancerous lesions.

Thymine is a base pair that forms some of the blocks in the “ladder,” or double-helix structure, of everyone’s DNA. When thymines are exposed to sunlight, they bind together and become thymine dimers (they’re called “dimers” because there are two thymines: “di” is the latin prefix  for “double”).

When this happens, your body responds with a cellular process that splits up the dimers so they become two separate thymines again. The problem is, each time the thymines are split there’s a chance that a mutation will occur–and some mutations can be cancerous.

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